Reply #5: Thanks for Posting

[lolly]

I hope everybody who has participated in the lengthy Kobe threads of the last few weeks reads this entire article.

The comments afterwards were interesting as well. The suggestion that "Date Rape" could and should be a separate charge from "Stranger Attack Rape" made some good points about the problems of prosecuting Date Rape.

An excerpt:

this type of assault and stranger-in-the-bushes rape are so different from each other in legal and social nuance that it is inappropriate for the legal system to treat them as indistinguishable, either in method of proof or in consequence after conviction. They present, at a minimum, entirely different legal issues. I think they present different social issues too. The question of fact in stranger-in-the-bushes rape is rarely whether or not a rape occurred, as physical evidence sufficient to remove doubt about this usually exists. Almost always, the issue is solely the identity of the rapist. In date rape, the reverse is true. It's almost never in dispute that the accuser and the accused were together consensually. And because of the existence of physical evidence of sexual intercourse, and these days because of DNA identification, rarely is it disputed that sexual intercourse occurred. The issue is entirely whether the intercourse was consensual, and resolution of that issue turns wholly on three facts that cannot be proved scientifically: the state of mind of the accuser, the accused's perception of that, and the reasonableness of that perception. . . .

Food for thought.