Letters to the Editor

• Alvin Committed Fraud

  [Read the article: Does sex through fraud constitute rape?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I am a bit puzzled as to why so many people want to retry the details of the case in order to question the veracity of the victim rather than addressing the larger issue of fraud as rape.

  If instead of trying to retry the case, why not assume the facts as presented are true. Where did the fraud come in? It is really simple. The fraud happened just after the victim said, "Duane, why are you home so early?" At that point it was incumbent upon Alvin to reply: "It is I, Alvin, who have come to have sex with you instead." Can you see how different the outcome would be? The victim, being so informed would not then be a victim at all but rather a person with choices. She could have replied, "Hi Alvin. Come and hop in bed." Thus would she give consent. Or she could have said, "Alvin, get the hell out of here." Thus she would have said the equivalent of "No" and consent would not be given.

  I had to laugh when burrnini said, "She knew there were multiple men living in the house." -- as if a woman gives consent to any man in the house to enter the room and have sex with her simply because she is in the same house! This gives a whole new meaning to the perils of coed dorms. Do all the women living in them automatically give consent to all the men in them? What about women living in their family home? Let us say that an eighteen year old woman (of legal age) is living in her parents house when her father/brother/cousin/whoever enters the room for the purpose of having sex with her. Has she consented simply by not protesting?

  NO! She reasonably assumes a certain safety simply because she is at home.

  Burrnini would have us assume that every woman who values her virtue should sleep with a loaded gun under her pillow to use it against the encroaching males with whom she lives. Burrnini has a very low opinion of men. Burrnini sees them all as animal skin wrapped predators ready rape at any moment. Perhaps Burrnini has been reading too much evolutionary biology. Burrnini, please allow me to tell you that there really are some good men out there. They are not all like Alvin.

  On to the sleep issue: Do a little reading about sleep before you make judgments about how others sleep. When I first fall asleep a pin drop could wake me. Towards early morning, I could have sex with Snuffleupaguss and not be aware he wasn't my desired one. Sleep patterns are individual and not universal. To take on the issue of whether or not the victim should have fully realized who Alvin was without his identifying himself, implies a desire to distrust the victim without hearing her testimony, to see women as natural liars, to identify with the perpetrator.

  Prosecuting attorneys must acquire facts. Juries must decide upon facts. The defense attorney in the case might reasonably question the woman about her degree of wakefulness. Her individual sleep patterns would certain be important for the jury to decide whether she should have been able to identify Alvin. We do not have that luxury. We are not the jury. Any of us may assume that Alivn is either guilty or innocent since we are in effect arm chair quarterbacks replaying a game we did not even see. Lucky us.

  Also, do people not realize that many states consider sex obtained by fraud to be rape in certain cases? Do you think the legislators who made these laws had simply lost their minds? So how many cases have we read in the news lately where women are charging rape because some fella said he was richer than he was, smarter than he was, or younger than he was being prosecuted? Notice any? What? There are none? How can this be when the laws in other states have opened the door for such prosecutions?

  Could it be that that is not the sort of "fraud" such laws address?

  Somehow I think this case would not be so difficult to understand if a stranger had jimmied a window and entered the victim's room and had sex with her under the exact same circumstances. We would immediately have no problem seeing what the victim endured as "real rape."

  Permalink Saturday, May 12, 2007 01:21 PM