There's a running joke here in South Africa that when Zuma was in charge of the National AIDS Council he thought they were pro- not anti-

It's not a good joke, but at the moment we're finding it hard to laugh at things.

I apologize in advance if my language offends anyone, but this gives new meaning to the phrase "fucking idiot."

It seems as if it might, but when they've actually tried it, it doesn't work, because a significant number of rapists are choosing to rape out of hatred of women, not out of sexual desire, and they will use objects if they can't get it up themselves. Meanwhile, what do we do about the number of men who are wrongly convicted of rape because a woman who was actually raped mistakenly picked them out of a lineup and no one did DNA tests? I, too, do not believe the rate of false accusations of rape is any higher than false accusations of anything else, but I think that the rate of successfully convicting the actual criminals in *any* crime is much lower than we'd like it to be, because poor people and black people have a very hard time getting a fair trial. So I think there are a lot of rapists roaming around free and a lot of innocent men who were wrongly convicted, and this is the fault of the justice system, *not* the fault of women, who almost always were really raped by *someone* before they made any accusations.

You can't give a man back twenty years of his life... but you can't give him back his balls, either, and I suspect most men would prefer to lose the twenty years.

If a person has been identified as 100% certainly a rapist, I believe they need to be locked up, because there is no way to tell if castrating them will stop them (it might just lead them to start murdering women instead of raping them). They should be locked up until they are elderly, if not for life, because elderly men commit a very tiny proportion of the world's rapes. To address the issue of rapists, or anyone, being raped in prison, we must commit to stopping prison rape, *not* give rapists a break by cutting off their genitals and then letting them back into the population. Prison rape is committed by prisoners, who are under the control of guards. If the prison system wants to stop prison rape, it can be done much more easily than stopping the rape of free people is, because you can monitor and control the movements of both the rapists and the victims if you invest in the proper surveillance and if you *care* about stopping it. Since most prison rape is not committed against rapists, but against people who committed non-violent crimes, the idea of going out of our way to spare rapists from prison rape while leaving the guy who stole a few hundred bucks worth of cigarettes at the mercy of predators seems foolish. (The entire prison system is barbaric and needs serious reform, anyway.)

Personally, I don't think there needs to be a law specifically against false rape allegations. They happen, just as false reporting of other crimes happens, but we already have laws to deal with it, law enforcement and criminal attorneys are already aware of the possibility, and there are other disincentives to bring a false rape case. It's just not the huge problem that some people make it out to be, and it's often a red herring in discussions about rape.

Sorry, No Name Given, didn't mean to get you misinterpreted there. For clarification's sake, my questions about false allegations were a complete aside to this specific case, more prompted by the fact that most times I suggest penalties for rape I get someone playing the old Potiphar's wife card. I'm personally unconvinced false allegations are that common, it's not as if women gain anything for making a false accusation except a long humiliating, expensive (in terms of work hours lost) trial during which they're painted as a slut, at the end of which only 1 or 2% of those indicted are convicted. There're easier ways to get revenge.

I was responding to the last paragraph in TheGlimmering's post, asking whether there was a crime relevant to making false allegations. The short answer: yes.

Hmmm...just wonderin' where you're coming from. Does your comment come as a result of Zuma being found not-guilty? Not-guilty doesn't always mean innocent. (In this context especially considering that South African women truly don't seem to have any means of saying "no.")

Yes, it is a crime to to make false statements to law enforcement officers in order to cause an investigation or other official action, as well as to commit perjury. So a person falsely claiming to be a victim of rape, like a person falsely claiming to have been the victim of arson, is committing a crime.

Oh, goodness, no. Make no mistake: In case my above comment did not make it clear, I in no way meant to question Ms. Hill's bold actions. I was just -- again, perhaps glibly, but also sadly -- questioning the effect they'd had in some arenas. I'd hate for my aside to have been misinterpreted as insulting to Ms. Hill herself.

With that attitude it's not a matter of if Zuma raped this woman but when he'll rape a woman. He acts as if he has a right to sex at will. Here in stark relief is that sense of entitlement feminists say is responsible for rape: the idea that a woman dressing a certain way, acting a certain way, or saying anything short of "let's have sex" level bluntness, leads to rape. Would it kill men to ask "hey, would you like to have sex with me" before getting into things? Depending on how you ask, it could be pretty sexy, and I'm sure it'd lead to a better evening than the sex you'd get out of misread signals.

If full surgical castration, sex hormone producing gonads included, were the penalty for rape, I expect we'd see recidivism rates next to zero. And it seems a more humane punishment than the eye-for-an-eye quality of sending rapist's to jail to be raped themselves by other convicts, a pattern that surely can't solve anything. It depends on what you believe the purpose of criminal punishment is. To my way of thinking, it's about protecting the public from the crime in as humane and pragmatic a fashion as possible. Removing sex offenders from jails would save them from a cruel and unusual punishment unsuited to the crime while saving everyone, including other convicts, the burden of overcrowded jails and tax burdens. For the record, I'm advocating the same punishment for female sex offenders as well, I see no reason female "circumcision" is any better or worse than the male equivalent. I'm not up on how the surgery would work, however.

Granted, if there were a standardized penalty for sex crimes, we ought to standardize the process for sex crime prosecution and institute suitable penalties for false allegations whether they occur frequently, infrequently, or not at all. (False allegations being defined as accusing or framing a specific individual with the intent to see them prosecuted for rape, naturally the burden of proof would hinge upon proving this was deliberate. If a woman happened to have actually been raped and the wrong person ended up prosecuted, we can presume it was not an intended false allegation. By the way, is their a crime along the lines of "conspiracy to commit false conviction?")