Resonant Information - Women's Rights - Comments

read the opinion before defending this man

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:31:03 -0400

If you read the opinion, particularly pgs. 5 and 6, you'll see that the whole situation involved force and coercion, and there was not really consent in the first place, because 'forced consent' is not consent.

From the opinion:

After Jewel acquiesced to the boys’ insistence that they stay
ten more minutes, she found herself on her back with appellant
removing her jeans and Mike sitting on her chest, attempting to
place his penis in her mouth. After she told them to stop, the
pair moved her around so that her body was up in appellant’s lap as
he held her arms and Mike tried to insert his penis in her, but
briefly inserted it into her rectum by mistake. After Mike again
tried to insert his penis in the complainant’s vagina, appellant
inserted his fingers in her vagina. After appellant exited the
car, Mike inserted his fingers, then his penis into her vagina.
Mike then got out of the car and appellant got in. Appellant
told Jewel that it was his turn and, according to the complainant,
the following transpired:
Q. [ASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY]: And what else did he
say?
A. He, after that we sat there for a couple seconds and
he was like so are you going to let me hit it and I
didn’t really say anything and he was like I don’t want
to rape you.
* * *
Q. So when Maouloud said I don’t want to rape you, did
you respond?
A. Yes. I said that as long as he stops when I tell him
to, then -
Q. Now, that he could?
A. Yes.
* * *
Q. Did you feel like you had a choice?
A. Not really. I don’t know. Something just clicked
off and I just did whatever they said.
* * *
Q. Now when you told [appellant] if I say stop,
something like that, you have to stop. What did he do
after you spoke those words?
A. Well he got on top of me and he tried to put it in
and it hurt. So I said stop and that’s when he kept
pushing it in and I was pushing his knees to get off me.

5 seconds is not rape

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 21:45:52 -0500

I agree with you, but to answer your question about whether the boy was impaired, he was. The opinion states that the boys had smoked pot. Another thing to point out in this case is that yes the boy was 16, but the girl was 18. In addition to being older than the boys, the girl made a choice to go with these boys. There was another girl with these three who decided not to continue hanging out with them when they went for a ride.

In regards to some comments that this case provides that women can not withdraw consent after penetration. That is incorrect. Of course a woman can withdraw consent and a man should comply. The question is what is the crime if he doesn't? I personally think it is wrong to place this type of activity in the same criminal category as a situation wherein there was never consent. Obviously when there is never consent, the perpetrator has intent to rape, this is not always so in these "post-penetration" cases. The 16 year old boy in this case clearly made a decision to not rape. I feel for him and his family. I think that women need to take some responsibility for their actions as well. This girl was an adult, she knew what was going on. She even gave the boy her phone number and hugged them goodbye when she dropped them off. As for the examples someone else gave about a women who consented then found out that the partner had a disease, shouldn't that be discussed prior to consenting to sex.

As a woman, I agree with the views in the Battle case. If I consent to sex then want him to stop and he doesn't, that is a crime, but it is not the same crime as if I had never consented. The harm is not the same.

Give me a break

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:29:58 -0500

How silly. Stops after 5 seconds and gets 5 years in the slammer? WTF is this world coming to? The pendulum has swung too far again.

What is rape?

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:41:38 -0500

I have been reading many articles on-line about this case. While I agree that the Maryland law needs revision, I am very troubled by the idea that what this boy did would be considered 'rape'. I'm speaking specifically of it taking him five seconds or less to comply with her withdrawal of consent. The boy was sixteen at the time. I have not read whether or not he was impaired by alcohol or drugs. Were his youth and inexperience even considered?!

As a fifty-year-old woman, I can think back to several "sweaty groping sessions" that I went through during my late high school and college years where the gentleman in question had a lot to put up with from me. I wanted to but I didn't want to. Yes. No. Maybe. I was inexperienced and he was inexperienced. If I said, "No, stop, don't do that" and he didn't INSTANTLY obey, I would no more consider that 'rape' than if he didn't INSTANTLY obey me when I wanted him to turn down the radio or stop tickling me. Kids wrestling around in the backs of cars--especially CONSENTING kids--do not instantly obey one another. That's not how the games of youthful exuberance are played. When does tickling your girlfriend for five seconds after she said 'stop, stop' become 'assault'? When does playfully tackling a buddy on the playground become 'battery'? I am very troubled by the idea that five seconds or less of hopeful persistence--followed by disappointed compliance--would land a sixteen year old boy in jail for FIVE YEARS and completely ruin his life.

We use the term "fog of war". I think that the term "fog of sex" also applies. Five seconds or less is a fairly responsive time for a steamed up 16-year-old youth to reign himself back in after a girl says yes and then no.

The second boy is a no-brainer: she said no, he forced her. That's rape, end of discussion. But the boy who had permission, had consent and then allegedly took a few seconds to stop? I can't believe that he was even prosecuted. Frankly, I'm appalled.

The decision to prosecute him in this circumstance shows a complete lack of common sense and dilutes the meaning of 'rape' in a manner that I fear will come back to haunt us.

Women can be convicted

Zed — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:51:19 -0500

No, the basic requirement is that the guilty party "engage in vaginal intercourse", plus a host of other requirements. See the "Maryland Criminal Law" section. A woman could meet that just as well as a man.

As an aside, however, the world hasn't changed that much. While there are male victims of rape, only about 3% of men will ever experience rape or attempted rape during their lifetimes, and the majority of those will be attacks by other men. 18% of women will experience rape or attempted rape during their lives. See Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey, National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 1998.

women and rape

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:44:03 -0500

...are we therefore saying that women connot be convicted of rape? well, well, well... would you look at who has ut easy, i am a woman and I think that it is unfair to look at this issue in such a way. Call me what you like but I think that it is just plain oout UNFAIR! After all take a look around th e world is changing and so are women. there are women who assult and molest male children and adults alike

women and rape

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:30:01 -0500

i think that it should be implemented that women should have the right to stop sexual intercourse no matter how far along the process has already gone.

Sexual consent in Maryland

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:53:50 -0500

Thanks for submitting this to the Carnival of Feminists. It's an important example. The blog is included in the 27th Carnival that is now up on our blog "Body Impolitic".

Best,

Laurie Toby Edison

Hm.

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:04:10 -0500

While you have a strong arguement and what not (which I throughly enjoyed reading), I would like to point out one glaring fact that denotes that you are not ontop of today's pop culture slang- a grill does not refer to ones FACE, it refers to ones TEETH, much like the grill of a car looks like an open mouth. That is where the term was born .

Maryland statute

Zed — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 14:18:58 -0500

You note that, strangely, Maryland specifically excludes vaginal intercourse from its list of "sex acts," but I believe that is because it is listed separately in the statute and would therefore be redundant.

Unfortunately, it's not redundant, because the minimum requirements to trigger §3-308 require only a lack of consent, and the requirements to trigger §3-303 or §3-304 technically require substantially more.

Most troubling to me, however, is that the "sexual contact" (something that is neither vaginal intercourse nor one of the listed "sex acts", but is for the sexual pleasure of one or both parties) requires penetration by a body part that is not the penis, mouth or tongue into the genital opening (vagina) or anus. Basically, sexual contact is pretty much limited to sticking fingers or perhaps toes into a vagina or anus.

Yes, this is another problem. It's still not legal, mind you, but it would fall under the category of assault (§3-203), which perhaps even more strangely has a higher maximum penalty than the fourth-degree sexual offense for sexual contact.

Go figure.

(Also, apologies for how long it took for your comment to appear — a major problem with blogging on topics related to sexuality is that they give the antispam system a very itchy trigger finger.)

Excellent Analysis

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 05:31:06 -0500

I found your analysis to be thorough and pretty much agrees with my conclusions after reading the decision.

I found your links to the Maryland state law to be somewhat troubling as well. You note that, strangely, Maryland specifically excludes vaginal intercourse from its list of "sex acts," but I believe that is because it is listed separately in the statute and would therefore be redundant. Most troubling to me, however, is that the "sexual contact" (something that is neither vaginal intercourse nor one of the listed "sex acts", but is for the sexual pleasure of one or both parties) requires penetration by a body part that is not the penis, mouth or tongue into the genital opening (vagina) or anus. Basically, sexual contact is pretty much limited to sticking fingers or perhaps toes into a vagina or anus.

But don't we teach children that improper touching includes the intentional touch (not just with the hands) of a female's breast or either sex's groin area. Does this not fall under the definition of sexual contact? I would hope that case law provides for such restrictions, but it would seem to me that as long as the Maryland legislature reviews this decision and statutorily corrects the Battle decision, they should also address this gaping hole in their state law as well!

And, by the way, citizens of EVERY state should be verifying that their state legislature addresses "post-penetration rape," not just residents of the state of Maryland. According to the Babe decision, only 7 states have affirmatively stated that post-penetration rape is a crime. Excluding Maryland and North Carolina, that means that 41 states have no current case or statutory law addressing the issue.

Losing personhood

Zed — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:42:14 -0500

I noticed that Alas, a Blog has a category devoted to Terri Schiavo, which covers some of these issues from the other direction: at what point you can stop considering a lump of flesh a person. From the scientific side, it appears to center around Mrs. Schiavo's loss of a cerebral cortex.

Personhood, etc.

Zed — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:39:32 -0500

Hello Abby. Thanks for stopping by.

Quoting Abby:

I appreciate your response, but this is what I cannot accept: that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it.

It's not that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it, but that many reasonable people can disagree over whether something has any significant value at all. If that is the case, then it is wholly inappropriate for half of the population to attempt to imprison the other half for choosing to preserve something that everyone agrees has value at the cost of something for which there is no such agreement, not even a significant majority.

The sets of situations I presented weren't chosen at random; they represent a gradient of risks. Forcing a woman to bear a child can place that woman's life at risk. Forcing a woman to raise an unwanted child is a painful experience for both, often harmful to their development, and harmful to the society around them.

Quoting Abby:

The terrorists tell you that you have to choose who will die - your spouse or the 10 people from India. What do you choose? If you choose to save your spouse, does that somehow mean that the people from India weren't really 'persons' or worthy of legal protection because you have a greater emotional attachment to your spouse?"

There are three fundamental differences in your scenario. First and foremost, you've brought another free will into the equation: my decision to say anything does not prevent the terrorist from choosing not whether or not to kill anyone. Second, the (presumably adult) Indians are not in questionable status as to whether they are people (you might have a better analogy by having the terrorists forcing you to choose between gassing two boxes, one of which has your spouse, whom you can clearly see through a glass pane, or another completely sealed box, that might or might not have people in it, in sort of a twisted version of the Schrödinger's Cat experiment). Third, the truly important question isn't about whether or not the ten people from India are worthy of legal protection, but whether or not you are worthy of legal protection if you choose your spouse and let 10 people die. Are you willing to put someone in jail for choosing their spouse? If the answer is no, then you should be very wary of being willing to put someone in jail for choosing the mother over the embryo.

Quoting Abby:

You're saying that almost everyone will disagree about when a fetus becomes a person, so we should allow abortion anyway because it makes room for "differences of faith." The thing I don't get about this is that this can be applied to so many other things. If someone believes that, say, redheds aren't "persons" because there's something about their hair color that makes him think of witchcraft, and he goes on a murderous rampage, killing all the redheads he sees, we wouldn't say, "Well, he has a right to do this. We ought to allow differences of faith, after all." OK, this may seem like a hopelessly inadequate analogy, but it's much more similar to the abortion position than you think!

Actually, I don't think it's similar to the abortion position at all, because we already have a number of globally accepted standards about how to recognize people (they deliberately interact with their surroundings, have roughly human shape, communicate with us, contribute to society, etc.), and although nobody claims this list is complete, it is definitely sufficient. If you're walking, talking, and building it doesn't matter if you're a redhead (in fact, it doesn't matter if you're an embryo — if you show me an embryo deliberately manipulating its environment in more than an instinctive fashion and carrying a conversation, I'll change sides) because you have already met conditions that everyone can agree on.

The problem with an embryo is that it doesn't meet these conditions, and you would have been better off looking for other examples that are more marginal because they also don't meet those conditions, such as people who have taken brain damage and have been left in a vegetative state. These situations are controversial for almost exactly the same reasons, however, and are rife with arguments over when someone can override a Do Not Resuscitate directive, or can pull the plug on someone who isn't going to recover. The arguments over DNR have gotten so bad, in fact, that physicians and nurses have started getting DNR tattoos, to make sure that there is no dispute about their wishes.

Quoting Abby:

And as for "jailing people for having differences of faith," isn't that the purpose of laws to begin with?

No! Good heavens, no, absolutely not, at least not in the United States; the First Amendment explicitly forbids it, in fact. The purpose of laws is to prevent harm to contributing members of a society. This might be different in a religious state, such as Israel or Iran, but I am quite happy not to live in such places and am quite willing to concede them whatever insane laws they desire, as long as they keep them strictly within their own borders.

Quoting Abby:

Second, you are exactly right that there's no scientific evidence for the beginning of "personhood." In my post on Feministing, I meant to point out that the concept of "personhood," is, in itself, vague and arbitrary. There *is* scientific evidence, however, about when a human life begins.

No. No there isn't. All you've done is switched out "personhood" for "human life", but it's exactly the same concept. I highly recommend you go through that link, as it covers most of the differing philosophies (and their history), inside the scientific communities and out, but inside or out they're still only philosophies. Science can only show us chemical or electrical behaviour, the rest we make up ourselves. I'm from the (admittedly somewhat extreme) school that believes that consciousness defines humanity, and thus human life; most people don't like that argument because conscious decisions don't become apparant usually for several months after birth. For the sake of peace, I am willing to bend over backwards to support extending protection to birth, the state at which care can (more or less) easily be given to another, or with a lot of argument perhaps as far as 7 months after conception, the point at which neural connections are formed. Few would claim that an adult with the brain completely scooped out and only the body kept alive by the miracle of modern life support technology was still a person, however, so I can only see the claim that a body with no brain at all developed is a person as ludicrous.

Even granting as far as I could possibly go, just for the sake of argument, the law already protects a fetus 7 months into development, however (well past the second trimester limit). This isn't what the anti-abortion crowd is looking for.

Quoting Abby:

And this is the ground on which I ultimately base my position. There's nothing even remotely "religious" about it. Human life exists in a continuum, and I believe that all human beings, regardless of stage of development, size, or certain attributes they happen to possess, have a right to live.

And this is the reason that many people find your position completely untenable. You say there's nothing religious about it, but all you've done is state completely unsupported beliefs. You are taking it on faith that a few cells constitute a human being, despite the fact that those cells can't do any of the things we expect human beings to do. They don't communicate. They don't even move. They don't laugh, cry, become curious, panic, or love. They can't. They don't have two neurons to click together, at least not at early stages of development. Treating them as human leads to absurd connections, as were pointed out so well in the Reason article I linked to in the main entry: 80% of fertilized embryos are lost naturally. Are we to reshuffle our priorities to try to save the millions (billions?) of zygotes lost to nature every year? If we are to accept fertilized cells as complete human beings, this is the leading cause of death in the world by a gigantic margin. Are we to do so at the cost of health for grown adults? Shall we arrest those who spend money on vitamins, but refuse to contribute to a fund for zygote rescue?

Quoting Abby:

Oh, and how is a fetus be a "potential human being"?

It's a potential human being because it isn't a human being yet, but if given the proper environment and support, might become one eventually. A seed may be a potential tree... but it is not a tree.

Quoting Abby:

I really appreciate your response; I've never been quoted on a blog before!

Stop by more often, and I might quote you again.

Personhood, etc

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:01:44 -0500

Zed, this is Abby. I appreciate your response, but this is what I cannot accept: that the value of something is based on one's emotional response to it. I've heard tons of arguments that go along the lines of, "if stuck in a burning building with a three year old and a fetus in an artificial womb, which would you rather save?" This is based on the false assumption that a value of a person's life is equal to whether or not we would mourn if they died. One blogger puts it better than I can: "Terrorists have kidnapped you and your spouse. They bring you into a room with a television screen where they have a live feed of other terrorists in India who are pointing guns at the heads of ten innocent people. The terrorists tell you that you have to choose who will die - your spouse or the 10 people from India. What do you choose? If you choose to save your spouse, does that somehow mean that the people from India weren't really 'persons' or worthy of legal protection because you have a greater emotional attachment to your spouse?"

And another thing. You're saying that almost everyone will disagree about when a fetus becomes a person, so we should allow abortion anyway because it makes room for "differences of faith." The thing I don't get about this is that this can be applied to so many other things. If someone believes that, say, redheds aren't "persons" because there's something about their hair color that makes him think of witchcraft, and he goes on a murderous rampage, killing all the redheads he sees, we wouldn't say, "Well, he has a right to do this. We ought to allow differences of faith, after all." OK, this may seem like a hopelessly inadequate analogy, but it's much more similar to the abortion position than you think! And as for "jailing people for having differences of faith," isn't that the purpose of laws to begin with?

Second, you are exactly right that there's no scientific evidence for the beginning of "personhood." In my post on Feministing, I meant to point out that the concept of "personhood," is, in itself, vague and arbitrary. There *is* scientific evidence, however, about when a human life begins. And this is the ground on which I ultimately base my position. There's nothing even remotely "religious" about it. Human life exists in a continuum, and I believe that all human beings, regardless of stage of development, size, or certain attributes they happen to possess, have a right to live. Oh, and how is a fetus be a "potential human being"?
I really appreciate your response; I've never been quoted on a blog before!

More on Judge Jones

Zed — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 04:18:58 -0500

Feministing linked to a local news source with more information.