I've had many encounters online with people demanding sympathy for rapists and saying that they shouldn't be hated. There was one amitheasshole thread about a woman who dumped her partner after finding out he was a rapist, and a lot of comments were mad at her for not having any sympathy or understanding for her ex, and just dumping him. The thread was brigaded by feminist subreddits, so most of those comments are gone, and at the time I considered those comments garbage rape apologetics. But now sometimes I wonder if they had a point in that a man shouldn't be denied relationships just for doing one bad thing. I've also heard people say that anti-rapists are worse than rapists, because being condemned to prison is a far worse fate than being raped, and people convicted of it are ostracized for the rest of their lives.

One event I remember was on a gaming group years ago, when one of the members had the police called on them because he had sex with a 12 year old girl. The members who reported him were criticized by other members, who said that they shouldn't have publicized the incident and told other people he was a rapist. They complained that publicizing the incident will encourage other people in the group to make false accusations for publicity, and that telling everyone he's a rapist only serves to unnecessarily demonize a man who showed no signs of wanting to do it again.

Should society be sympathetic and understanding toward rapists? And if so, how tolerant should they be?