r/AskSocialScience user tries to find justification for why women are given more lenient sentences

gratis_eekhoorn · 2024-08-03T07:29:13+00:00

Reminder: do not vote/comment in the linked subreddit, brigading is against reddit's rules.

HantuBuster · 2024-08-03T03:42:23+00:00

A lot of the comments actually shot down the posters arguments. It's just that the people who do call OP for his/her bullshit are not the most topvoted. Also, their argument is total dogshit and applies 100% to men as well. They mentioned that most female criminals have a history of abuse, well... so do most male criminals. They also argued that most women are "proxy criminals" (i.e. a man tells her to do those crimes). Thing is, it is also true the other way around.

Vegetable_Camera50 · 2024-08-03T03:33:15+00:00

We live in a society where bias towards women is strong.

To use an off topic example here that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with lenient sentences in general. So this may be a specific example here when it comes to male abuse victims.

Don't believe me, ask Amber Heard.

No seriously, she literally said how society won't take a man seriously in court because he is a man. She just flat out said that, with the mask off.

So even someone like Amber Heard recognized this obvious bias. Why can't the social science sub recognize it.

Garfish16 · 2024-08-03T05:18:34+00:00

Reminds me of this reply I saw earlier this week.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomenNoCensor/s/mcoU5pICRh

I think when feminists start grasping at straws or wildly postulating phrenology level pseudoscience to justify inequality you just need to laugh and disengage. There's no point in trying to argue with them or debunk their reasoning because they don't hold the views they espouse based on the reasoning they articulate. Instead, they synthesize the reasoning based on their preconceptions. It's like discussing the teleological argument for god with a presuppositionalist Christian. It's pointless.

Alex_Mercer_23 · 2024-08-03T06:49:50+00:00

Part- 1

Statement 1: Most female prisoners were victims of sexual violence

Rebuttal 1: So were most male rapists.

The majority of men who rape women are sexually abused by women in childhood

Heterosexual Molestation of Children Who Later Became Rapists

This is a report of a serendipitous finding from another study of childhood heterosexual molestation of men who were incarcerated as adults for rape. Subjects were 83 men in a medium security penitentiary who had been convicted of raping women at least 17 years of age. They found that fifty-nine (59%) of the rapists had been heterosexually molested.

The Male Survivor

"Briere and Smiljanich (1993) administered Koss and Oros's Sexual Experiences Survey (SES) and found that sexually abused men were significantly more likely than nonabused men to report having had sexual intercourse with a woman against her will either because they 'became so sexually aroused [they] could not stop [themselves]' or 'by pressuring her with continual arguments'. Briere and Smiljanich reason that their childhood experiences modeled aggression in sexual relationships and conditioned sexual arousal to coercive or aggressive behavior. (It seems reasonable to suspect that childhood sexual abuse would also model a lack of impulse control and ability to delay or deny gratification.) Briere and Smiljanich also noted that those who experienced their own abuse as something they had minimal control over were most likely to be sexually aggressive. They view rape and other sexual offenses as a maladaptive attempt to master or gain control over the trauma."

"Freeman-Longo (1986) focused on connections between sexual abuse and later sexually abusive or aggressive behavior. Based on his work with sexually abused sex offenders, he argues that 1) the offender's offense(s) are a replication of what happened in his sexual victimization; 2) the offender's offense(s) are an anger reaction to his sexual victimization; or 3) the offender's offense(s) are a modelling of his sexual victimization because his personal and/or misinterpreted view(s) of his victimization was that it was not that harmful to him, that there were pleasurable aspects of it, and in some cases it was thought of as sexually arousing."

"Freeman-Longo emphasizes the enormous amounts of anger, pain and frustration experienced by the men he studied. He states that they are unable to deal with feelings for fear of becoming vulnerable to others. They often possess tremendous hatred toward their abuser and a desire to retaliate against him or her. At the same time they feel vulnerable towards their abuser and may feel in his or her control. They tend to experience themselves as having a lack of power and control in their lives; powerlessness is among the most dominant features of their psychology. Sexual assaults are attempts to regain power and control by sexually abusing others."

"Freeman-Longo found two features to be critical risk factors for the repetition of sexual abuse: (1) victimization by more than one perpetrator on separate occasions, (2) abuse that occurs repeatedly over a long period of time. His theory, that the offender's offenses replicate his own victimization, gains some support from the findings of other studies of convicted sex offenders. Groth (1979b) found that rapists (of women) are more likely to have been victimised by females in childhood, whereas child molesters were more often abused by males. Petrovich and Templer (1984) found that 59% of convicted rapists had been molested by females during childhood and that the majority of this abuse was quite severe. Briere and Smiljanich (1993) found that 80% of sexually abused men who reported sexually aggressive behaviour towards women had themselves been sexually abused by women during childhood. Summit (1983) also sees the perpetuation of child molestation and rape as part of the sexually abused boy's legacy of rage."

Protecting boys from the risk of sexual abuse

Because few male victims admit their victimisation to academic researchers, it has been assumed that either boys are less vulnerable to sexual abuse than girls or that their abuse is less damaging. As a result, very little attention has been given to the protection of boys. This negligence is surprising given the known relationship between male sexual victimisation and the later commission of sexual offences (Kohn, 1987; Dimock, 1988; Briggs, Hawkins and Williams, 1994). In his current British study, Bentovim (1994) has found that one in five male victims becomes a juvenile offender.

So does this mean all these rapists should get as low sentence as women?

WitnessOld6293 · 2024-08-03T05:41:08+00:00

I'm sure it's the patriarchys fault somehow

SvitlanaLeo · 2024-08-03T09:09:39+00:00

Russian law literally obliges judges to give women significantly more lenient sentences for particularly serious crimes.

Averzan · 2024-08-03T05:05:03+00:00

Their useraname checks out.

In addition they say abuse survivors are overrepresented amongst criminals.

Last time I checked, the overrepresentation of a group in crime was justification to vilify and dehumanise them, not an attempt to get others' sympathy for them. Oh, wait, they aren't men, so they can be excused (while those factors will only be used to dehumanise the men with those conditions).

Not much else to say other than that, since their post and the comments are pure speculation, aside from the aforementioned data (probably self-report) in the OP.

maomaochair · 2024-08-03T21:23:05+00:00

Socialscience is science, but feminism is an ideology and belief without falsifiability and testibility.

cheapcheap1 · 2024-08-03T11:37:22+00:00

This is the sole reason I have zero respect for most people in social sciences.

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Scientists are people and they're not magically freed from hateful bigotry by receiving an education. I understand it hurts when people justify bigotry against you misusing scientific language, I find that they are closer to the truth than average society. That thread also has some very good posts that you would find in few other places on reddit.

Professional-You2968 · 2024-08-03T06:04:34+00:00

Inequality is the reason. Social "science" is not a science.

Garfish16 · 2024-08-03T07:38:25+00:00

The top comment mentioned April Wilkens so I looked her up and read most of the Wikipedia article on her along with some primary sources. It was very interesting. She is a woman who killed her ex-boyfeiend, drug dealer, sugar daddy, abuser, and rapist Terry Carlton in 1998. She tried to excuse her killing in court by arguing she had Battered Woman Syndrome, a kind of insanity defence. While some of her unsupported testimony seems pretty dubious, especially around their drug use and the stalking in late 97' thru early 98' she was definitely severely abused.

I don't think BWS (or BPS to be egalitarian) makes sense as an insanity defense. In federal court an insanity defense requires convincing evidence that the defendant did not know right from wrong when committing the alleged crime. I think that's a reasonable standard. April Wilkens clearly knew right from wrong because she herself has said she thought her actions were right. Without diagnostic criteria BWS comes off to me as less of a real condition than as an attempt to medicalize a set of otherwise illegal behaviors to avoid punishment.

That's not to say abuse or mental illness is not a mitigating factor. In extremely high control and violent situations I can see commuting someone's sentences entirely, even for murder. I don't think this was a sufficiently high control environment for that. While he was stalking, threatening, and manipulating her for the months and even days leading up to his murder they weren't living together, she wasn't financially dependent on him, and she still had an outside social network. Even according to her own testimony on the night of the murder, April went to see Terry.

To be candid this reads to me like a revenge killing. I don't know if this will be a hot take or not but I don't think people should be able to get away with murder or vigilante justice, even against rapists. After over a quarter century locked up and given the context of her murder I think April deserves parole provided she recognizes that her actions were wrong and does not pose a danger to her community.

If you're informed about this case, I would be curious to know your opinion.

Title	r/AskSocialScience user tries to find justification for why women are given more lenient sentences
Author	luciolover11
Upvotes	178
Comments	54
Date	August 3, 2024 3:23 AM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1eitbbc/rasksocialscience_user_tries_to_find/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/rasksocialscience-user-tries-to-find-justification.1526175 https://theredarchive.com/post/1526175

Comments