When feminists destroy the sacredness of sex, rape becomes just another crime

May 7, 2019 by Jill

by Anthony McCarth, LifeSite:

The BBC News headline read, “United States dilutes UN rape-in-war resolution.”

In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted three Bosnian Serb soldiers of crimes against humanity for their role in the rape and enslavement of women and girls. This was the first time a U.N. criminal tribunal had specifically prosecuted (as opposed to merely recognized) rape as a crime against humanity.

Rape is an especially wicked crime. It brings about a specific kind of moral disturbance in its victims, which distinguishes it from other kinds of assault. However, it is difficult to understand why this should be so if we don’t have a view of sex as a distinctive area of moral activity with a special meaning.

The small minority of feminists who question the seriousness of rape are perhaps more consistent on this front. Germaine Greer has argued that we should “abolish the crime of rape altogether, and instead … expand the law of assault to include sexual assault in varying degrees of gravity; so that, for example, mutilating assaults on children would be recognized as many times graver than penetration of a grown woman.” More recently, she wrote in her book On Rape, “an elbow, a thumb even, can do you more harm than a penis. It is a nonsense for our daughters to be more frightened of penises than our sons are of guns or knives.” In a similar vein, Barbara Hewson, a barrister and trustee of BPAS, Britain’s leading “abortion provider,” says in Spiked Online, “Victims may use hyperbole, and one can understand any parent being very distressed if their child experiences a serious assault. But such excessive reactions appear to be the culmination of a questionable trend that sees rape as uniquely damaging.”

Such views are not common, but they do reveal that the more one sees sex merely in terms of consensual behavior without special significance, the more one may struggle to account for the unique nature of rape.

Read here