PainRack wrote:And your definition isn't the definition found in pyschology textbooks.
Is that so? Well, it's been a long time since I, you know, got a degree in psychology and I don't have my textbooks anymore, but maybe you could provide these definitions in these unnamed textbooks? Seeing as the
dictionary definition agrees with what I'm saying and all.
a mark of disgrace or infamy; a stain or reproach, as on one's reputation.
a distinguishing mark of social disgrace: the stigma of having been in prison
Also, sympathy in and as of itself CAN be negative.
In what way? If so, then this is just another example of trying to define the problem so as to be insoluble; what other reaction are people
supposed to have to the news that someone has been raped, if not sympathy?
If all the disucssion really is, is whether the word "stigma" can be used, and "stigma" is so broad it can be applied no matter what, then this is merely semantic fencing. The issue is negative attitudes towards rape victims that
affect their likelyhood to report it, and their treatment by society in general; i.e. are they looked upon with suspicion as a general rule. This has meaningful negative effects for the victim. Simply showing that a certain term can be applied to any attitude towards the victim, and simply pointing out the vague possibility of undefined harm on the part of positive or sympathetic attitudes gets us nowhere; this is precisely the sort of nonsense I was voicing my suspicion of in regards to rape advocacy groups earlier in the thread.
And like it or not, the thread isn't wholy about stigmas that hinder reporting.
Like it or not, that's the sort of stigma I have been addressing, because that is the sort of stigma that rape advocacy groups have been complaining about for the last several decades. People who can, you know, understand context should not need it re-explained precisely what I am talking about each and every time I use the word stigma.
All you're doing is defining stigma so that it is essentially unavoidable. If being labelled a rape victim is inherently a stigma, then there is no amount of social reform that can address this problem short of some solution that utterly eliminates rape - which I don't see forthcoming.
And? Again, not everyone in this thread is talking ENTIRELY about rape reporting.
Complete failure to address my point. I am only really discussing stigma in that context, and yet responses have been directed at me that shift onto matters such as dating. This is known as "shifting the goalposts", a term I believe you've been here long enough to understand. More importantly, you did not address how it matters if there is a stigma if simply being a rape victim makes a stigma completely unavoidable, regardless of social reform. You are focusing on trying to find a way to apply a particular term, when my point has been that significant social progress has been made.
May I remind you that the current thread is responding entirely to your social stigma in the US is now significantly less, to the extent that its a myth?
May I remind you that the stigma asserted to exist that I was calling a myth in the first place is the one that supposedly prevents women from reporting it? You are strawmanning my argument. When rape organiztions assert that there is a stigma that affects reporting because of the treatment the victim will supposedly endure, and I call that a myth, my assertion does not suddenly become untrue because someone can find a way to apply the word "stigma" to some unrelated aspect of the problem.
And not the US has not made changes socially and in the law that affect stigma?
The meaning of this sentence is not clear. If this is an attempt to say "not only the U.S.", again, I am not measuring the U.S. against other countries.
Ok. Self stigmatisation is entirely relevant to rape reporting.
And? If women are constantly being told how badly they will be treated if they are a rape victim and then they go and "self-stigmatize" (leaving aside this definition of stigma that makes the entire problem completely unavoidable), then the problem is
being created, or at the very least seriously exacerbated simply by asserting there's a stigma attached!
What in the world makes you think that self stigmatisation WON"T be a factor in rape reporting? Third parties can't be held responsible? So what? Has ANYONE here actually argued that the police is responsible for your feelings? They're merely ACKNOWLEDGING it.
Dumbass, all you're doing is calling it self-stigmitization and pretending you're bringing up something new. People not reporting rape because they feel they'll be treated as a liar or a slut, because they've been told that's how they'll be treated is the problem I've been addressing all along. That failure to report is then in turn used to claim they don't report rapes because they'll be called liars and sluts!
If you're referring to some other self stigmitization, lets hear what it is in more precise terms. So far, you've appealed to the anonymous authority of uncited definitions in unknown psychology texts and claimed with no evidence or even argument that sympathy can somehow be negative, and generally gone on and on about stigmas so vague that their existence is virtually assured regardless of what steps are taken. I'm not optomistic about hearing any reasonably addressable idea of what this self-stigma might be.
Third, women may not want to be associated with being a rape victim (or anyone else, so nice that once again you forget male victims) but that is really not an option.
OH REALLY? Thanks for showing that Serafina and the rest aren't the only ones who put words in other people mouth.
Read through my post. The context was ENTIRELY GENDER NEUTRAL.
Liar. From your post:
We're debating purely on the negative aspect here, but again, a salient point raised is that the entire aspect of being labelled a rape victim is a form of social stigma that women may not wish to be associated with.
Seriously. Read through that entire thread SPVD, and find a SINGLE sentence that used gender to describe rape victim. Go on. Afterwards, go fuck yourself.
I'll avoid flaming you until reading your reply. You have one chance to retract based on the line I quoted above from your post. I'm quite sure that you
meant to be gender neutral, but you weren't and it's not my job to read your mind. Otherwise, I'm going to treat your successive posts as if they contain the blatant dishonesty you're showing here.
And again, negative connotations to the label of rape victims is the whole point of the debate right now.
No, it is not. This is moving the goalposts. I started out talking about how the bad treatment of rape victims following a report was largely a myth after 3 decades of progress. That was discussed at some length, and then the goalposts were moved to whether there are negative connotations in a romatic scenario, and then you jumped in and tried to move it to "any negative connotation at all". Aside from the fact that a negative connotation is
utterly unavoidable simply because
being raped is inherently negative, you are now trying to claim, as far as I can tell, that even sympthy is, or at least can be, negative.
How do you propose this be addressed? Some women may not want to reveal that they were a victim, but sometimes that is not an option or it is found out anyway. Are people supposed to somehow make themselves forget that a person was raped? Are they supposed to never acknowledge that fact under any circumstances? You have essentially defined the problem into irrelevancy.
Worse, this contains an underlying assumption that once someone is aware a person was raped, that any further negative attitude towards them is caused or affected by that knowledge. In practice, this is part of the real problem; it assumes that the victim is nothing more than his or her label and rejects the validity of the other person's experiences in dealing with them simply because of the label.
I can make this apply even with labels that are not negative. Let's take law enforcement officers. Simply being known as a police officer could be negative, and not all law enforcement officers want people to know their status because they might not want to be associated with it (this is actually true). However, when people do find out, even positive reactions can be negative! People announce the LEO's status at inappropriate times, make inappropriate jokes, come to him or her for legal advice as if they were attorneys, or sympathy when they've had an interaction with another LEO that they didn't like.
Obviously there's a stigma attached to being a law enforcement officer.
Maybe technically there is, but so what? People react to others based on the information they know about them. The real matter is whether those reactions are appropriate, and in the case of rape victims a great deal of progress has been made in that regard. Simply attempting to redefine the problem so as to ignore any progress is not helpful to anyone.
Again. Sympathy CAN be a negative connotation. You heard what Knife posted earlier on about labelling. Guess what? Part of the problem with labelling kids as cancer patients or terminal illness and etc IS due to sympathy.
Yes, it can be but sympathy is also not
always a negative. Sympathy to a rape victim in the direct aftermath, or when the topic comes up is appropriate, and is not a negative. Bringing up the topic inappropriately, or every time you see the victim is inappropriate, but the cancer patient example illustrates that this is not a matter of rape stigma; it is a matter of some people simply seeing
anyone with a traumatic life event and not being able to see past that person's difficulty, or worrying they will appear callous if they are not constantly expressing sympathy. This is a problem, but it is not a rape problem. It is a problem of needing to adjust the attitudes of some people towards anyone with any sort of trauma.
Amputees complain about this sort of treatment too. If you want to discuss a more general "traumatized person stigma" that might exist, I suggest starting another thread.
The person who can't walk may not want your sympathy because it immediately assumes that he is marginalised and less able. I won't go on further regarding this as its would become a thread hijack, but again, plain sympathy CAN be negative.
Again, it CAN be but, it is not always negative, and you are illustrating my point. This is not a rape stigma; it's an issue of how to treat any traumatized person.
And once again, why is it that you dismiss the argument that self stigmatisation can and is a reason why rape goes unreported?
I'm not. I addressed it long before your posts here. People, mainly women, are told that they will go through hell and not be believed if they report a rape. They then don't report it. This is then used as evidence that they don't report it because of some "Stigma". Alternately they
do report it, and in many cases they regard the normal investigative process as a "hell" because they've been told that the accused's right to a trial, to be convicted on proof beyond reasonable doubt, and to confront his or her accuser, is some sort of "hell" and evidence that "people don't believe you",
especially if he or she is not eventually found guilty. They then go back and talk bout what a terrible experience it all was and affirm that what they were told in advance was true - because they went into it having been told that. They are self-stigmatizing because they are told to do so in advance, and then their experiences are used to relate this to others. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy where self-stigmitization is created by being told one will have one. Were victims told what the criminal justice process was in less loaded language, and were they clearly informed that rape is a serious crime and that affording the accused his rights is not an accusation of lying on their part, this would probably be far less of an issue.
Here's news for you. We do know the reason why people with risky lifestyles, even those who are diagnosed decline HIV testing and treatment. Take a guess at what it is.
Here's news for you. There isn't just one reason. Look up complex cause fallacy.
So... in other words, you're contiuning to fuck the dead horse that somehow, everybody is obessed that people aren't making progress on how we treat rape victims in society.
Ah.. in other words, when people move the goalposts, I'm not supposed to point that out?
No. Everyone else in this thread, from Serafina onwards, is responding ENTIRELY to your argument that no social stigma exists towards rape victim, even when clearly negative connotations of being a rape victim exists.
Except that "negative connotations to being a rape victim" isn't a social stigma. I posted a definition; 2 actually, with a link, to what a stigma is. You have done nothing but appeal to unnamed psychology textbooks. Clearly there's a negative connotation to being a rape victim; there's a negative connotation to being an assault, robbery, or burglary victim too. That's because having any of those things happen to you is bad. Simply regarding being raped as a negative thing to have happened to a person does not automatically translate to a negative attitude towards that person.
You're attempting to redefine terms when there exists NO NEED to do so. Why can't you simply argue that society no longer blames the victim for bringing it on themselves? Why is it that you MUST argue that there isn't a negative reaction to being labelled a rape victim?
I'm not the one redefining terms here; you are. I provided a definition. As for why MUST I argue it, why must you get in such a huff about it? I'm only discussing it because the goalposts got shifted here when people couldn't address the fact that serious progress has been made on treatment of rape victims.
The real bottom line is that the negative attitudes people held towards rape victims both in and out of the justice system have always been referred to as a stigma. Now, those stigmas are largely gone, yet many rape advocacy groups and many people who have bought into what they say continue to claim that this exists as if no change had occured in 25-30 years of effort.
When the changes are pointed out, then people myseteriously start discussing other, different forms of "Stigma". This is a very clever tactic because if one can get an admission that some stigma, any stigma exists, or define it in some way that one necessarily must exist, then it's very easy to shift back to the original "victims are treated as liars and sluts" stigma and claim
that still exists by simply throwing around the term "rape victim stigma" carelessly. This is a very common debate tactic, but highly dishonest.
Hey. You want a technical term? Here's one. Society as an insitution no longer automatically casts rape victims in outgroups.
Got a point here? Or are you just tossing out a technical term to appear more knowledgable than you really are?
Its up to you however to actually prove that society in general don't cast rape victims into outgroups.
No, actually it's not. Look up "burden of proof". I notice that you've failed to define "outgroup", and given your apparent need to define things in such nebulous terms that they can always be said to apply would render such proof impossible because some new outgroup would always appear.
Shit like this is why I'm kind of glad it isn't legal to go around punching people in the crotch. You'd be able to track my movement from orbit from the sheer mass of idiots I'd leave lying on the ground clutching their privates in my wake. -- Mr. Coffee
