Serafina wrote:Sorry, but that's just not true. Being drunk removes restraints, common sense and fear of consequences - but it does not give you impulses you don't already have.
The prime example would be that not everyone gets violent when drunk. Others are drunk driving - someone who knows that its wrong no matter what won't do it no matter how drunk. Likewise, someone who knows that sexual activities without an explicit yes from the other person is wrong won't do it either no matter how drunk.
What does change is that a suppressed impulse may stop being suppressed. Or a hidden opinion may surface. A
lot of people suppress violent instincts, for example- we are not surprised that people get into bar fights more often than they get into fights on random stretches of street.
The notion that lots of rapists are actually decent people who just made a stupid mistake is damaging.
Again, it can be compared to drunk or reckless driving - the notion that its something of a juvenile mistake vastly increases its occurence, whereas society realizing that its always wrong reduces it.
So please, don't say "it just happened because he was drunk". It happened because he doesn't care about consent, and due to his work thats even worse than it would normally be.
Personally, I think:
1) It's always wrong.
2) It happens more often when people are drunk- men are
more likely to harass women when they are drunk. Men whose judgment and inhibitions would normally stop them, are not stopped when drinking removes the judgment and inhibitions.
You might try to place men on a sliding scale of "how likely is this man to commit sexual assault?" Very few men- almost zero- would do it to a complete stranger while totally sober. A larger percentage would do it to someone they found attractive, who'd had social dealings with them, with their inhibitions lowered by drink.
That's precisely equivalent to drunk driving, where accidents are more likely when drunks get behind the wheel, and less likely when sober people drive. And we
still hold the drunk driver accountable for his actions, and as far as I'm concerned that's the right policy.
"He was drunk, and did something he wouldn't do sober," is NOT an excuse. However it's an explanation, and one we might want to think about if we're trying to minimize the number of sexual assaults that happen. He's far from the only man to commit a crime while drunk, that he would probably not have committed sober.
Scrib wrote:I'm curious about the quality of work before his assault. I've always been skeptical about this idea that what someone does when really drunk is a sign of their "real" personality as opposed to the countless other hours of actions while they were not drunk.
Granted, I can see where one is coming from when they say that someone with subconscious (let alone conscious ones) issues might damage cases even if they didn't mean it but the general idea is one I've just never completely bought into.
There does have to be a limit to
in vino veritas, I think. You cannot define a person just by their base instincts, and when someone is very drunk, their base instincts are pretty much all they've got left.
