Rapists

[TaraJo]

I mean, you can recover from rape; you can't recover from murder.

I don't think it's about the recovery of the survivor of the attack but how sociopathic the perp is and therefore how dangerous that perp is to society.

Are you arguing that murderers aren't less sociopathic than rapists or that murder is less dangerous to society than rape?

Prison time is not just designed to punish but also to prevent them from harming society.

I agree, mostly. I'd like to see some amount of rehabilitative efforts thrown in there with far less emphasis on punishment.

There are many different scenarios under which murder might happen with a huge variety of motivations. This is why we punish pre-meditated murder differently than murder in the heat of the moment. A wife who shoots her faithless husband upon finding him in bed with another woman one day is generally treated differently than one who planned and poisoned her husband after taking out a big life insurance policy on him.

I agree with this, too. There's a lot of gray area in there when it comes to murder and it's the reason a serial killer is going to get more time than someone who accidentally shoots someone while they're cleaning their gun. But the same goes for rape, too. There's a lot of gray area in rape, as much as we might not like to admit it, especially when drugs or alcohol are impairing the judgement of people involved. Statutory rape can certainly be a gray area as well, because, let's face it, we don't ask for photo ID of sexual partners before we get down and dirty and it's entirely possible for someone to lie about their age.

By contrast, there are no conditions under which I could consider rape to be either justifiable or understandable.

Justifiable? Maybe not. You don't rape in self defense or in defense of someone else. But understandable? I can understand it, somewhat. Many people can confuse the non-verbal cues we use for a lot of our communication and think someone is into it when they aren't.

Neither does it make much moral difference if the rape is pre-meditated or just happens in the moment. Rape is an inherently sociopathic crime while murder might not be.

Really? You're more comfortable with someone who had a temporary lapse of judgement than you are with someone who planned out a crime for maybe months in advance? I don't feel that way at all.

Some murderers are serial but not all. By contrast, the repeat offender rate for rapists is quite high, last I checked. The repeat offender rate for child molesters is 100%. You do not rehabilitate a child molester. They will strike again if they are able.

Correct. However, in the original post that was being asked about, we weren't talking about a specific kind of rape, we were talking about rape in general. If anything, this only strengthens my case that there's gray area with rape and some rape, like child rape, is worse than others.

But even in cases of child rape there can be gray areas. There are places where it's a crime for a 19 year old to have sex with a 17 year old (by the way, this is something that regularly gets used by homophobic parents against the partners of their gay children). I mentioned lieing about your age earlier. Perhaps we could eliminate the gray area by saying all pre-teen rape is terrible, and I'd probably agree with that.

But even then, murdering a child still strikes me as worse than raping one. I don't like either, though.