10mo ago

How does employing a rapist not constitute an unsafe work environment for female employees?

So I just discovered that I have been working next to the waste of oxygen that raped my best friend several years ago. I work in a manufacturing environment and I know that you can't fire someone just for being a sex offender unless it directly interferes with work duties (in the US). But despite it being a primarily male workforce he does work with several women who have no idea what he is. He literally followed a woman home, broke into her house, and raped her. Him working here puts every female employee at risk. How is that not an unsafe working environment? How is it at even legal to employ him anywhere where he will have contact with women?

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How are you expecting him to feed himself if he can't work anywhere? There's no such thing as a men's only work place.
I agree that rape should be charged with the same severity as taking a life. But we also need to let ex felons leave that in the past if they can. There's a lot of abuse and oppression that results from permanent shunning. We made the choices in our justice system that we made because of history. Let's not repeat the mistakes of history.
- I respectfully disagree. Murder is not at the same level as rape. Rape is awful and despicable, but at least you're alive to recover from it.
  
  That's the thing, many people never recover from rape.
  
  I think more people don't recover from death compared to rape
  
  I'm not arguing that lol. But many people would literally rather be killed than raped and it's frequently cited as one of the things, "worse than death".
  It should absolutely be punished similarly.
  
  That sounds like a great way to make all rapists murderers.
  
  No. There's a psychological barrier to killing, even in the mind of a criminal. That's why most murders are actually people who knew each other and had enough emotion to overcome that barrier or people who were scared/abused enough that the barrier was no longer there. (It goes away as a defense mechanism)
  
  That sounds like a blatant threat and attempt at emotional blackmail
  
  Many is not anywhere near all.
  That is an option for the victim in a rape still, there is no option for the victim in a murder.
  
  But it is possible to recover, and many do. There is no recovery from being murdered. Personally, I'm glad I'm still alive even if I'm still dealing with my own SA-induced trauma 20 years later.
  Murder also has further externalities. When you kill someone, you take them away from their friends and families, who now have to live forever without that person in their lives.
  But this whole conversation feels a lot like we're asking "who was worse, Hitler or Genghis Khan?", and it's weird to put either side on the defensive even if there is an objectively true answer to be found.
  
  Yes, but statistically speaking the amount of people who recover from murder (being around 0 to 1, depending on if the Resurrection of Christ is a factual event or mere myth) is a tad lower than people who recover from rape induced trauma...
  
  There is no reason why rape is judged much less severely than torture though.
  
  What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
  You are advocating a known sexual predator be allowed in the workplace, knowing other employees are threatened by his presence.
  The company isn't responsible for ensuring the rapist -- who is not supposed to be in society in the first place -- is able to put food on the table. It is the company's responsibility to protect its workers in th workplace, and that means not letting a known rapist work around women.
  Honestly, those women could probably go complain to the EEOC. They certainly could win a civil suit.
  What you're asking for is horrific and a blatant violation of the rights of other people. We don't live under the barbaric practices of the 20th century where anything like this can just be done to you and you have to put up with it. We live in the 21st century where we recognize the rights of victims and communities are more important.
  Don't like it? Do what you're telling rape victims to do: get over it and move on.
  
  Women aren't the only victims of rape. Clearly he shouldn't be allowed to work around anyone right? Actually he shouldn't be allowed to live near anyone who could be at risk either. Actually he shouldn't be allowed to go near anyone who could be raped. I think the Soviets already tried a prisoner only island and it didn't work too well.
- Or we can accept the past actually does matter, protect our communities and offenders can be the ones to accept the short end of the stick.
  You know, like a sane society
  
  If you don’t allow people to have second chances, then recidivism rates skyrocket. Being tough on crime creates more crime (and more prisoners).
  Look at the Scandinavian prison model. Reform is what ought to be the focus.
  But in the US, recidivism is kind of the goal. After all, we need to keep the for profit prisons full.
  
  For profit prisons are creepy and ought to be illegal, but they're also a small percentage of US prisons. They're not to blame for the high prison population. They're another symptom.
  
  If you dress up enabling rapists, who do not belong in the community, through flowery rhetoric, you deny that second chance to everyone else.
  Society doesn't owe rapists anything. It owes everyone else their safety. If the rapist doesn't like it, they should not have raped anyone. If you don't like the fact that your rapist friend is ostracized from the community, you should stop being friends with rapists.
  This is why we need to throw rapists in jail for life, and quite frankly, to start jailing their enablers, so communities can rebuild and the trauma from those acts can heal.
  
  When did the person you responded to say they were friend with rapists. When you resort to ad hominem attacks on peoples character, you're signalling to everyone you have already lost the argument and have nothing of value left to say, just take the L.
  
  Well, when did anyone say they were ostracizing a rapist? You want to talk about logical fallacies, you best look at yourself and your compatriots here.
  Firing them from a job like that, where they have to work closely with women and have the opportunity to reoffend, isn't ostracization the way you're flagrantly exaggerating it to be. It's called common sense.
  The other employees have every right to fear being raped because there is a known sexual predator in the workplace. It's a specific and credible fear that not only is grossly immoral if the company doesn't act, it also will put them in a position of extreme liability. That scumfuck should never have gotten past the background check in the first place.
  And you don't care about that because all you care about is yourself. Because like the other apologists here, you're thinking from a perspective of "But what if I get caught?" and that means you believe you or someone you know will rape someone someday -- and you'll keep them in your life anyway, because you don't care about justice or morality, you only care about shielding your friends from consequences.
  
  Seriously, that was my only comment and now I'm also a rapist according to you. This is something else, I can't say I've ever encountered someone this toxic on Lemmy since I've been here. You extrapolated all sorts of things I never said from 2 sentences.
  Not that you are remotely deserving of a respectful response at this point, but I'll still give you my thoughts:
  I've been sexually assaulted and have had people close to me be sexually assaulted and raped. The insinuation that I am a rapist would be personally harmful to me and retraumatizing if I wasn't aware that you are doing this because you are unable to articulate your opinions on the matter effectively, so you resort to insults. I totally understand the visceral need and desire for vengeance and justice when you or someone close to you is the victim of vile acts. There is someone I grew up acquainted with that if I saw them again in person I would have an intense desire to cause physical pain because of what they did to people close to me. I totally understand the desire for vengeance, and I suspect everyone else on this thread does too.
  With that said, when societies make rules you have to decide what the goal is. Is the goal vengeance and punishment, is the goal a better future for society in general, or is it a little of both. We have the sum total of human experience to look back on, we can see what societies systems of punishment result in better outcomes for society at large. We know what systems of punishment result in recidivism more often, what systems result in rehabilitation more often, and we know what systems perpetuate a cycle of violence that never ends. We don't rehabilitate criminals and sex offenders for their sake, we rehabilitate them for societies sake. Because we can conclusively show that if systems of punishment make it their goal to rehabilitate instead of get vengeance, it usually breaks the cycle of violence whether it be physical or sexual. You're basically saying you would prefer vengeance, even if it is at the expense of sexual and physical violence being perpetuated through society generation after generation.
  I strongly suggest you read this article: https://www.firststepalliance.org/post/norway-prison-system-lessons#:~:text=Prisoners%20in%20Norway%20lose%20their,crime%20rates%20in%20the%20world.
  Norway has the lowest recidivism rate in the world exactly because the treat their criminals like human beings. Guess who wins, all of the non-criminals that enjoy one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
  
  What kind of society are we going to have if we do that though? Societies with forever punishments are worse places to live specifically because it ends up being used as a weapon. It gets easier and easier to get that forever punishment because this exact argument gets deployed for lower and lower offenses. Your three options are slavery, banishment, or death. And it's usually for an ulterior motive like votes or money. Humans have tried all three in the past and they've all led to more heartbreak and violence than they've stopped.
  A sane society wants and works towards peace. You get peace with rehabilitation and treatment.
  
  A better one.
  See, in the real world where adults pay bills, your actions have consequences. Those actions tend to be for everyone else and are extremely damaging if you rape them, so what sane societies do is prioritize the interests of the victims and the community at large over the rapist. They imprison or preferably execute the rapist, to guarantee they cannot hurt members of the community anymore without forcing the community to bear the burden of the rapist's presence, for their mere presence is now a problem.
  Communities do not owe anything to rapists and are under no responsibility to integrate people like that into it. The act of doing that endangers a community because now they have to live alongside a rapist.
  Communities have a large moral obligation to establish a Moral Event Horizon and accept that individuals who do horrific things like rape don't belong in it anymore regardless of circumstance. The community has to be willing to discriminate who can participate or not based on actions. That's what a community does to maintain itself.
  A community unwilling to do this is an unprincipled one that usually just thinks rape is morally acceptable or at least necessary to reproduce. A community unwilling to permanently remove a rapist for any reason is just, quite frankly, an evil one.
  Rapists don't have a permanent right to participate in the community. The idea that they do has destroyed our society. You have to earn the privilege to participate through following the laws and good action, and if you refuse, you can no longer participate in the community.
  Communities have an obligation to establish rules and enforce them through threat of losing the ability to participate.
  It's not hard when you don't enable rapists.
  
  Let's say we agree on your governance model. There are non-trivial cases of men falsely been accused of rape by women. Some have even been convicted and their innocence proved many years later. How does your governance model that proposes execution of the convicted account for this?
  
  It literally doesn't matter because this isn't a discussion of the death penalty. This is an individual asking about a serious situation at work you deliberately ran off the rails to push a political agenda. Take your anti-justice garbage and shut it.
  Oh, and by the way, OP's friend being expected to work alongside their rapist functionally is worth than death.
  
  They imprison or preferably execute the rapist, to guarantee they cannot hurt members of the community anymore
  It does matter because you brought it up, this is what you said, word for word. Do you hope your proposed legal framework to be implemented at any point in time and therefore willing to give it some serious thought or are you just venting?
  
  Sounds more like a backwards medieval society than a ‘sane society’.
  Most modern and sane societies have a concept of rehabilitation and have found that we are all better off when a justice system is centered on rehabilitation and addressing the roots of crime at a deeper level, beyond just punishment, punishment is not very effective on its own.

312 comments