And when I say I don't trust judges and that the justice system of most places is broken for giving a single person the final decision power, based on whatever they think is right, people say I'm trolling.
Judges pull decisions out of their ass to fulfill whatever interest they have. Or sometimes just because they are stupid.
Good judges are super rare.
Oh wow, something from Belgium showed up here. Obviously most reactions are the same here. But I would urge everyone to read more details about this. As there much more uncomfortable nuance here. One of those being that the dude is also in agreement he did something wrong. He also gave a relatively accurate description of the events of that evening that got proven with phone records and CCTV at different locations. Making his account of what happened at the least somewhat reliable.
Obviously the woman could not consent because she was drunk as fuck. And she's allowed to get drunk as fuck without being taken advantage off. CCTV showed them kissing at the bar they met. Phone records show he tried to call her friend she was supposed to go home with. CCTV shows them going to that friend's dorm and not getting in and waiting there for half an hour. Then they walk back to his place while kissing on the way there. The morning after his messages to her indicate he wants to continue seeing her. (https://m.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20250402_95297572?journeybuilder=nopaywall but it's in Dutch)
Again, she could not consent, and he as the least drunk of both of them bears the responsibility of this. I do think he should have had some form of punishment above of what he got and for the woman's feeling of safety a restraining order like she asked. And something that would have made mandatory counselling and follow-up possible. Not to mention that although justice in Belgium isn't supposed to be revenge, it should also cause some sort of satisfaction for the victim.
This situation just shows that the definition of rape over the decades has become more complex and nuanced, but unfortunately the tools to deal with this have not. This dude definitely did something wrong, but he's not just a vicious predator.
If they were both drunk, could either of them consent?
It really depends on how drunk you actually were at the time, and that’s what makes cases like this so difficult. Generally speaking, simply being drunk isn’t enough.
Hell, even being blackout drunk isn’t enough. Because you can be blacked out without being passed out; Blackout drunk simply means your brain isn’t recording things to your memory, so you won’t remember it after you sober up. Contrary to popular belief, alcohol doesn’t make you forget existing memories. It just makes it so you don’t ever commit things to memory in the first place. That’s what happens when you’re blackout drunk.
In order to be incapable of consenting, you need to be so drunk that you can’t comprehend what is happening. Because informed consent requires two things: Information anbout what is happening, and enthusiasm. You can have both, even while blackout drunk. Because you forgetting your enthusiasm the next morning doesn’t automatically make it rape. After all, you were informed and enthusiastic when it was happening, so you consented. If you were capable of understanding what was happening and were enthusiastic, it’s not legally considered rape.
And that’s a surprisingly high threshold to beat. You usually need to prove to the courts that you were basically passed out (and therefore unable to be informed about what was happening) before they’ll consider it rape.
Even if people would colloquially consider drunk sex rape, that’s not typically how the courts view it. And that’s a large part of why so many accused rapists get off without a guilty verdict; The victim basically has to prove that they were missing either information or enthusiasm to overcome the accused’s “they consented to it” defense. And if the victim was blacked out and doesn’t even remember the evening, that becomes extremely difficult to do without outside witnesses corroborating that the victim was passed out and/or combative.
And hell, in cases like the Brock Turner one, even when the victim proves that she was passed out, the rapist can still get away with just a slap on the wrist.
Brock Turner?
You mean convicted rapist Brock Turner?
I just want to make sure that's the rapist Brock Turner you're talking about and not some other Brock Turner.
I only know of one Brock Turner, and he definitely raped a woman, but the judge let him off easy because he has affluenze.
The judge decided that a punishment might jeopardize the rich kid's future, and cited that he hadn't been brought up to realize the consequences of his actions. To my naive understanding that seems like a really teachable moment.
By the way, in case anyone wasn't sure: Brock Turner, the convicted rapist, raped a woman and got away with it because his parents are rich.
And how do you determine who raped who if it's a question about how drunk you were? I have had a lot of nights out in my teens (european), where I have no clue what happened after midnight, but didn't get home until 05:00. If I had sex with someone pretty much equally as drunk, who did the raping?
Oh... you didn't hear
There are different levels of being drunk. She was so drunk she blacked out and had trouble walking. He As drunk but can supply a recollection of what happened. There's nuance like I said, but someone who can recollect events and relies on his rational actions where he called her friends can logically be considered to be more responsible for not taking into consideration she was too drunk to be able to consent.
Alcohol impairment can be very messy. I know someone who had 1 and a half drinks, had no speech slurring or obvious signs of being black-out drunk, but did not remember a third of the night the next day because she’s a lightweight that’s drank a single-digit number of times in her life (she’d also eaten very little that day and had some recent sleep debt). I would not have guessed she was blackout drunk, she was just talking about her problems and was articulate the entire time I saw her. If I didn’t know she had been drinking, I can’t think of how I would’ve known short of some kind of specific motor function test that’s made to suss that out/harder than just sitting around, talking, and occasionally going to the restroom. She just looked a little tired. When we spoke later, she didn’t remember basically anything after a certain point (a couple of hours’ worth) and wondered if some vague flashes of memories had been dreams. It was rather surprising to me.
To add to this, the university decided to suspend him. The court did also order him to pay a fine to the victim.
I remember an officer in the USCG accused of rape while I worked as a welder on base. Guy had to paint the fire lane on curbs for a month while his superiors quietly hushed up the incident so as to not disturb the guys advancement prospects (he was the kid of some higher rank admin).
I'm sure that taught him a lesson
/s
And people wonder why there are vigilantes.
If we are going to be ol fashioned then we are going to be ol fashioned.... If there is no justice we will go and find justice. We're even seeing this with the likes of Saint Luigi. People just don't understand history. FAFO
The Kidnap Years: The Astonishing True History of the Forgotten Kidnapping Epidemic That Shook Depression-Era America David Stout
This reminds me of the rapist Brock Turner, aka Allen Turner, the rapist.
Oh Allen Turner? Who started using his middle name instead of Brock Turner? Because he raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster? That guy? (Brock/Allen Turner?)
I just want to be sure I'm thinking of the right guy...
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/06/us/sexual-assault-brock-turner-stanford/index.html
This Brock Allen Turner right?
Does the rapist Brock Allen Turner still live in Oakwood Ohio, a wealthy suburb of Dayton Ohio?
Hey all, anyone who cares about/is interested in knowing more about the crime committed by the rapist Brock Allen Turner should read Know My Name, written by the woman who was actually assaulted, Chanel Miller.
I highly recommend listening to the audio book, as she reads it herself and has a powerful voice.
The conviction will not appear on the man’s criminal record. However, if he reoffends, he will be sentenced for this rape as well as for the new offence.
Why wait to be proven wrong? I don't understand. Rapists shouldn't be doctors.
Doctors get one rape...
He claims that he asked her several times if she consented and that he had been given the impression that she did.
In his summing up the judge said “It has been proven that sexual intercourse took place at a time that she was in a state that meant that she couldn’t possibly consent to it. The offence is serious and unacceptable.”
Wow, we can both read! That's awesome. Now one of us just has to work on their comprehension and maybe even finish the article next time...
You asked why wait. The point of jail and fines is to avoid reoffending. The judge thinks he won't, and will be more valuable to society as a doctor than an inmate. Also If he does this again then he will get hit twice as hard.
Something tells me that they are not publishing his name because they're betting that his future patients would feel differently. I would not want to see Dr. Rapist for any reason, even if he's the best physician in the city.
By finding him guilty but not punishing him, he will be made to feel guilty and the chance of him reoffending will be prevented, without socially impairing the man
What a load of horse shit. “Letting him get away with rape penalty free will ensure he doesn’t do it again” is some crazy fucking logic. Seems like knowing there are no consequences for your actions would make repeating the offense significantly more likely.
It's funny that the court would explicitly legitimize the idea that some people deserve to be "socially impaired" and others do not despite committing exactly the same crime.
Funny in the sense that it contradicts the entire foundation that the legal system is based on and makes the court look illegitimate and deliberately corrupt.
I’m sure this concept of non-punishment will now be applied to many other cases across social classes, right?
Right…?
Hey, it worked great when Susan Collins took that approach with orangeboi in his first term, didn’t it?
…didn’t it…?
It's a bit like the old sitcom "Night Court" where the judge would find the ladies of the evening guilty as charged and turn them loose with "time served" as their penalty.
This "lack of sentence" is a bit more than time served since the penalty for this crime can still be applied at any time if the offender is in court for anything else.
It's overly lenient and a bad message, but better than letting off manslaughter charges for a defense of "affluenza." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43621839
What the actual fuck.
Don't worry, that's not the real reason. The real reason is most likely that the perpetrators family is rich and the victim's family isn't.
Latest case of affluenza. He needs the Brock Turner treatment. You remember the rapist Brock Turner, right?
The article doesn't mention this rapist's name, though.
Little coward is probably afraid of getting the Brock Allen Turner treatment.
If he's been convicted, he shouldn't have a choice about that.
Regardless of why he got suspension of penalty, if you read anything about the case it wasn't because he or his parents are rich. Personally I think there's more nuance than the clickbait headlines. I think he should not have gotten the penalty suspended but I can understand why that happened. The shortened motivation for this does read like ragebait ofcourse. His future should not have been as important as his cooperation, verifiable truthfulness and the fact he did abuse the state of someone who could not consent. Where that balance ends for punishment ends I find hard to say. But to reduce it to that he's rich is just populist nonsense.
I actually spend quite a lot of time in Leuven these days, and looking at some of those houses and the general state of Belgium today ... I can't say that's not likely to be true.
It's just that the place kinda struck me as safe. I guess it's not.
Belgium has some of (if not the) lowest income inequality in the OECD due to our very harsh income tax (highest median tax wedge of the OECD, yes even including the nordics). With quite a few asterisks attached to that statement of course because our fiscal system is a complete mess so if you're special kinds of well off (e.g. you make your income on capital gains) you'll be taxed very little.
How low income inequality doesn't correlate to very high standards of living like it does in the Nordics... Well I'll leave it to historians and economists to hash it out. The answer you get will almost certainly reflect that person's personal politics. Harsh industrial decline is worth mentioning though.
Wallonia is measurably poorer than Flanders, but both regions are developed western economies. The US has a murder rate 535 % of Belgium's, and I don't see anyone warning students away from studying there (or well, not until the past few months).
That judge should be investigated and the prosecutor should definitely appeal, and besides there is a lot of work to do safety-wise, especially for women to be able to feel safe, but that's hardly a problem specific to Leuven or Belgium.
It is quite safe. What I heard about this case is that the victim was happy with the outcome.
They met at a party, she was drunk. He said he asked consent, she said he raped her. There was no evidence or allegation of force, just that she couldn't have consented in her drunken state.
He had a clean record.
He got convicted and ordered to pay €3500 and if he commits another crime, then this one will count too.
She was satisfied with the outcome. She especially wanted recognition that it was rape.
I think this is a good outcome. If he ever rapes someone again, he'll be a serial rapist and get the book thrown at him.
And on the flipside, I find it difficult to throw the book at people under the circumstances in these kind of cases.
You're gonna have to give a source for the victim being satisfied with the outcome.
There are a few other articles it seems - this one has:
While the victim has found some solace in the court’s recognition of her assault, she is disappointed that her attacker faces no real consequences.
Which says she was not happy with the outcome, only that the rape was recognized.
Per this article:
Leuven University Hospital has suspended a medical student that was convicted of raping another student but was not sentenced for his crime.
The school has at least ensured there were some measure of consequences. Also:
Chief physician Gert Van Assche said that "First and foremost our thoughts go out to the victim. Together with KU Leuven we will look at the court’s ruling and examine how we will go on from there. In the meantime, as a precautionary measure the doctor concerned has been suspended from duties at the hospital”.
The only other article was paywalled and seemed to have no additional information anyway.
Edit: I think its worth noting, though it can be seen in the link, he was studying gynecology.
They changed it though. Now they are saying she wanted him to be ineligible to practice medicine.
Also how many people will potentially suffer before another one comes forward and gets taken seriously? 🤨
Nevertheless, the judge refrained from passing sentence. “It is undeniable that he passed the line of what is permissible. The man showed a lack of respect for the victim's physical, psychological and sexual boundaries.
I don't know how they do it over there, but where I'm from, those are 3 things someone should probably respect if they're going to be placed in a position requiring great trust like a doctor....
Translation: this guy has wealth parents and is spoiled to high heaven
He was training to be a gynecologist, so definitely would rape again. Don’t wish for him to have another victim but sounds like a second offense gets him a sentence for the first one as well.
Seems like his goal from the beginning
And his victim wasn't also young and talented? Are they concerned about how the victim will go on when this fucker walks back on campus?
At getting away with rape.
This truly is a prison planet.
Judges who do this need to be... whatever the judge equivalent of disbarred is. It's wrong.
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
Posts must be:
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!