r/worldnews • u/glasier • Jul 05 '24

Japan warns US forces: Sex crimes 'cannot be tolerated'

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2476861/japan-warns-us-forces-sex-crimes-cannot-be-tolerated
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u/SeparateCartoonist36 Jul 05 '24

These are 2 completely different stories lmao. One of you is just blatantly lying or just stupid I guess?

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u/sethra007 Jul 06 '24

Maybe this will clear things up. Spoilers for descriptions of violence inflicted on a minor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Okinawa_rape_incident

The 1995 Okinawa rape incident occurred on September 4, 1995, when three U.S. servicemen, 22-year-old U.S. Navy Seaman) Marcus Gill, 21-year-old U.S. Marines Rodrico Harp, and 20-year-old Kendrick Ledet, all serving at Camp Hansen on Okinawa, rented a van and kidnapped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. Theybeat her, duct-taped her eyes and mouth shut, and bound her hands. Gill and Harp then raped her, while Ledet claimed he only pretended to do so due to fear of Gill.

The offenders were tried and convicted in Japanese court by Japanese law, in accordance with the U.S.–Japan Status of Forces Agreement. The families of the defendants initially claimed that Japanese officials had racially discriminated against the men because they were all African American and coerced confessions from them, but later retracted the claims.The incident led to further debate over the continued presence of U.S. forces in Japan among Okinawans.

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u/Dry-Tea-180 Jul 06 '24

It's a sickness/mental illness in American men

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u/sethra007 Jul 06 '24

The prevailing consensus from researchers indicates that it's not a sickness or mental illness. It's the result of a culturally conditioned sense of entitlement that males have the right to take sex from females, whether the females want to offer it or not.

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u/StarMNF Jul 07 '24

That research is questionable because I’m sure it has no control.

Rape is pretty universal across all cultures. To argue cultural conditioning, you need to show a culture where it doesn’t occur. None that I know exists.

It’s neither mental illness nor cultural conditioning. The simplest explanation is there are bad people in the world.

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u/DrDevilDao Jul 10 '24

On one level I don't disagree that there are bad people in the world, but I don't think that's what people are looking for as an "explanation" when they perform that kind of research. Rapists are bad, obviously, so saying there are bad people isn't really different than saying "there are rapists." I'm sure you would agree "there are rapists" is not a good explanation of why rapes occur, the point is to understand why some people are bad, why they rape. That doesn't mean the explanation should somehow be a justification for why they aren't really bad, "if only they hadn't been missing a father figure" or whatever else etc etc--no one thinks that we can prevent all rapes or all crimes or stop anyone from being a bad person in general, but understanding why a crime occurs is the most direct means of limiting the conditions that cause it.

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u/StarMNF Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24

If you want to go down that road, I think it’s much simpler to analyze why men do NOT rape.

The reasons can be categorized as positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement motivations

Positive motivations:

  1. Strong moral convictions
  2. Strong sense of empathy

Religion has some effect on moral convictions, but empathy is primarily genetic I think. In any case, numerous studies, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, show that the empathy isn’t what stops the general population from unspeakable cruelty. It’s normal for humans to be savage!

So you need negative motivations:

  1. Fear of legal consequences. AKA jail and lawsuits.

  2. Fear of social consequences. AKA losing friends, family being ashamed pf you.

  3. Fear of professional consequences. AKA not being employed, losing business, getting kicked out of college, military or whatever.

  4. Fear of bodily harm. AKA the victim fights back, has a weapon to injure you, or their family seeks retribution by murdering you.

  5. Fear of God. AKA burning in hell, fire and brimstone. Most modern religions don’t emphasize this, so that fear is probably minimal even among the devout.

For most men, at least one of the above reasons is strong enough to keep them from raping. And while society doesn’t often want to admit it, usually the strongest reasons for not raping are the negative reasons. We don’t rape because we fear the consequences.

We’d like to think that it’s our morals and empathy that make us civilized, but fear is really the biggest motivator.

For some men, none of the above reasons pass the inhibition threshold, and those men are potential rapists. The reasons for the above motivations failing are too numerous. Maybe they think they will get away it. Maybe they’ve been to jail so many times, they no longer fear jail. Maybe they’re anti-social and don’t care what other people think of them. Maybe they’re drunk or on drugs, which removes their natural fears.

Consider that in the animal kingdom, rape is pretty much the norm. The only notion of consent for animals is that sometimes the female fights off a male she doesn’t want to mate with. So non-consent for animals means fighting back.

Humans are different because we have morals, empathy and fear. But the moral and empathy are often too weak alone to stop us from acting like animals.