Responsibility

[andrewducker]

This is inspired by the comment here, where ladysysiphus says "If you have consumed enough alcohol to impair your judgement, I believe you then have to take at least some responsibility for putting yourself in a position where something like this might happen."

[Poll #619684]

Comments

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Thank god! Neither do I, and I was beginning to think I was the only one. I equate responsibility more with causality - if you hadn't done x, y wouldn't have happened - but with no blame connotations. (This, incidentally, is why i didn't fillin the poll.)

I'm getting intensely frustrated with the reporting of the Amnesty poll conflating "is partially responsible" with "is partially to blame".

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

Part of the survey asked is a woman totally responsible, partially responsible or not at all responsible for being raped if it is known the woman has had many sexual partners.

Is it possible to understand responses to that question using the causality interpretation of responsibility?

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

The survey has a range of questions, so the question itself makes sense. And I can see how people *could* answer at least partially responsible, in certain cases - the less clear-cut cases, where the man believed he had consent, and the woman didn't actually fight him off. (Before you jump down my throat, I don't believe this, and I would answer not at all responsible.) But if she'd been flirting madly and it was well known that she brought home a different guy every friday and saturday night, and the respondents thought that that could cause a guy to believe she wanted to have sex with him - yeah, I can see 20% of the population believing that.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

(waves hands pathetically at screen, much as Wallace would at Grommit)

No jumping down of throats, I'm just interested in the survey and how people interpret it and the questions that were asked.

I would say, for example, that the question on previous sexual behaviour is of a different quality to the others .... the others relate to what the woman is doing now (wearing certain clothing, walking in a certain place) or has done in the time immediately before the rape (flirted, got drunk) whereas the previous sexual behaviour question asks the person answering to consider behaviour which is not connected to the immediate circumstances of the rape at all.

I, myself, wasn't at all shocked at the range of responses to all the other questions (which is not to say I agreed or didn't with any particular answer but just that I wasn't surprised by them) but I was surprised by the answers for previous sexual behaviour. Also, the fact that that question was answered in the way it was would lead me to believe that many people answering the survey were using responsible more in a blame sense than a choice sense - in the sense that 8% of the respondents seem to think that sexually promiscuous women are totally responsible for being raped => worthy of punishment?