If a person (“A”), with A’s penis— (a) without another person (“B”) consenting, and (b) without any reasonable belief that B consents, penetrates to any extent, either intending to do so or reckless as to whether there is penetration, the vagina, anus or mouth of B then A commits an offence, to be known as the offence of rape.
In America, rape doesn't necessarily have to involve either a penis or actual force. Since the Constitution doesn't cover the subject, it's left up to each individual state to give a legal definition to the word.
I'm not sure I see there being different laws in different places as being a problem. Some of the laws will undoubtedly be ones I object to, but the idea that there are multiple legal definitions of rape in different states doesn't bother me more than the idea that there are different definitions in Scotland and England (the definition I gave was the one for Scotland as of 2009).
Ah. The problem springs from the fact that whenever someone here (in the US) attempts a concerted effort to work out what the rape stats are, whether they're talking about false allegations or just collecting numbers for purposes of tracking violent crime, it's almost always a national agency (usually the FBI) who relies for its numbers on state reporting.
It's hard to decide what criteria to use on a national basis when something that was reported as a rape in Kansas wouldn't have been illegal in California.
As noted in the Wiki link, some states don't think (legally) that men can be raped at all . . . so do you even count the reported rapes of men that occur in states where it's not legally possible to rape a man? If a charge of "sexual assault" is proven to be false in a place where that same charge would have been "rape" in another place, does one count that as a false allegation of rape merely because it happened in Michigan instead of in Alabama?
Aaah, so the problem is that rape stats across the USA are hard to gather in a sensible way, because the reporting is different from each area. And therefore telling what percentage of the reportage is false is going to be even less reliable. Gotcha.
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andrewducker) wrote2010-02-26 11:01 am
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How about this one?
Which is the definition in Scotland.
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There is no national rape law in the United States. Each state has its own laws concerning sexual aggression. Nor is there any national standard in the US for defining and reporting male-male or female-perpetrated rapes. More than half the states use traditional sex-specific rape law, limited to male perpetration against females.[citation needed]
In many states, a female who is younger than a certain age is unable to give consent. Sexual activity in this situation is therefore automatically considered to be rape.
You begin to see the problem?
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It's hard to decide what criteria to use on a national basis when something that was reported as a rape in Kansas wouldn't have been illegal in California.
As noted in the Wiki link, some states don't think (legally) that men can be raped at all . . . so do you even count the reported rapes of men that occur in states where it's not legally possible to rape a man? If a charge of "sexual assault" is proven to be false in a place where that same charge would have been "rape" in another place, does one count that as a false allegation of rape merely because it happened in Michigan instead of in Alabama?
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So no, that's not a good definition.