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Today in rape culture: Pre-college edition

Caperton

[Content note for rape]

Because we needed another reminder that a promising young athlete’s bright potential mustn’t be dimmed by the consequences of a rape conviction: 18-year-old rising collegian David Becker was charged with two counts of rape and one count of indecent assault and battery after sexually assaulting two unconscious classmates at a house party in 2015. (He texted one of the victims the next day, saying “sorry. its my fault[sic],” and texted her again the following day, saying “Very sorry about last night I was very much in the wrong and was an embarrassment … I understand if I’m not your favorite person right now.” See? It’s called being a gentleman, people.)

The district attorney recommended two years in prison, but Palmer District Court Judge Estes ordered a continuation without finding for two years. During his two years of probation, Becker has to avoid drugs and alcohol, submit to evaluation for sex-offender treatment, and stay away from his two victims. He won’t have to register as a sex offender and won’t have a conviction on his record as long as he sticks to the terms of his probation, which is good for this community-serving, college-bound, three-sport athlete, because, his lawyer said, “We all made mistakes when we were 17, 18, 19[.]”

“He can now look forward to a productive life without being burdened with the stigma of having to register as a sex offender,” said attorney Thomas Rooke, who defended David Becker, 18, in court. “The goal of this sentence was not to impede this individual from graduating high school and to go onto the next step of his life, which is a college experience.”

Yes, God forbid a young man allegedly nicknamed “David the Rapist” before the offenses in question be “branded for life with a felony offense and branded a sex offender” just because for being a sex offender. No community-serving, multi-sport athlete should have to carry the aftereffects of sexual assault into the next step of their lives, potentially spoiling a college experience.

14 thoughts on Today in rape culture: Pre-college edition

  1. This is how they handled rapists back in the day .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryl_Chessman‘ but then liberals started to coddle criminals. I recall following that case in my freshman year of high school. In those days, we had to ask a girl’s permission to hold her hand and kissing was the most you could ever expect from date. There was no sex and no rape. And for myself and my peers, we preferred using our left hand with a Playboy Mag over dying in the electric chair.

    1. tomsims: the way you remember things or the way that they were spoken of among your peers at the time doesn’t seem to gel with facts on the record even in the very link you cite.

      Chessman was condemned to the death penalty for the repeated “kidnapping resulting in bodily harm” part of his crimes, the fact that the harm involved was sexual assault was not what allowed the state to kill him, even if it may well have been the underlying reason why the court prosecuted him so severely (and if he’d committed those crimes a year later, the death penalty application to “kidnapping resulting in bodily harm” had been repealed).

      Now, did you notice that the two women he kidnapped and assaulted were traveling with male companions at the time? Imagine if they had instead been traveling alone? Do you think anybody would have believed them about being kidnapped and sexually assaulted without a male witness? The fact that Chessman was a stranger rather than an acquaintance might perhaps have given them some credibility, but what if Chessman had counter-claimed that he wasn’t a stranger and that he and the women had been consensually having sex? Given the long history of men who’ve claimed that it was all a misunderstanding between two consenting adults, who do you think would have been believed?

      As for no premarital sex and no rape when you were in high school, that is an utterly laughable claim. While the chaste hand-holding/kissing may have been the expected norm and all that you personally observed, you would hardly have been an invited observer to anything more, would you? And where do you think all the babies in orphanages available for adoption were coming from back then? Was it from a cabbage-patch? Or was it more likely from young unmarried mothers? How many of those young women do you really think were fully consenting to the sexual act that resulted in those socially devastating pregnancies?

      It is a statistical near-certainty if you went to a high school of more than moderate size then some of your peers in your high school “date-raped” some of your female classmates and bragged about how she was “begging for it” because she was just a little slut. It is also a statistical near-certainty that nobody who heard them bragging about it ever thought of those young men as rapists, and if any of the young women had tried to report a fine upstanding young man who was her boyfriend to the police for rape then she would not have been taken at all seriously.

      Just because good old-fashioned rape-culture denialism about anything other than stranger-rape as real-rape was in full flight back then doesn’t mean that sex and rape wasn’t happening in your wholesome little town, just that nobody was willing to call it rape when not just the victim but the whole town knew the perpetrator socially.

      1. Well yes looking back at this as a 69 year old man, I agree all that most likely went on. But to a 13 to 17 year old boy that fear was real. I grew up in a small town and there were about 250 kids in all 4 grades. There was no social media, we had 4 channels on our black and white tv. It was a far different world then. The most popular tv shows were Ozzie and Harriet, I love Lucy, Burns and Allen etc.

        So I was answering the question in the view of a young teenage boy back in the late 50’s and early 60’s, not as a present day 69 year old man. And yes we were naive and more so than the teenagers of today.

        But we both agree the the courts are way too lenient in sentencing for rape.

        1. I can understand your teenage naivety, but perhaps you ought to engage your current 69 year old worldliness a bit more firmly before commenting like that in future?

          But we both agree the the courts are way too lenient in sentencing for rape.

          I don’t entirely agree. The sentencing stage is far less of a problem than the investigatory and prosecutorial stages IMO. There are still far too many cases, especially in small towns, where the police refuse to write up a report if the accused rapist belongs to a “respectable” family, even more so if he’s a noted athlete, because hey everybody knows that all the girls want him to be their boyfriend, so why would he need to force anybody? When the report never even makes it to the DA’s office, there is no trial and therefore no opportunity for any sentencing at all. Or, if an ethical LEO does actually file charges, the DA too often decides to bin them, or the judge dismisses them at the committal hearing, because the young man’s family is an important campaign donor etc etc. Small towns, especially the way they are organised in the USA with public officials being elected by their neighbours, are far more notorious for having thumbs firmly on one side or the other of the scales of justice depending very much on the social status of the accused within the town.

          But even in small towns, the sentencing for stranger-rape, when a jury returns a guilty verdict, is generally quite robust so far as I can see (there are many problems with how juries apply rape-myths to avoid rendering guilty verdicts, of course). The sentencing problem comes when a jury returns a guilty verdict for cases of acquaintance-rape, and that’s when some (too many) judges step in and hand down ludicrously light sentences because they “don’t want to ruin a promising young man’s future” (and we all know what “promising” young men look like – rather like the judge’s relatives and neighbours).

          It’s rape culture all the way down, Tom. If we don’t tackle the rape myths and the resulting double standards that mean “respectable young men” receive far more benefit of the doubt, even/especially among officers of the court, than the “respectable young women” they manipulate into isolated spaces for the purpose of rape, then the subset of young men who are serial sexual predators will logically believe that they can continue to rape without consequence, and they will mostly be right. Reforming of attitudes needs to occur at a far more grassroots level than the judicial bench before it will be reflected in sentences handed down from the bench.

          1. P.S. I spent my final two years of high-school in a small country town in the early 1980s (my dad, a state public servant, was transferred to a post there). High schools in Australia cover years 7-12, and the school had around 400 pupils, so probably roughly equivalent in size to your town’s combined middle and high schools.

            The general social attitude to premarital sex there was rather more relaxed than the 60s (the legal age of consent for young women in NSW was/is 16 and most girls over 16 with a long-term boyfriend were open about being on the Pill), and during my time there nobody whispered anything about rape, but looking back I can think of one young man who was almost certainly a serial sexual predator who repeatedly acted the gentleman by driving young drunk girls (and I do mean under-18 but only just over-16) home, and then those girls never wanted to be anywhere near him ever again, and people felt sorry for *him* because he couldn’t get a girlfriend. Took me decades to actually recognise that pattern for what it was, and I have no doubt that the police of the time would not have treated any of those cases seriously if any of the girls reported it because he didn’t force them to get into his car.

            Then there were the two girls who were reputed “nymphos” who had supposedly taken on the whole football team (one in my old city high school, one in my new country town high school). It was decades until cases coming before the courts where a woman was seduced by one footballer and then “surprised” by his team-mates arriving in the room and locking the door made me reassess those alleged “nymphos” in high school, too. But of course those fine young men would have sworn blind that the girl was fully consenting to sex with every single one of them and rape myths would have meant that the police would have believed them.

  2. You expressed to a T exactly what I thought upon reading an article about this earlier today. Except that I though of posting it to Feministe, but then thought why bother? It’s exactly like the previous one! Is there no end?

  3. “UPDATE, 1:20 p.m., Aug. 22, 2016: This story has been amended after a spokeswoman for the University of Dayton contacted The Republican / MassLive to say that Becker will not be a student there. Reached this afternoon, Becker’s attorney, Thomas Rooke, would not comment.”

    So it would seem this HAS affected the poor young darling’s college future. I weep for him. How unfair. Boo hoo. However, on the bright side, he has been spared the burden of having to try to stay away from the two young women, who will not be sorry he’s gone!

  4. I agree with everything Tigtog has said. However, was anything said about this particular man, David Becker, knowing the women in question, and this being a factor in going easy on him?

    1. The victims are referred to as his classmates, and he had the phone number of at least one of them because he texted her the next day. So he’s not a stranger, and both juries and judges historically fall over themselves to find excuses about misunderstandings and lack of clear signals etc etc when a rape case involves an acquaintance/classmate/workmate rather than the scary stranger jumping out of the bushes.

  5. There is a reason we have a sex offender registry. If we don’t put rapists on it, then what exactly is it for?

    1. I agree completely. People have the right to know about any sexual predators living near them. This is especially important when it comes to child molesters.

    1. No, not at all. But most would agree child molesters are the lowest form of life on the planet. I would also make a mandatory sentence of adult rapists to be 10 to 15 years. I would execute child molesters.

  7. I am absolutely disgusted. Our justice system is absolute crap. Apparently if you’re a qualified young athlete you can get away with whatever the hell you want. Never mind the impact it had on those two young girls. “Boys will be boys.” Disgusting.

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