by ROBERT J. BURROWES
A scared child shows fear in an uncertain environment PHOTO/D. Sharon Pruitt/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license/Wikimedia Commons
A recent report from Equality Now titled ‘The World’s Shame: The Global Rape Epidemic‘ offered a series of recommendations for strengthened laws to deter and punish sexual violence against women and girls.
However, there is substantial evidence that legal approaches to dealing with violence in any context are ineffective.
For example, the empirical evidence on threats of punishment (that is, violence) as deterrence and the infliction of punishment (that is, violence) as revenge reveals variable impact and context dependency, which is readily apparent through casual observation.
There are simply too many different reasons why people break laws in different contexts. See, for example, ‘Crime Despite Punishment‘.
Moreover, given the overwhelming evidence that violence is rampant in our world and that the violence of the legal system simply contributes to and reinforces this cycle of violence, it seems patently obvious that we would be better off identifying the cause of violence and then designing approaches to address this cause and its many symptoms effectively.
And reallocating resources away from the legal and prison systems in support of approaches that actually work.
So why do some men rape?
All perpetrators of violence, including rapists, suffered enormous violence during their own childhoods.
Inter Press Service for more