Round - III - Ishita

Read previous round here. Table of Contents here.

You're not being very specific.

If I may remind you, we're talking about whether the dress of a woman has any effect on deterring (or inviting) rape, and consequently whether adhering to a dress code will reduce the risk of rape.

This is a highly specific question, and has to be answered specifically.

From your first bit about human behaviour, I'm unclear about what exactly you are trying to insinuate? Are you calling rape human behaviour? Now in principle there is nothing wrong with that - crimes are committed by humans and therefore are to be analyzed as behavioural phenomena.

From your second bit about objectification being a general phenomenon. Consider some major disasters in the history of mankind - Slavery, Apartheid and the Holocaust. What do all of these have in common?

All of these occurred when one group (the slave owners, white people, the Nazis) consider the individuals of another group (the slaves, black people, Jews and Romani) as non-human.

Rape and all the crimes related to it, including female infanticide and the systemic bias against girl children and female employees and female members of the family, all of these happen when both men and women are taught and raised to view an entire gender as non-human.

Yes, students are categorized by their grades, employees by their KSA's and citizens by their income. But there's a vast difference in gauging a person's usefulness in certain situations via factors they are actually responsible for and denying the basic humanity of a person just because they are born a certain way.

To equate the dehumanization of the former with the categorization of the latter under the common umbrella of objectification is not science, it is intellectual dishonesty.

Now back to your points about the role of dress.

Given that rape is a criminal behaviour that stems from category based hate, what do we already know about the role of dressing in such similar hate-crimes?

Did one group of people simply enslave another simply because they dressed differently? Did the dress sense of the native black populations contribute to the notions of their supposed inferiority compared to the colonising white peoples? Did the Jews and Romanis get persecuted because they dressed different from the gentiles?

And most importantly, was a change in dressing part of the solutions of these peoples' problems?

And finally about the premium placed on sexual relationships today, this is hardly a recent phenomenon. May I direct you to Genesis 2:24 which says:

"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."

Crimes against women can be traced back to genesis of humanity. But as a species our sense of ethics has evolved. We have been able to see the evil that lies in such ancient crimes as slavery, racism and religious intolerance and we've even taken steps to impede them. We can do the same for sex crimes, provided we are not sidetracked by non-issues such as dress.

Read the next round here.