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So, the Guardian has decided to be offended by a volleyball player, gleefully (and from what I can see, technically correctly (the best kind of correct!)) calling him a child rapist in the headlines.
Apparently he had sex with a twelve-year-old when he was 19 (with no additional elements of coercion) and served a year for it in 2016.
That is one icky age difference, and I think that the prison sentence he served might be an appropriate general deterrent. (Personally, I would prefer having (legally void) consensual sex with an adult (to whom I am attracted, see consent) at age 12 to spending a year in the prison at 19, but ymmv.)
However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.
Both of the Guardian articles feel less of a hit piece than some other stuff I have read in the past, apart from the headline. (I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.) Of course, that the elected to report on it at all is the most problematic part of it apart from the headlines -- it was eight years ago, which is longer than most doping bans last, and he did a substantial amount of time for it.
As noted by Freddie deBoer, woke people tend to endorse the concept of rehabilitative justice most enthusiastically, but have two weird carve-outs: any kind of alleged sexual misconduct, no matter how innocuous; and using or mentioning racial slurs in any context. Any white cisgender male who commits one of these infractions is assumed to be unclean forever and always, no matter how much punishment (legal or otherwise) they may have endured.
To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles (a group which I think it's totally reasonable to characterise this guy as a member of)? And frankly, I think almost everyone essentially shares this attitude. For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?
This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.
Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women. While it might not be possible to change the sexual preference, that doesn't mean we cannot rehabilitate criminals. If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?
(This conflation is very common in discussions surrounding pedophilia, by the way. My theory for why that happens is that people have such an irrational, visceral hatred of pedophiles that they just do not want to consider the possibility of a non-offending pedophile. But the distinction is important nonetheless, if you want to maintain a justice system where people are convicted based on their actions, and not just their thoughts or inclinations.
Something similar happens with other hated groups like “incels”, where being involuntarily celibate is almost a crime in and of itself, regardless of whether you've actually harassed any women.)
This is an irrelevant hypothetical. You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?
The people who oppose Van de Velde participating in the Olympics seem to do so on the basis of some poorly-articulated principle that someone who has committed a horrible crime should never be allowed a place in the spotlight, regardless of whether they are likely to reoffend or not.
Well this is my point: I think most woke people would categorically state that a cis male rapist of women (or groper, or harasser, or catch-all "creep") cannot be rehabilitated - that one can no more rehabilitate a cis male rapist's preference for penetrating women without their consent than you can convert a gay man to being straight. Remember during #MeToo, when dozens of men had their careers ruined because someone dug up evidence (or "remembered") of them being a little pushy or handsy a decade or more ago, having given every indication of being scrupulously respectful to women ever since, by all accounts? I don't think this is just "this guy may have learned the error of his ways, but he still needs to be brought to justice" - I think the woke stance is explicitly "once a ra(p)(c)ist (broadly defined), always a ra(p)(c)ist (provided you hold the relevant identity characteristics)".
Back from Bizarro World, I believe that rapists and people who rape, molest or statutorily rape children can be reformed and rehabilitated. I just don't think woke people believe that - it's heresy in light of "born this way".
Nothing, of course. I just think it's a bit rich that commenters here are waving the flag for this dude without even the barest pretence of having any motivation other than owning the libs - but in practice, if they were to interact with this guy in person, if it was their
kid at risk of being interfered withox being gored, their revealed preferences for how they think he should be treated would be functionally indistinguishable from those of the Guardian journalist who wrote this article.I mean, wasn't part of the whole idea of MeToo that some of the highest-profile people (no idea about some of the collateral, as it were) effectively had gotten away with sexual abuse over multiple decades? And so the suspicion was, and somewhat still is, that since cover-ups were so common, maybe every case of sexual abuse is actually the tip of the iceberg. People started jumping at shadows... kind of understandably? I think the ideological portion of this was and is overstated, though it's still a conversation worth having. The fundamental [human] problem of "how do we gauge how sincere an apology is" still remains and makes things messy.
On more general moral principles I tend to feel more like "three strikes you're out" but I think for some people rape and its analogues might test that principle (do we really want to accept 1-2 additional, perhaps unnecessary rapes in "exchange" for a moral stand? Honestly probably yes, but we need to be honest that this tradeoff kind of does exist at least in part)
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