Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
There's a difference between it being your fault, and you taking some responsibility, though.

If an area, for instance, was known as a mugging black spot, then personally, I feel I'd be pushing my luck walking down it, late at night, on my own, with an expensive laptop slung over my shoulder, counting the £50 notes in my wallet.

It's a case of when you take some responsibility for your own actions.

Consider negligence. When is something you do negligent? When :-

1) You have a duty of care
2) You breach that duty
3) As a result, someone suffers a loss or damage.

As a driver, you owe a duty of care to pedestrians not to run them over. If you do, you breached the duty. If they suffer damages as a result, be it torn clothes or physical injury, then you stand to lose a negligence suit (assuming all can be proven).

But .... if it can be shown that you weren't watching where you were going and wandered out in to the road, then the principle of "contributory negligence" kicks in, and the damages awarded will be reduced by the amount the court deems you have have contributed to your loss by your own negligence. By your action, you are partly responsible for what happened to you.

Another example. Check your insurance policy to see where you stand for theft claims if no clear evidence of break-in exists? Or if you don't have the mandated locks on your home. Just because you don't have good enough locks doesn't mean you are to blame for being burgled, but it does mean that you could have and, for most insurance policies, should have taken better precautions.

To my mind, rape is always the fault of the rapist and not the victim, but there are situations where the victim has to take some responsibility for putting themselves in a vulnerable situation. For instance, getting so drunk they don't know what they are doing (and I exclude spiked drinks from that).

The victim being drunk does not excuse the rapist, and nor does the rapist being drunk excuse the rapist any more than claiming you were too Mozart to realise driving your car was illegal will help you if you're caught drunk and driving.

But, by voluntarily getting so drunk that you end up putting yourself in a vulnerable situation means you should at least accept that, had you not got so drunk, you might well have exercised better care. If you're so potted you stagger out into the road right in front of a car, giving the driver no chance at all to stop, are you responsible for your own injuries?

Rapists are always to blame and rape victim are never to blame, but that doesn't mean that the victim should not take some responsibility for being so stupid, or naive, as to do things they wouldn't do if they thought about it, and were sober. After all, getting drunk was a choice, and we should all take responsibility for our actions, and the results of our choices.

If I go out and leave all my doors wide open, I'm not to blame for being burgled, but I'm sure responsible for making it more likely than it would be if the doors were properly shut and locked.
I agree that getting paralytic (sp?) and going back to a random stranger's house is foolish, but that doesn't make you responsible for the person sexually attacking you. Stupidity/bad decisions don't make you deserve any crime. We do have a responsibility to protect ourselves from harm, but how can you possibly know who might turn out to be a rapist? Or do you think that people should just avoid drunken sex? But even if some of the responsibility were yours (which I still contest), so what? (that's not a question to you specifically, just in general) Should it be punishable as a crime in itself? Isn't the aftermath of being raped more than we should wish on anyone?

But as an aside, that's not the only situation in which rape occurs, much of it is in the context of a relationship if recent reports are to be believed.... it's just that most people/the popular media like to focus on promiscuous behaviour rather than confront some harsher realities it seems.