Informed consent – and its discontents.
An Arab guy in Israel is being sent to prison for *consensual* sex, yet that consent was later declared by the woman who consented to have been based upon fraudulent information. The woman claimed she *would not have consented* had she known ex-ante what she does ex-post.
“Handing down the verdict, Tzvi Segal, one of three judges on the case, acknowledged that sex had been consensual but said that although not “a classical rape by force,” the woman would not have consented if she had not believed Kashur was Jewish.”
It’s a pretty clear cut racist thing here, so even most radical feminists will disagree with this verdict, but that doesn’t answer the more profound problems posed by the notion of “consent” by such a verdict.
Could a man claim “rape by deception” if a woman later reveals she is in a relationship even though he was *at the point* happy to have sex with her? Should a woman be allowed to claim rape by deception because a man she wanted to have sex with lied about his financial status? Is there specific information that potential sexual partners should be legally obliged to declare correctly prior to enganging in sexual activity?
There is no doubt that “lying about oneself to get him/her into bed” is not exactly good behaviour, but consent to personal interactions cannot be dealt with with standards developed for commercial interactions, because personal interactions cannot be undone once they happened. And ex-post declarations about what one would have or would not have done knowing what has been revealed thereafter are nothing but hypothetical.
She may claim that she would not have consented to sex given the information that he is not Jewish, but who knows whether she may still have consented in the moment because she was sufficiently aroused to not care about the guy’s ethnicity… maybe her later retraction of “consent” has nothing to do with consent to sex and a lot to do with the state of her community.
It’s a crime to punish people based on hypotheticals, and it’s a ridiculous assumption that people are always aware of the criteria they use for making decisions in the moment.
Giving them the opportunity to later withdraw their decisions based on criteria formulated ex-post is absurd – in other words – it’s crossing the line.
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Editor’s Note: This piece was submitted to us by Sam.
Tags: international, men, rape, sex, women
This story is more than a little frightening to me. It really looks more like a precedent for Arab-Israeli miscegenation laws than anything else. The race component is unignorable.
What’s worse, though, is that this is hardly new or isolated. The charge of “rape by deception” has been successfully levied against trans people in several countries. The whole phrase loses meaning, though, when you look at cases where it has failed. A woman in Massachusetts, for example, pressed rape charges after having sex with a man she was led to believe to be her boyfriend (http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2007/05/sex_by_deceptio). Her case was dismissed because she “consented.” Consenting to one person does not equal consenting to someone else. That’s clearly rape. Consenting to a person who has lied about their religion? Not quite.
What’s next? Rape by deception because a you thought a light skinned black person was white?
This is the first case of a cross-cultural conviction. The law has generally been used against Israeli-Jewish men who lied about social status or patronage relationships, such as being a neurosurgeon or being able to supply public housing or welfare benefits. And no, men do not receive the same protections, the assumption is that men always benefit from sex-as-commodity.