Semantics Matter

With the Penn State Scandal, there's been a debate in the NY Times about phraseology for describing statutory rape and child molestation: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/the-language-of-sexual-assault.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share

This has caused me to clarify my postion:
1. I do think there is a difference between molestation and rape.
2. I think there need to be clear definitions of what constitutes rape (as opposed to molestation) - at what physical point of sexual intimacy does something become rape? The definition for this must not be penetration - and hence phallic - based, and must take into account rape where females are the perpetrators, as well as the victims.
3. There should be different words for different types of rape, because if not, it obscures factual differences. Rape measures the magnitude of a sexual crime, but it does not describe exactly what happened.
4. There is a difference between different types of rape: For example, in sex where one doesn't force oneself on a the child physically and where one does, in the first case of child sex, one type of rape occurs, where in the second, two types of rape occur - statutory and physical. This difference also exists with raping adults (ie, getting someone wasted out of their mind is rape, but it is a different type of rape than when they are in their mind and you physically force them, which is different than other types of coercion that can be used to the point where your action is called "rape") I think not having these differences actually prevents people from understanding that there are different types of rape, and its not all the "he forced himself on her while she was walking home" type of story - so then when a situation doesn't fit that story, they assume it cant "really" be rape.

I know that feminists tend to be against labeling different types of rape differently, because "rape is rape", and once you start giving different definitions, society might start classifying some of those definitions as not "real" rape. But the truth is, definining statutory rape, getting a girl roofied, and forcing yourself upon someone all as "rape", without any modifiers, does not prevent society from drawing distinctions and minimizing the first two categories - if anything, society feels the feminists have gone "too far" in equating the three scenarios, which makes them generally resistant to expanding definitions of rape and fighting for victims' rights.

The truth is, that I do beleive in degrees: Murder is a horrible crime, but our society recognizes the difference between first and second-degree murder. This does not mean that our society considers second degree murder acceptable or not "real" murder - if anything, having clear categories helps society to understand different types of murder and how they are all murder. The same can be said of rape: Having one's consciousness taken away and waking up having been slept with is experientally different from the semi-consious state of drunkeness in which you are too weak to resist, which is different from being fully awake, physically resisting, and being physically compelled. I think that the first case is hard to quantify, but the third case is worse than the second, and recognizing that while both are rape, they are different types and degrees of rape, would actually cause more people to accept the second case as rape. It is when you try saying the second case is "as bad" as the third that people intuitely sense that it's not, and then resist calling the second case rape all together - since after all, it's different from the third case. If you called the second case "second-degree rape", people might be more willing to accept the fact that it is really rape, and to treat it as such.

No matter how our society and legal system choose to define and label rape however, it is important to understand that semantics matter, and the time has come for our sociolegal system to have this discussion and take a deeper look at how we define such things.