A Lack of Legal Credibility

I just had a very interesting conversation with my wife who has 3 degrees, two bachelor's degrees and one MBA in Non-Profit Fundraising.

Her take on not only the UVA situation where the university was legally forced to close all fraternities because of a gang rape in one of them and finding out this sort of thing has been going on historically (without the gang rapers) all college fraternity brothers never ever being prosecuted for the last 100 years or so.

When you combine this kind of thing with what is happening now with Bill Cosby whose friend who worked for him said that he would invite women into his dressing room and then later had this friend "pay off" these women.

However, obviously these are all allegations.  My wife was saying something which I also knew was always true in the 1950s and to a lesser degree in the 1960s and thereafter depending upon which U.S. state you were in that all women had basically the same legal rights as a child most of the time.

So, if a woman said, "I've been raped" it could mean that she had been raped, it could be she wanted to be raped, it could mean she wanted to hurt a man for some reason, it could just mean she hated a man and wanted to put him in jail.

By the way all this still could be true depending upon the woman. However, men generally saw all women through this filter as "not being reliable" in any logical meaningful way.

In contrast, any man who didn't speak the truth knew he would be either beat up or killed by other men right on the spot. This was true in the 1950s still while I was growing.

Because you couldn't kill a woman and get away with it they were considered then to be "like children' and not necessarily accountable for their thoughts or actions ever.

And like I said men knew they would be potentially killed or harmed by other men if they were found to be lying about anything. This is all still true in some ways even today.

However, women because of being better  educated generally have been raised to a newer standard of behavior since then.

So, slowly we have seen women as being seen as more credible year by year and this is also reflected in many laws both federal and very slowly state by state.

However, both the Bill Cosby cases and the gang rapes at Virginia state which now have resulted in all fraternities being banned from that university mean that when women are raped, date raped or gang raped they hopefully will be taken more seriously both now and in the future. And hopefully, what they say is equally more credible than it was in the 1950s.

So now, the real problem becomes that if women lie about all this no one is there to kill them like there would be for men if they lied about something like this.

Men expect other men to kill them if they lie about some things still. It has been this way for thousands of years.

So, in some ways there is no accountability for women still. And when children are never spanked there is no accountability for them either.

So, Society still hasn't dealt with either of these incongruities. Hopefully, sometime in the next 1000 years civilizations will figure a way to create accountability for children, for women and for everyone if they lie about important things.