Do you think men & women should have the same punishment for sex crimes? Such as student sex, pedophiles (men AND women), etc. I personally think they should be the same. Women want to be treated the same as men but when they commit a sex crime they don't get punished nearly as bad as men do. The reason I ask this is because I read an article on a female teacher who slept with one of her students and she got 3 months in a jail, didn't have to register her name in the sex offender database, and a small fine I think. If a man slept with a student, voluntary or not, he would be crucified. Long time in prison, register with every sex offender database and a HUGE fine. And yet this woman got a slap on the wrist... Granted men like sex more than women, they both commit the same crime and they should be punished JUST THE SAME. Thoughts?

i totally agree with you, why the hell should they be treated different and personally i think the laws need changing to allow for worse kinds of punishment...especially for paedophiles..they should serve a life sentence after all they take someone's life away with the things they do

The direction of any debate about this might depend on the circumstances of the crime you have mentioned. Can you give more details or preferably a link or two with details please.


Some evidence for this would also be appreciated please.

As Badog says, different circumstances attract different penalties. One would need to know the background before making any judgement.



Not in my experience...

u kno i think they should serve the same punishment. ofcourse every circumstance is unique.

but yeaa dey cry for equal rights and yada yada.. so let they do equal prison time


( these guys hav found women who like sex more than men.... i'll like to see the stats on that)

Without judging either way I think it boils down to the fact that it's virtually impossible for a women to rape or commit a sexual offesene to a man without his consent due to the nature of the male reproductive system. Granted you could drug him but it still comes down to the same reproductive system problems. Whereas a man can force it on a women with/without her consent.

For some strange reason, many countries don't recognize rape by a woman as a crime or even being possible.

Rape doesn't need a penis to make it rape. Foreign objects can also be used and even masturbation of an unwilling victim would be rape.

He used the teacher/student as an example. Here in the states when it comes to sex with a minor consent doesn't matter, its the taking away of innocence either way, so the woman should get equal treatment and time. they never do, we have a few high profile cases of this every few years and they always get off with a slap. what was that one that had the baby and caught charges for the same boy like 3 times, the 2nd and 3rd time she was already on probation for that and they still never really got serious about it. I'll ask my wife what her name was, she follows these court cases like sports.

That's why I asked for links, sex with a minor is statutory rape which is a different offence to forceful rape in the US.

Not all students are minors. With these kind of cases the devil is in the details (which we don't have at the moment).

Joyce McKinney

the age of consent is a huge issue here right now, i think you will see the humor, I live in the reddest of red states and the age of consent was 16 and the conservatives were trying to get it raised to 18, well that billed died but in the digging they found out the current law was unconstitutional and it reverted back to the age stated in the original state constitution from the 1780's. 14! So a teacher could sleep with a 9th grader and not be charged with any thing. they are working on a new bill right now but the state house is all tied up in a fight over whether or not to take the stimulus money from the Fed even though not taking it will mean loosing all Fed money.

Granted rape can involve many things including forgien objects or masterbation of the victum, my point was only that due to it generally being harder to rape a man than a women that is why I think the laws are different. Now that's not to say this is correct as in the case Charnel pointed out. Personally I think a lot of the laws in many countries are very out-dated and don't always consider scenarios things they should.

The whole area of sex crime is a vexatious one.

Take the crime of rape, for instance. Rape is, without doubt, a horrendous violation. However, there is a very large grey area here. At the moment in the UK, there is legislation in the offing that makes a crime of (for the man involved) the act of intercourse with a woman who is drunk, the reasoning being that a woman who is drunk is not in a responsible state, and thus unable to make a responsible decision. So the man will be categorised as a rapist.

It is true that sometimes women under the influence may be taken advantage of. However, I fail to see why a drunken female is deemed not responsible for her actions, yet a drunken male is supposed to be responsible for his. It usually boils down to a "he said, she said" contest in court. If this legislation gets passed, the man will automatically be found guilty, be put on the sex offenders register (along with all the perverts) and be stigmatised for life. All because of a boozy evening / office party / whatever, and a girl who regrets it the day after. These days a man is supposed to get a positive affirmative (rather than unspoken acquiescence) before he makes love to a woman.

Are they serious?

I can't think of a more effective passion killer....

As far as the female teacher who has an affair with one of her pupils, that again is a tricky one. Speaking for myself, if as a 14 year old I had been seduced by an attractive female teacher, I would have been cock-a-hoop! It was an adolescent fantasy! It certainly wouldn't have "destroyed my childhood". (I loathed that appellation, and couldn't wait to move on into adulthood). Sadly, it never happened to me, but I know for a fact that most of my peers at that time would have had the same attitude as me, and relished the chance of a sexual experience with an older woman.

The other way round, I'm not so sure. Some girls are ready for that kind of liasion at a very early age, others are not. The age of consent is really totally arbitrary, and indeed varies from country to country. I feel that in a lot of cases, people are unjustly prosecuted for a crime that is a crime only because some moralising arbiter has decreed it so. Common sense doesn't seem to enter into the equation. Read Nabokov's "Lolita", and understand another perspective. But as the father of two daughters, I don't like the idea of an older teacher seducing his young female pupils. Maybe I display double standards here, but as Flatline points out, it is not so easy for a woman to commit rape as it is for a man, and that principle applies throughout the whole gamut of sexual relations.

If a guy leads a woman on as to his intentions, he says he loves her, says she sees a future with her, and none of these are true, surely this is a likely to put her in a false place and make her as likely to be conducive to sexual relations as a few glasses of wine. Maybe he tells her she's the most beautiful thing in the world whilst actually thinking she has a face like a bag of spanners....but hell it's nearly midnight and I haven't pulled so she's better that nothing.

Maybe they'll legislate against this as well.

Hell ya , punishment should fit the crime no matter what sex you are !

I agree with nisakiman, sex crimes is a thorny issue. What is a crime to me might not be for you, what you all perversion I might call normal behaviour. When it comes to minors I agree that this is a violation as minors do not have the capacity to make these decisions.

However, when does a minor stop being a minor? In the case of a minor leaving home, the judge, and even police, will tend to overlook the matter if the minor is close to legal age. Why not some leeway with sex with minors, lighter punishments if they are almost of age? Maybe they could have a mathematical formula for how much jail time you get depending on how close the minor is to being of age! I know this is making light of a serious issue, but I believe there is some truth to it. It's not the same thing statutory rape of a 12 year old and a 17 year old (if the age of consent is 18). And to think that if you change the age of consent that now a 17 year old is jail bait when the same guy/girl used to be consentable. Solution: a graded system. I am only dealing with statutory rape here.

Punishment should fit crime. That's what I believe personally.

I would suggest people start reading Plato, again, and philosophy in general, for that matter.

I agree too. For Sex Crimes the punishment should be the same for both men and women. We now live in a world where women are considered among men and not like olden days where women were only expected to sit in house and cook food. So i think that since everybody is equal in this world women shouldn't be given special treatment just because she is a women. she has done the same crime as a man and therefore should get the same punishment assuming the crime fits the punishment.

A somewhat cryptic and meaningless comment.

Would you like to explain why you think people should start reading Plato, and how it relates to the thread topic?

I think if someones body has been violated against their will,then the gender of the perpentrator shouldn't come into it.the law concerning that violation should be equally dealt out.

I also think that it is possible to rape a man, as bad dog said, rape can be in many forms and be equally devastating in it's effect.
I would also think it was fairly easy to get a young boy/youth aroused enough to 'perform', even if he didn't want to?

N.B
"Granted men like sex more than women"......( sorry I have never got the hang of the quote button )
.....perhaps they like it more frequently ,but I think we (women) enjoy it just as much

Punishment does not deter someone from an action. If you were to read the first book of Plato's Republic where they are discussing "justice," which is still a highly flawed argument, but does provide some very nice points, you will see Socrates and Polmarchus discussing what happens when a horse or dog is beaten or injured, and the same of man. The injury to the subject creates deterioration within the subject. By punishing the offender, you create a worse person. Most people who have been in the prison system end up staying there because it does not address the underlying issue.

I'm also of the belief that you deserve exactly what you get, whether it is rape or robbery or death, and that includes children (If you don't know what I am talking about, go find a copy of Ask and it is Given by Esther Hicks and I am not about to explain it until a grasp of that principle is had). But that is my personal belief system. I would consider it terrible to be raped, myself, but I also had the choice to go out that day or be in that situation. It ALWAYS takes two to tango.

The punishment of the legal system is a form of society approved revenge. Revenge begets more revenge. You can't lock everyone up or kill them because they disagree with you or do something you don't approve of. If that were the case, it would be worse than Orwell's 1984.

I have seen the extreme double standard of "women's equality" from the inside. They want the same pay and rights, but they want extra time for this, that, and the other thing, and they use their sexuality and societal stigma to get what they want. A girl can easily say she has been raped by her boyfriend just to get back at him for something and society will believe her. Or she can tell the boss if she doesn't get a raise she'll sue for sexual harassment. It will be hundreds of years before there is equality between the sexes because it has been ingrained in society that women are the weaker of the two. Physically, that may be the case, but other than that, they can destroy you just as well as a man because they can use the bias of society to get their way. And very few if any of these get caught. One more joke to add to the pile.



I would consider the above to be a speculation only because unless you were both a man and a woman, you would not be able to correctly compare the two. And even if you were, you cannot make a generalized statement based on the experience of one person. Just because a bunch of people with letters behind their names agree on something does not make it true. People rely too much on the small snippets of text and sound bites provided by papers and media to give credence to a cause. There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion or study, even in the scientific world.

I don´t need any book for me to know what is right and what is wrong, I have something called a social conscience.
In my world rape is wrong, robbery is wrong and certainly taking anothers life is also wrong. How can you say that the victims of these acts, asked for these things to happen to them. The victims are the innocent parties, they did not get up one day and say to themselves, ´Oh I think I will go out and get raped/robbed/murdered today´ Children most definitely do not ask for these things to happen to them.
You can read any amount of books, written by people, who in my opinion don´t live in the real world. It doesn´t make these things go away, and it certainly doesn´t make them right.
If someone has done something as serious as rape/robbed/murdered, then they should take the consequences, and it doesn´t matter if they are male or female.
It´s the ´do gooders´ in this life who quote from those same books as you have, that muddy the water and take pity on the wrongdoer. Poor person, had a bad childhood, had bad things happen to them. Bulls***t. There are plenty of people in this world, who have had the same things, if not worse happen to them, and it doesn´t make them go out and do the same to other people.
This is my opinion.

Right and wrong are extremely fluid mental constructs. For instance: most people would agree that murder is wrong, but it's encouraged during war. What about stealing to feed your family? People bend the rules and definitions to fit their needs at the time. Right and wrong do not exist. They are one of the greatest pieces of hypocrisy around.

Sounds like the pitiful reasoning of some religious people. "I guess it was my karma, I deserved that!" "That kid was run over by a car: it was meant to be." What an attitude of complacency, instead of building protection to stop these dangers from happening.

I'm not saying that we can stop all wrong, but we won't get anywhere by figuring that you got what you deserved!

As for the main issue at hand, I too agree that gender should have nothing to do with the justice system. We do have to keep in mind that many laws are based on centuries old reasoning, so don't expect immediate results from the legal system. These things take time to iron out.

This is why society is the way it is. This is why freedoms are being taken away. People think they can control the circumstances. People think they can control reality. No one can control it. People think they can control it, but in actuality they cannot. You cannot control peoples actions or their thoughts. Oh, they've been trying to for millennia, but it obviously hasn't worked.

You can make as many laws as you want and punish people left, right, and center, but free will is the biggest bitch in the universe.

Karma is like Newton's third law of motion. If I get in my car in the morning to drive to work and get hit by another car, I am partially to blame. I chose to get into my car that morning and go to work. I chose to take specific roads on that journey. Had I stayed at home or taken a different route, I most likely would not have been involved in an accident.

The example of the kid getting run over by the car is a good one. The kid could have run out onto the street after his ball and the person who hits him is going the speed limit for that area, yet the person in the car will be blamed, not the child. They are both at fault. So what are you going to do, put fences around EVERY road with bubble wrap or make the speed limit three miles per hour? You cannot control anything and looking for someone or something to blame for why it happened in the first place will not stop it from happening in the future. If something bad happens to you, you obviously deserved it. How can you say you are morally superior to reality by saying that the thing that happened to you was not supposed to happen? How about accepting that it happened and move on with your life instead of dwelling on it, becoming emotionally involved, and lobbying to some idiot politician to enact some law that won't stop it in the future anyhow.

Just because they are based on centuries old reasoning does not mean they work. If they worked we wouldn't have such a bogged down legal system and full prisons. They obviously don't work. But then again, it seems people still think that making people conform is the answer to everything. You did something I didn't like so I will put you in a box for a few years with some food and water and we'll see if you want to live up to my unique expectations, because, yes, they are different for each person. You'll either want to conform or beat me to a pulp because you don't know better than me. You just made up a bunch of rules that you expected me to follow even though I did not have any input or agree with them.

Know one knows better than anyone else. End of story. We are all just walking around with our opinions, most of which aren't even our own but forced upon us by someone else. Even this is an opinion and I think I'm right and you have your opinion and you think you are right. Guess what? We are all right. There is no ultimate right and wrong. This is another major problem. People think in order to be right, someone else has to be wrong. How about we just are. Stop labeling it. They are all equally valid. The number of people behind each one does not make any one more or less valid.

I rest my case, and I don´t like having someone else ramming their opinions down my throat, just because they think they are superior to me.

May I interject here, I have crossed words with LaoTzu on a few occasions and would like to help diffuse this. I have found that she does not speak from a place of superiority as it might seem at first. She has a Class A education in and a very good understanding of Eastern Philosophy and a good grasp of the western version to. My opinion is she speaks from a place of confidence that comes from such deep understanding.

Now LaoTzu, I mean this with the greatest respect, sometimes you go over our heads with it and we don't clearly understand your meaning. I'm no slouch mentally,(more a good mind with a crap education) and sometimes I have to read your posts a few times to get it and a few times I have had to go do some reading to get there.

I happen to agree with you on these points which in my opinion are bullet proof. How I will incorporate them into my own doctrines of belief? ??? Might already be in there coming by a different path.

May I say without getting into trouble here, Education is no proof of intelligence. In fact the education system is geared up to produce sheep. The educated are being instilled with the opinions of their teachers.

But this doesn´t mean that those people who escape the education system are any less informed, or intelligent.

Everybody who commits the crime of murder or rape should receive punishment. We are not talking about war here, just the everyday workings of life.

As for saying that babies and children deserve what they get, because it takes two to tango, comes from a demented mind.
Educated one or not. One that is maybe making excuses for their own transgressions.

This is of course my opinion.

PH8AL, please debate the topic, not Darkside members themselves. Thank you


Cozmicdog, I understand the issues are emotive, please refrain from expressing judgements on the possibility of dementia in other members. LaoTzu offered reasoning along with the statement, which in itself makes dementia an unlikely diagnosis. Please stick to debating the topic only. Thank you.

Sorry what I should have said was ´ridiculous´

hmmmm........i kno there is good and bad. yin and yan, dark and light. if we belive in all this karma thing.

but.....to make a livin.... u need money. food has to be bought...its not free.
people work...to make money.....to live, buy food , pay bills etc. so to say that its the persons own fault really doesnt make sense. and i dont want to get caught up in this as it seems to b changin direction.
this reasoning has no merit. its almost in line wit sum spiritual thinkers to say - everything happens for a reason/
i hate hearin dat ......
dat person got shot - it happened for a reason
dat girl got raped - it happened for a reason
dat person got robbed - it happened for a reason...

wat reason could there b for sumone being killed or raped.....

and if the person has done wrng in their life we are not judge jury and executioner. let God judge them. we are all sinners so y judge others

stupesss. seriously??.

anyway......they should hav a standard punishment for the crime b it male or female. bcuz if there is a lighter punishment for lets say females eg. sum females will think "hey we can get away wit this..."

The punishment that is metted out to an offender should transcend their gender, the law should focus on the crime and not the person

yes for the same crime should be the same punishment of course like other have stated sometimes there are diffrent circumstances.....But i think all peodofiles Men And Women should be given the death penelty ( hang peodofiles not the injection 2 much of an easy way out )... Dont think there is a worse crime then ones thats include abusing children

obviously the henious crime of rape has never happened to yourself

I would have to agree with Flatline on the anatomy. But I also think age and circumstance should play into the punishment of a male or female offender!

Well said, crunchytop......like the name, by the way. If the crime is bad, then no matter what sex you are, you should pay the price.

my view is that men and women should be treated equally before the law,
if we want to live in a collective society we have to live by the rule of law ,but if we cannot live by the rule of law and break those rules then we are outlaws and should be removed from the said society,
as to the punishment or re-education of said offenders
that's a tough one.
but yes definitely women should be treated the same as men

Yes i think that it should not matter what sex you are if you commit a crime you should get punished for it no matter what.

i don't think so, if a man comiits a sex crime, his nuts should be cut off, a woman doesn't have any of those so they cannot be the same.

Without a doubt, YES. If everybody wants equality(???), then it's self explanatory...........

I think that if a person (regardless of gender) commits a sex crime they should have the same punishment as anyone else who has done the exact samething