By trenton
in Intellectual Stuff: Philosophy, Science, Technology,
I have been doing some research on crimes against humanity. I have discovered that sometimes rape is seen as a valid military tactic designed to terrorize and dehumanize the population. This tactic is especially effective and terrorizing against deeply religious communities who place a strong emphasis on being proper to the point that women may be killed when violated or they are forced to marry the rapist. Rape is also a form of biological warfare designed to impregnate the victim population, destroying their race and ethnicity or to infect with STDs.
I have read about several examples of genocidal rape, trying to put myself in the victim's shoes to see how I would feel. I genuinely felt disturbed by what I imagined.
Here is one of many examples of genocidal rape.
Rape was widespread during the Armenian Genocide, which was committed by the Ottoman Turks. During the death marches of Armenian civilians through Anatolia in 1915, Turkish soldiers frequently raped and killed Armenian women and children. In many cases, Turkish and Kurdish civilians also participated in these crimes. Turks took Armenian women and girls into sexual slavery or forced them into marriage. Those women forced into marriage also had to convert to Islam. Some perpetrators believed that women and girls could be successfully assimilated into Muslim Turkish culture, unlike men and boys. After the genocide ended, women and girls who had been forced into marriage often could not return to their former lives. They had no family left, no source of income, or otherwise feared the stigma of having married a Turk. Additionally, Turks publicly raped the wives, daughters, and other female relatives of important Armenian men. In addition to dehumanizing the victims, these targeted rapes intimidated the Armenian leadership into submission and dissuaded them from resisting. Some Armenian women and girls were sold as sex slaves. The Turkish soldiers stripped them naked and displayed them at auction. Their nudity in a conservative society served to further dehumanize them and strip them of agency. Many were forced into marriage or prostitution.
In many cases women prefer to kill themselves to avoid being raped. There were cases with women being chased by soldiers through the streets only to jump off a bridge to kill themselves, avoiding rape. There were also mass suicides in Japan near the end of world war two because the women believed the enemy would rape them. Rape can also cause severe PTSD leading to suicide at a later date.
Rape can also cause a challenging moral dilemma if it leads to forced pregnancy. On one hand the victim is not responsible for the child, but on the other hand the child doesn't deserve to die. Some women throw these babies in a dumpster. Meanwhile there are some anti abortion women who were raped and are now single mothers.
There were some more severe cases of rape. For example, there was one woman who was nonstop gang raped for eight days believe it or not. She died shortly afterwards in one example of being raped to death. Other examples include things like the rape of nanjing in which babies were torn from the arms of their mothers by a bayonet, the mother's were raped, then the women were stabbed in the vagina with a bayonet until they died. Meanwhile boys were cut open and raped through an artificial vagina as well. I would rather die than have my penis cut off and be raped through an artificial vagina. I probably wouldn't survive such a brutal rape anyway.
One last example I found was from unit 731. This was a world war 2 death camp in which prisoners were infected with STDs and then held at gunpoint being forced to have sex with each other. This process continued with this repeated rape by coercion, infecting people with more and more STDs. The result is that each rape was more agonizing than the last. In the end the victims developed horrific infections in their genitals to the point that they all died and there were no survivors. I imagined how I would feel if I were one of the victims. I would rather refuse to have sex with this woman even if I am shot to death to avoid developing a horrific infection that may be lethal.
With all of that in mind, here are my questions.
Is rape worse than death? How would you feel about being raped as a man or as a woman? How severe does rape have to be for you to kill yourself?
Personally, if I were raped it would be severely disturbing and traumatizing. I would be damaged forever, but maybe I would survive. I think I could live with being raped once, but probably not multiple times with no hope of escape. I would definitely rather die than be a sex slave. For me I think it depends on how brutal the rape is, how many times, and what kind of STDs for me to fear it more than death.