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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

Writing whiny articles is counterproductive. A rapist is not going to read it and think - "Uh oh, turns our rape is bad, I should stop".

If there's some abuse/assault/rape, you deal with it like in any other field - you call the police, and then you press charges, and then you sue. It's the only thing that really stops the abusers/rapists.

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Your argument is that writing an article doesn't stop rape. I find it true that writing an article won't fix my rape seeing as writing an article is not magic a time machine. However, I find it hard to believe that writing an article would not help reduce rape. Writing this article helps people understand rape is common and hopefully make people be more likely to believe the next person who comes forward and is ready to press charges.

How is writing an article counterproductive though? What am I hurting?

Rape is actually not common at all. 26-27 per 100,000 population. So one in 3700 - 3840 people get raped. 91% of them are women.

And it's steadily declining.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics

Again, how does complaining about rape stop a rapist?

Your numbers seem to be of police-recorded offenses. Many studies show that only a very small number of rapes are reported. I cited a study where 4% of men self-identified as rapists for scientific study. Half of those men were repeat offenders, and averaged 5.8 victims.

Complaining about rape doesn't stop people who already rape. I never made that argument. You argued that complaining about rape makes the situation in the world worse, and I was asking what your reasoning was for that.

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