No.

Sing it, Belle! I could not agree more.

Disclosure : I think I am an asperger, although I never consulted a specialist (I did various online tests where I scored a bit high, plus other stuff typical of aspergers like learning to speak before learning to walk).

Some years ago I acted exactly as your stalker. In fact I realized what I was doing very, very late, and when I realized I was shocked that I didn’t realize it before, so that I read some book on emotive intelligence to understand how could I behave that way without realizing.
I came to the conclusion that I have a very low emotive intelligence, and years later when I by chance learned about asperger this made me think that I am one.

I empathize with your stalker more than a bit and, while you have and had all the rights to prevent said guy to stalk you, I think it doesn’t make sense to frame the situation in moral terms (with said guy being bad), rather I think it’s better to frame the situation in practical terms (you have the right of not being stalked, even if the guy doesn’t have mens rea).

… had his therapist advise him to look at pornography to get a better understanding of sexuality …

!!
!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What did the therapist’s therapist have to say? ‘Have you considered a different career path?’? ‘Just put your practising licence down on the floor and back away from it slowly’? What do you mean, the therapist didn’t have a therapist?

Had the therapist looked at pornography and found it full of insight into sexuality?!? What was the therapist’s excuse??

I know that’s not the main point here, but I got that far and then I read everything else with the klaxons blaring.

I love your writing so much and cherish every one of your posts. Thanks!

Ms. Waring,

Setting aside the [ugh!] child porno case, the stalking case seems really straightforward. Why should it even fucking matter whether the stalker is a {child,adult,autistic,etc} ? Their rights stop where the victim’s begin, *period*. Now, in the case of a child, one can argue that they can be taught, b/c they’re not finished maturing. But if we know that an adult is incapable of change [and somewhat, the defense of an autistic stalker might rest on the fact that he’s unaware of the gravity of his behaviour and hence, can’t change it] then it just doesn’t -matter- why they do what they do.

The victim has rights, too.

Belle Waring

What if the person who raped you thought you were consenting, even though he had to put his hand over your mouth for some weird consensual sex reason you never discussed? Who the fuck cares, is the answer.

There’s a new play about that, which I saw last month.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Prima+Facie%22%22Suzie+Miller%22&t=h_&ia=web

Also, weird how intent doesn’t make anybody less stalked and no prizes for all the commenters careful not to acknowledge that Belle’s stalker got less stalk-y when there was another man around. Almost like dude understands the dynamic he’s created just fine and knows when not to push it. Like a domestic abuser who minds their Ps and Qs around bigger people down at the bar, but shows no such restraint when there’s a potential victim to be had and in private.

A while ago, a person who has high functioning autism was telling me that these kind of legal defenses are bullshit, because they are just wrong about the nature of the condition. So, in support of Belle’s overall point: people who have been diagnosed as autistic don’t believe these legal defences, either.

Why should it even fucking matter whether the stalker is a {child,adult,autistic,etc} ? Their rights stop where the victim’s begin, *period*.

Noone’s claiming anyone has a right to stalk people: the issue is about criminal punishment.

Btw not a lawyer but I’m fairly many people here are badly confused about the concept of mens rea (it definitely does not require awareness of the law—traditionally, lack of such awareness is never a defence).

There seems to be an asumption that not being convicted as sane means one goes free. The alternative would be that one has to spend possibly much longer than with a regular conviction at a forensic hospital, no? At least that would be the German situation.

CA:

But to claim, as you do, in so many words, that we shouldn’t care about what goes on in the mind of an autistic person when such a case arises strikes me as incredibly unforgiving. Even if it isn’t relevant to whether something counts as a crime, to claim that it isn’t relevant to how we respond to that crime, or to how we treat the offender within the criminal justice system, is remarkable.

It’s has never been clear to me why this (first sentence) should matter so much. If I am a victim of a crime, the *most* compassion I can manage for the perpetrator, is to want that that perpetrator never commit the crime (or related crimes) again, against me or other victims. [Again, *most* compassion I can manage:] If [a stern talking-to, or] education can accomplish this end, that’s great! If not, and if incarceration can do it, so be it.

But what matters to me, is that I and other victims are not aggressed-against.

ISTM this “mens rea” standard is all about efficiently (that is, with minimum harm to all) and justly achieving the above end. It recognizes that treating someone who negligently kills a person, the same as someone who plots to do it, doesn’t efficiently achieve the end of deterring people from killing others. If a perp’s state of mind does not affect whether they commit the offending act, then I don’t see why it should be considered as in any way mitigating that act.

I’m a support worker for autistic adults and it now turns out that I am autistic too. Yes, the article is bullshit – ignoring the victims and making wrong generalisations about autistic people. Dubin appears to be using his autism to excuse his behaviour and that is a disservice to autistic people. I see no reason why victims should care if the perpetrators are autistic or not or that they should empathise or try and empathise with the perpetrator. I have thought before about the social model of disability and autism. How far can society be changed to accommodate people with a social development condition? Asking victims of sexual crime to understand/excuse the perpetrators is not right in my opinion.

However, that does not mean that the fact a perpetrator is autistic is irrelevant and that they should not be empathised with at all. One truism about autism is that if you have met one autistic person then you have met one autistic person, i.e. every autistic person is an individual and there autism effects them in an individual way it is impossible to make assumptions from the general to the individual level. For that reason I strongly disagree with the lawyer in the article who is quoted as saying “There should be an escape from sex-offender registration for those with autism spectrum disorder who are first offenders with no history of inappropriate contact with children”. It might be appropriate for some autistic people but not all.

More and better education for autistic people around sex, sexuality, and relationships would help prevent sexual crimes as well as helping autistic people form intimate relationships. Understanding a perpetrator’s autism should help to figure out what to do after the fact. Is the person capable of understanding why their actions were wrong and of responding differently in similar future circumstances? Is criminal justice the best route to go down and if so will being on a register help? Etc. In each case the answers to these questions will differ.

I know it’s not the main point of this discussion (I have nothing to contribute to that discussion that adds to what’s already there), but I am still gobsmacked by the idea of a therapist recommending a patient/client (autistic or otherwise) look at pornography to get a better understanding of sexuality. What kind of therapist is that? A therapist who knows nothing about pornography shouldn’t be making that kind of recommendation; and a therapist who knows something about pornography shouldn’t be making that kind of recommendation.

Anecdote is not argument, except when it is. The attempt to derive generalizations from radical particulars can either be done via semantics, logical, rule-based/authoritarian, and masculinist; or by pragmatics: contextual, empathetic, co-operative and largely feminist. The greater the defense of the particularity of the anecdote the more radical and social the pragmatics. Listen and co-operate, don’t compete, except on Belle’s terms, with support or escalating/de-escalating anecdotes of your own. Or whatever, I don’t care. This hegemonic dance was boring years ago.

Saurs is fun.

Pretty sure, almost by definition, this PhD has a documented history of thinking things through logically and (see: his degree, his career) for his own gain. Pretending we accept as honest and complete his explanation, deciding that looking at naked children is fun enough not to question too rigorously the availability and origin of his photographs or think too deeply about the children depicted was, yes, an active decision. Choosing not to think critically or examine something too closely lest you find fault with it and ruin your fun does not mean you lack the capacity to do so or, indeed, the willingness, when the spirit moves you. Failing to think things through is not a legal defense, nor is it a habit for which people on the spectrum hold patent. All of us are as myopic and stupid as we can get away with. Dubin’s angle now, a decade later, is that he was punished for his autism, not for being willfully uninterested in sussing out the ethics of his porn consumption, an ethical obligation adults the world over have been grappling with for years.

He’s a few years older than me. By his early 30s, as Belle says, he had heard of the concepts of slave labor and exploitative labor practices. He had heard of child pornography before. His profession more or less guarantees that he knows what child abuse is, and that autistic children are especially vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse by the adults in their lives, their parents, their parents’s acquaintances, their doctors, their teachers, their care-givers, the religious authorities of their community. He was a well-known figure in the autistic community when he was arrested. Apathy and incuriosity about where his pornography of choice comes from and at the expense of who are not aberrations and are shared by many, “intentional” consumers of child pornography included. If he wanted to elude punishment, he had to offer some kind of defense. This is what he chose. If he were guilty of actively seeking out that pornography rather than stumbling upon it, the defense for charges of doing so would be nearly indistinguible from the one did offer, which is why some skepticism is warranted. When there is no meaningful difference, it’s hard to conclude that his account absolves him.

Still, it’s ludicrous to pretend Dubin never added two to two and discovered four and then just kept that inconvenient sum to himself. Some Great Man of History once advised us not to automatically attempt to make a rational conclusion more complex than it need to be. In this case, here is a person caught with child pornography and his explanation (“who is it really hurting, me sitting here?”) is exactly the same as everyone else’s, PhD or nowt, autism or no. Makes you think, or, really, perhaps not.

If you want the big thoughts, here is a guy who definitely knows he isn’t 11 or 7 years old and knew as much when he was arrested, only a few years after being formally diagnosed as autistic. He spent his entire adolescence, adulthood, and post-graduate career amongst his fellow teenagers and then adults, wondering if he was gay or not, struggling to date women. He knows what his degree is in; he recognizes the distinction between a child’s mind and his own, otherwise, what the hell did he study? His career, post-conviction, appears to focus on young autistic people and their legal rights. So, forgetting all that, if we can; sure, children are known to have a sexual interest in their fellow children. They also—because they are not islands unto themselves and are, in fact, just as highly socialized as our hero—feel the effects of our culture’s sexualization of adults and adult bodies. It’s normal, regular, unremarkable for kids to get a pash for their elders. Dubin never says he was confusing children for adults; he just didn’t see the naked children he was looking at as human and real, and that the act of the photography was, itself, abuse. That’s a perspective not specific to neuroatypical people at all.

Part of what’s going on here, I reckon, is that Dubin has leveraged this experience for professional gain. The bright spot here is that the overall lesson he’s helping to spread in this regard appears to be sound, informed, healthy, and helpful. I’m glad he and his father are choosing to advocate the right position, even though the explanation for his own offense is implausible. And it’s good he agrees that the goal should be prevention/diversion, which protects everybody, rather than automatic exoneration. Pace everyone else in that article, though, there will be crimes autistic people commit that necessitate a prison sentence. Pretending otherwise is not helpful for the people they are trying to protect (mostly from themselves.)

I did read the article, I just don’t agree that it’s obvious that an autistic person would realise ‘in a nanosecond’ it’s wrong. You say it’s “immediately present to the mind” but on what basis do you think that it’s immediately present to the autistic mind? I don’t know very much about autism but I do know that things that are “immediately present” and obvious to the neurotypical mind are frequently not so present and obvious to the autistic mind, which neurotypical people often find immensely frustrating, baffling, unbelievable, disturbing, etc. I don’t find myself in a position to assert things about what must be obvious to people with a serious and complex mental condition on the basis of what is obvious to me, and I don’t find myself able to agree with these kind of assertions from someone else, either.

To take a condition I do know a little bit more about, people with Cotard’s syndrome think they are dead (or something similar). The fact that they are not is, to people without the syndrome, the most obvious thing in the world, so it’s easy to be totally baffled and incredulous about the whole thing (“how could they possibly think that?” – how could there even be a question about this). They are often extremely resistant to reason on this point, but they can reason fine about other matters. We might be tempted to suppose that as their reasoning isn’t massively impaired across the board (including about what counts as being alive, or who apart from them is alive and dead), they must also be able to apply this to their own status (and therefore perhaps be tempted to think it must be an act) but such is not the case.

(My point here isn’t that this is particularly similar to autism; I am pointing out the dangers of neurotypical people making assumptions about the reasoning powers of a neuroatypical person.)

Here’s a rough outline of some things I think one needs to register to be able to work out for oneself that pornographic pictures of naked children is wrong:

– that it’s shameful to be seen naked by strangers in public
– that certain poses are particularly shameful
– that the fact that being naked in a photograph is just as bad or worse, even if you never interact with the strangers
– that children also know this and won’t do this of their own accord, and will feel extremely uncomfortable if someone asks them to do it
– that to get them to do it will require some kind of manipulation – punishment, reward, talking them into it
– that some people find these photos arousing (even if you don’t)
– that having photos distributed of you for the purposes of arousal is a bad thing that people object to
– that some of these people end up terribly emotionally manipulating and physically abusing children, and the presence of photos may contribute to that.
– that the people taking the photos may also be terribly emotionally manipulating and physically abusing the children in those photos.

Here are a bunch of confounding factors:
– naked children in public and naked pictures of children are just fine under other circumstances.
– naked pictures of adults and even occassionally naked adults are just fine under other circumstances
– photos of adults in (some of) those same poses are also fine(ish, or at least not illegal and utterly horrifying to everyone) under a more restrictive set of circumstances
– things that you personally would find shameful or extremely uncomfortable other people (adults and children) do not
– in particular, children sometimes like being naked
– adults reward, punish, and talk children into things they don’t want to do all the time, and this is usally fine.

Also pontentially: you’ve been told that naked pictures of adults is shameful and wrong. But then someone you trust tells you that actually they’re fine.

This doesn’t look like the work of a nanosecond to me, and it looks like it’s riddled with a lot of social, emotional, and contextual understandings and distinctions rather than some IQ-test type puzzle, and if someone has a lot of difficulties in those areas I would not necessarily expect them to be able to work this out at all.

Actually, I doubt many neurotypical people could work it out either: the normal reaction is one of unmediated horror, and I think a lot of people are not going to get past that horror, they’ll just tell you it’s obviously wrong, and become disturbed that you’re continuing to talk about it. I don’t have a high opinion of the average level of moral reasoning, particularly when sex is involved.

(Don’t get me started about consent!)

Maybe you’re right and this guy is a predator with a clever excuse. I don’t know. It’s certainly worth thinking about because if it’s not this guy then someone is bound to use this as an excuse, so we should probably not be too credulous.

One would like to think the doctorate in psychology and the job with young people would mean he’d have to have come across it (but then again one finds astronomy graduates who are unable to explain what causes the seasons, etc.).

Saurs’ point that failure to think things through isn’t a defense is also worth thinking about — but I think the legal standard is normally something like “what a reasonable person would think of” which may not be a fair standard when the mode of reasoning isn’t really available to you.

I just find the argument that “it’s obvious” is totally unconvincing when we’re talking about people for whom many obvious things are in fact not obvious.

In general, the law takes into consideration both the effects and the intent behind a person’s actions. Evidence from a victim that the effects were severe would tend to increase the likelihood of harsh punishment, and evidence of malicious intent and premeditation would do the same. Mitigating factors such as mental illness or developmental disorders might reduce our use of punishment, not only because it may be unfair but also because it may be less likely to be effective. This is just a normal day at the courtroom.

Personally, I find it easy enough to imagine that Dubin didn’t entirely understand what he was doing. I’m not terribly interested in taking his lawyer’s word for it, or that of his parents or personal therapist, but if experts on autism say that it’s plausible, I don’t see much point in disagreeing with them.

Nor do I find the suggestions of better and more appropriate sex education to be misguided. If our concern is to reduce harm, this seems like the way to do it, and more likely to be effective than harsh punishment of people like Dubin (not that he doesn’t deserve punishment on a personal level, I’m just skeptical of the deterrent effect). If the figure in the article, that autistic people are twice as likely to receive no sex education at all, is accurate, then that would seem like a problem that should be urgently addressed. While we’re at it, we could probably improve the standard of sex and relationship education across the board.

Obviously it’s hurtful to ask the victims to have greater empathy here – they owe nothing to anyone, least of all a person who has caused them suffering. This is why criminal cases are brought by state prosecutors and heard by judges and juries, from whom the full range of emotional and intellectual intelligence can be demanded in order to produce the right outcome, which inevitably involves balancing a set of factors. It’s not unfair to ask them to have empathy in a case where a mitigating factor can be presented (though obviously we have to be wary of false appeals for empathy).

If you don’t believe that autistic people can have these difficulties, then the whole thing does look quite a bit darker – a claim of victim status to protect oneself against the consequences of one’s own actions. And yes, that definitely is a thing that people do. If that’s what Dubin is doing, then he’s doubly bad. I just don’t know who I should trust more than the psychologist on that question.

Most criminals are suffering from some kind of mental malfunction: lack of empathy, grandiosity, poor executive control, outright sociopathy, etc. Does this, then, mean that there is no such thing as crime?
It’s really not an easy question. You have your choice of moral monstrosities. I don’t think we can exist as a society without a fairly strong notion of criminal responsibility. But the notion of criminal responsibility is–uhh–irresponsible.

The more I’ve thought about this article the angrier I have got. Generally it’s the tone of poor autistic sex offenders being unfairly treated while ignoring the harm done to victims. If it had been framed as how to help prevent autistic people from being sex offenders and what is the best way to deal with autistic offenders – then that would have been better. Then all of the anecdotes are of male perpetrators and autistic women are written out. Worst of all in discussing autistic people, sex, and relationships it does not mention that autistic people can be more vulnerable and at risk of abuse and the difficulties they can have in dealing with being abused.

This is a TED talk from Alix Generous where she talks about her abuse and the effect on her.

This is another talk with Alix, Liane Holliday-Willey, and Temple Grandin where Alix and Liane talk about their abuse and have a bit of a wider discussion (from about 44 minutes).

To follow up on saur’s comment, this idea that child pornography (or indeed child sexual abuse) is an outrageous thing that all human beings automatically know is wrong – and that only someone with broken or delayed socialization wouldn’t understand is wrong – is a very a modern thing. And when I say modern I mean the last 10 or 20 years. Mandatory reporting of child abuse was only introduce in Australia in the mid-1990s and we were ahead; many nations still don’t have this requirement, so presumably work on the assumption that it’s not universally obvious that child abuse should be reported, or that your decision to report it should be supported by your colleagues. This matters if you work in e.g. a small private school where every parent’s money is important, and have no legal basis for reporting someone who is abusive. You’ll lose your job for that, in many jurisdictions.

When I was young at school and uni there were young women in my social circle who had been abused, and in many cases their parents didn’t believe them or didn’t ostracize the abusers from their social world, and certainly there were no legal ramifications. These were parents who loved their children but they didn’t think much of their sexual agency. This was only 20 years ago, and this general lack of respect for the seriousness of this issue is why people like Savile and Epstein were so successful.

A particularly good example of this is the nudist societies that my parents were part of and forced me to participate in as a child. These people have special secluded parks for being naked in nature, and they insist their children – even adolescents – do so too. They get super defensive of their privacy though and do everything they can (including legal remedies) to stop non-nudists peeking. But at the same time the back pages of their magazines were advertising videos of naked children playing in nudist camps, for anyone to buy. They were selling child pornography, basically, well aware that the children hadn’t consented to these images being sold on and well aware of how they were being used. They just didn’t think it mattered. But it mattered a lot to them if someone stole a glimpse at an adult without their permission!

It’s always a surprise to me that people think it’s natural that a basic human with basic human decency would think child sexual abuse or porn is wrong. Until 20 years ago nobody cared about this issue much at all, especially when it happened to poor or disadvantaged children and especially (as saur observes) children with disabilities or autism. There was a revolution in Australia 20 years ago as the people who did care about it finally forced the rest of society to notice. So the idea that it requires some special form of developmental disability or socialization disorder to have to not realize this is wrong, to me that’s a weird and backward idea. Without an entire social movement – backed up by strong legal sanctions – telling society that child abuse is wrong, perfectly normal, well-socialized people will think it’s fine or at least no big deal and will look the other way while it happens all around them. I mean, there is video evidence of Savile sexually assaulting a child on national tv and nobody at the time thought it mattered. So no, to me, the degree of social skills required to “get it” are irrelevant. It’s entirely about what society tells you is legal and not legal, and if you think otherwise you’re either very young, or constructing a very rosy view of how children were treated in your youth.

arcsecond your chain of reasoning about what is needed to understand kiddy porn is wrong is 20 years out of date. Yes 20 years ago when people first started taking kiddy porn seriously, the population as a whole needed to be taught these things. But now the required chain of reasoning is:

– is this kiddy porn?
– this is illegal and my entire society tells me it’s illegal, so I shouldn’t do it

That’s it. You need no more than that. If you want to argue that an autistic person of Dubin’s background isn’t capable of understanding either of those steps then fine do so, but don’t try and argue that the dude who accessed the kiddy sex picture on a porn site had to also go through the entire gamut of reasoning you describe. He didn’t. He just needed to recognize that what he downloaded was likely illegal, and stop right there.

(This is the gist of my other comment which has gone missing: most of us don’t decide kiddy porn is wrong because we go through these complex moral steps. We decide because 10-20 years ago society decided to stamp it out, and now we play our role in this process).

Chetan Murthy @48:

Or are you saying that everybody on “the spectrum” gets a free pass to look at as much cihld porn as they want, stalk anybody they want, howsoever they want?

No. First of all, the question isn’t about “free passes”, it’s “should we, given that we already weigh matters of intent when deciding punishment, take developmental disorders like autism into consideration more than we do already?”.

I would argue “yes, if psychologists asses the individual as having less capacity to understand that what they are doing is wrong” is a reasonable position to take. That’s a long way from a free pass.

…but this is a man with a PhD (in psychology) who works with children.

To pretend that somehow he is like (our pop-culture idea of) “typical” autistic people is a slur against autistic people. He is arguably an incredibly high-functioning autistic person.

I get it. I too find it hard to imagine that a person with a PhD and a job and a degree of standing in his community could be so very ignorant of the norms of that community, or so incapable of understanding that he is violating those norms by his actions. But I am not persuaded by “well, he doesn’t look that autistic to me!” as a means of determining whether it’s true or not. We have trained psychologists for this.

If we can agree that there are people with sufficient developmental difficulties that they might have a diminished capacity to understand the effects of their actions, or the moral wrongness of viewing certain content on the internet, then I think that people with those difficulties should be treated differently from those who do not have them. There might even be two victims with equivalent levels of suffering, and we’d still choose to treat the perpetrators differently if we knew that one of them had a severe developmental issue. I feel like I might be disagreeing with Belle here, but I may also be misunderstanding her point.

A real question is whether Dubin had such difficulties. The article doesn’t make a great case either way – I’d expect his lawyer to argue his case, ditto his parents. I don’t imagine that many of us in the thread are experts, so I’d be inclined to go with the psychologist’s opinion. How else are we meant to decide?

Alternatively, Slate is a trash rag and at least parts of the article are in some kind of bad faith. The reporter doesn’t actually directly quote Dubin’s psychologist, but two other psychologists saying that this is the kind of problem that we have to deal with when working out if an autistic person really understood what they were doing and its effects. No hard questions were asked of Dubin’s lawyer, and in fact Dubin is used as an incidental prop for a broader argument; perhaps the facts had to be presented so as to support that argument. Maybe Dubin is a bad example of someone who is being punished for something they were (to some degree) incapable of understanding. This is entirely possible, and we need to ensure that the psychological assessments that the legal system is using in making its decisions are of sufficient quality to make these determinations more accurately than a Slate reporter (or a CT commenter!) would.

Ok you want anecdotes? When I was about 14 I remember being in a shop with my parents and stretching out my arms and accidentally whacking the breast of a shop
assistant who was just walking in from another room behind my field of vision with the back of my hand. If I’d intended to do that it would have been sexual assault I suppose. But I didn’t so it wasn’t. I think the intentional context of my action affected both the ‘victim’s’ judgment of it and the harm done. She saw it wasn’t intentional so she wasn’t angry with me or ashamed about it (I think she was still slightly embarrassed and annoyed). Had I been able to time my stretching, by looking in an overhead mirror say, things would have been different. I don’t think this requires empathy in any strong sense, just an instinctive ability to interpret the behaviour of other rational agents through assumptions about their mental states which we all have and can’t really switch off, unless we’re cognitively impaired, or perhaps preoccupied with overwhelming emotions (in courtrooms judges and juries may engage in the same processes in a more serious and formalised way).

I don’t think anyone really disagrees with this (and the fact that Saurs responded do my previous comment with a detailed and convincing, albeit speculative, tale of ‘what it is like to be a stalker’ might seem to confirm this) but at times they are claiming to. FIN.

“Per the definitions above, realizing that child pornography is wrong does not require emotional intelligence. It requires intellectual intelligence.”

I was thinking about this on and off all day yesterday, and I think it’s an important point, but I also don’t see why what the quote describes (which the OP is disagreeing with) is emotional intelligence at all. It describes a process of induction over social experience, a common *intellectual* understanding shared with a community, an understanding of language and definitions and correct uses of words like “right” and “wrong.” Maybe there’s a psychological reason why emotional reasoning is connected with knowledge of social norms, but I wouldn’t have expected autism to be linked strongly or primarily with something like “exclusion from shared conceptual knowledge.”

Belle: re towering righteous rage. In what circumstances, if any, are other people entitled to use towering righteous rage against you?

Disclaimer: I do not myself think there are any. Still …

Re desire and desires (cf. Saurs @32):
I think it might be well to remember the most memorable line spoken by Freud’s patient Little Hans: “…wanting’s not doing, and doing’s not wanting.” (S. Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” [1909])

That a five-year-old, albeit a rather precocious one, grasped the distinction between desire (“wanting”) and behavior (“doing”) suggests that the distinction is a fairly intuitive one.

One can judge particular desires as antisocial, harmful, and/or illegal *if acted upon*, but as long as desires stay in a person’s head and don’t result in any behavior involving other people, then those desires, no matter how incomprehensible and/or disgusting one might find them, are not harming anyone. If my next-door neighbor, to take a hypothetical example, wants to have sexual intercourse with dogs but does not own a dog and never even so much as touches a dog (or for that matter looks at pictures of dogs on the Internet), it’s really none of my damn business what his or her sexual fantasies and desires are.

Stephen that example might be a bit more instructive if foster didn’t have a history of palling around with UDA murderers (including meeting one within 48 hours of murdering a man in front of his child), and wasn’t in a party stacked to the gunnels with gun runners and people very closely connected to loyalist terrorists. She and her mates spent a long time acting on their towering rage before they finally agreed to power sharing. Maybe like most people their rage just burnt out, or they made a tactical rather than a moral decision? Perhaps Nelson Mandela is a better example…

Dr Steve @66:

“By expecting people on the spectrum to not consume child pornography or stalk women (it’s usually women, WEIRD HUH) you are committing some great act of discrimination.”

This is weirdly exactly wrong. It’s non-discriminatory, because it treats autistic people exactly like everyone else! The sole meaningful argument of the Slate article is that maybe we shouldn’t do that, particularly when a psychologist’s assesment suggests that there’s a serious divergence between the autistic person’s understanding of the situation and a typical person’s.

I see the risk in making that kind of argument. There’s a kind of slippery slope here, that if we can agree that autistic men might be innocently harassing women, then we’ve established that harassment isn’t always the perpetrator’s fault, and we can broaden it out from there to excuse other instances of harassment. When the article calls for more sex education, we can spin that into a story which says that the problem here is that men (and not just severely autistic ones!) just haven’t been educated properly – it’s basically society’s fault for letting these men down, and who could blame them if they just can’t understand how to deal with women in those circumstances? I get it, it’s definitely a direction one could take this (and a particularly shitty one). I could imagine some “contrarian” right-wing NYT columnist making this argument (whilst possibly also trying to shill their book on how to cultivate a sense of chivalry, or some shit). It makes sense to be on guard against that kind of argument, which is the spirit I take Belle’s original post in.

But we seem to have ended up in a bad place if it’s not possible to argue for some (not total! Not “free pass”!) leniency or more humane treatment of people with developmental disorders inside the criminal justice system without it being assumed that you’re making some kind of crypto-MRA argument about how, as long as the man only did it because he really likes the woman, it’s bascially not his fault if she found his actions utterly terrifying. The two are not at all the same thing.

Meanwhile in the UK we have the unfolding tragedy of Jared O’Mara MP. O’Mara somewhat unexpectedly replaced Nick Clegg as the Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam. It’s all gone wrong, with long periods of absence, and now allegations of sexual harassment of staff, explosive resignations of his staff, and now his ownstatement about his mental health.

This is a mess. The obvious thing that needs to be done is for him to leave and a new MP to stand. No-one is winning at the moment.

If I were to make any observation it would be that in a world where one man may father over a thousand children, then a 1:1 distribution of men and women means men are massively over-represented with regards to reproductive requirements, and for many men there is a struggle to be reproductively relevant which produces a lot of unpleasant behaviour.

Whenever one of the women bloggers here posts about sexual harassment or rape there is a lot of pushback.

To be fair, when the male bloggers post on politics it doesn’t always elicit unanimous agreement.

Well, in spite of my intention to stay silent because of my conviction that women and feminists don’t really need my support or encouragement save my silent assent to the their accelerating expressions of rage and alienation, preferably at max volume, I appear.

Saurs above did a fine job above at refuting any invisible strawpersons of my previous comment showing that, yes, feminists are capable and skilled at logical evidentiary argumentation as if anyone sane could doubt it or as if I claimed such idiocy. I simply preferred Belle’s mode of expression, think Saurs granted in 2nd comment too much to the patriarchy and masculinist modes of communicative oppression.

I simply thought that a thread by a rape victim was not the time or place to show compassion, empathy or fair-mindedness to rapists and child-molesters. I still can’t summon up the competitiveness and contrarianism to troll so obviously.

Nah. I should have left it at above, and just read and listened. The women don’t need me.

(I have made similar mistakes in my times on the Internets. Examples abound, to be found with searches. I cop to them all, with shame. Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them.)

dd @ 68:

. I reckon Belle should take a good long look at her own anger here in calling for “putting him in boiling mercury”; in other contexts she’d be the first to talk about the iniquity of savage and counterproductive punishment of minority groups.

Although I’m not entirely in agreement with Belle’s point (or, rather, I think it makes sense as a view for her to hold but not for me or society at large to hold), I can’t see how you get from “I’d like to boil my rapist in mercury” to “I’d like to boil all autistic people who have been accused of sexual harassment in mercury”, and certainly not to “I think the criminal justice system should adopt mandatory minimum sentencing of boiling-in-mercury for any autistic person convicted of sexual harassment” (I presume that the autistic people are the minority group you’re referring to). This isn’t as difficult as you’re making it look.

This thread suffers from the notion that there’s no good outcome here, and we’re just arguing over who gets treated unfairly; uncharitably, Belle is broadly happy with the potential for some (minor, in the cosmic sense of things) potential for less-than-optimal treatment of autistic people in some circumstances (though she’s pretty dubious about whether the guy in the article is so autistic that he merits any special treatment), and I guess some of the other commenters are happy for perpetrators to be under-punished so long as it ensures that nobody who deserved some leniency failed to receive it, with the effect that victims in those cases tolerate excuses being made for the actions of the perpetrators, who are free to walk around, potentially harass them again, and quite probably do the same to other women.

I can end up tending to the latter position myself, because I don’t consider myself responsible for the actions of criminals, but do consider myself responsible (to the extent that my vote has influence over it) for the actions of the criminal justice system. Like, I’m opposed to killing people but don’t really consider it my job to stop people from murdering each other, Batman-style, but I do consider it my job to vote against the death penalty. I’d even subscribe to the view that it’s better for 10 guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to hang.

The problem is that we can’t use this as an excuse to shrug off large-scale criminality and victimisation, which is what sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse and harassment are in today’s society. There’s an asymmetry here, where we’re very concerned about the thing we feel we can control (are our judges giving people appropriate sentences?), and relatively (to judge from the thread) unconcerned about the thing we think isn’t our problem (are lots of women and children victims of brutal crimes that nobody is punished for?).

The Slate article tackles the first question and, in all honesty, I’m totally fine with the argument that, where our best means of psychological assessment tell us to, we ought to accept that some people don’t have the social competence to be fully responsible for offences they commit. But there’s a sub-text, and the sub-text is that “what’s in the mind of the perpetrator matters more than we currently acknowledge”, and the implication is that we should be spending more time understanding the thoughts, feelings and mitigating circumstances of perpetrators. If you’re aware that lots of people are already getting away with these kinds of crimes, you’re going to have a pretty reasonable suspicion that this is just another dodge. “But I’m on the spectrum! But I wasn’t given enough sex education! But I thought she wanted me to do that, and how could I have known otherwise?” are all the kinds of horrible excuses that have been deployed before and will be deployed again, and to allow them to pass unchallenged is to allow a travesty to continue, and maybe to get a little worse than it is already.

Obviously boiling people in mercury is barbaric. Obviously we shouldn’t do it even to people who might deserve the worst punishment we can throw at them, because we don’t do that kind of thing. But chiding women for being angry at the kind of argument that is often (if not always, if not necessarily) used to excuse one more rapist, abuser or harasser being allowed to carry on with their lives free of consequence is not something you get to do. You have to explain what you’d do to tackle the people already getting away with their crimes, and take seriously the fact that the anger isn’t coming from nowhere, it’s coming from a systemic problem in society.

“Lots of guilty people go free, so we should just up the punishments (viz. boiling in mercury) and lower the standards of responsibility (to hell with the psychological assessments!) required to give out the most serious punishments in the hope that we punish more wrong’uns” is a bad argument, and I think people are interpreting Belle as making it. This is disingenuous. It’s picking a fight over the wrong question, because I think most people would accept that there are sometimes mitigating circumstances for all kinds of crime, but our problem right now is that we’re collectively far too accepting of crime that’s already going on, and maybe that’s what we should be focusing on. Of course, we’re then back to the problem that most of us don’t have much of an idea of how to prevent such crimes given that “become Batman” isn’t an option, but at least it’d be the right question to start with.

Chetan Murthy @64: when you say “crime is different from war”, that is rather disputable in the context of the Northern Irish troubles. How many of the actions of the PIRA (shooting Arlene Foster’s father, blowing up her school bus) were crimes, how many were war? And if you say “they were all war” then I must suppose you cannot agree with the prosecution of British soldiers for actions in the troubles.

Over to you. Disempale yourself.

Sorry, I was attempting to draw that characterisation in order to show that it’s an incorrect reading (“disingenuous”), but I communicated it badly. My apologies. Feel free to delete any of my above posts, as I don’t think anyone is getting anything good out of this.

“Hey, thanks bob mcmanus! That was thoughtful and not trolly a bit.”

The internet is such a strange place. Anyhow, Belle Waring, thanks for the post, and sorry so many of your readers are real dicks :(.

Fwiw I agree the Slate article wasn’t very convincing, I just think (from other reading) the legal problem may be real. And I’m sorry people were patronising and insensitive.

Ms. Waring,

I feel compelled to note that almost all the folks making excuses for why {viewing child porn, or stalking, or other vile offenses against women and children} is OK, are *men*. Men like me. Maybe -men- ought to think carefully about these things, and about how they’re not in a position to judge. And STFU.

But really, time to cut the cord on this thread, eh?