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That’s what we are calling rape these days why punish the criminal
when you can let them hide behind a fancy term. It has become
fashionable nowadays to find a psychological cause for everything
we cant understand, we need to find a cause within the individual to
absolve them from responsibility or to put the blame squarely on
their shoulders.
The other day I brought this issue up the issue of medicalising rape
with another psychologist who actually thought it might be a good
idea. The rapist I am sure had some neurochemical imbalances
which made him do it or perhaps it’s a genetic thing getting the
rapist to therapy will do him/her wonders. Perhaps we can
understand them better, or maybe we can make them see how
wrong they are, or maybe we will change them, maybe we can
release them from their inner trauma that causes them to rape,
maybe maybe………… how naïve does one have to be not to see the
stupidity of it all. Why not legalise rape while we are at it, and while
we are at it lets look at the trauma a murderer feels when he kills.
I don’t know how many men sat and wrote the new DSM but I have
a hunch a large majority had to be men. As for calling a spade a
spade the mental health field fails miserably. Why call it rape when
you can give it a pretentious Latin name, which is not only
misleading but will also take away some of the revulsion one feels
with the term rape. We minimise the seriousness of the crime (I still
think it is a crime) by giving it a term very few people are bound to
understand. The term rape conjures up violent images but the term
Paraphilic Coercive Disorder does nothing of that sort the
perpetrator can very easily hide behind the veil of science and
obscure language. Lets call it rape and see how many people will
want to include it in the DSM. Those in power benefit with the
addition of the new diagnosis it allows them to wield greater power
over people without actually asserting themselves too much.