The Official Rape is Never Justified, Inc. Tumblr!

I’ve tried to remain silent, or neutral, on this particular topic because I know how unpopular my belief is as a survivor. However, I want to explain myself. (If you’re still unclear after reading, shoot me an email or write in the comments, please.) This may be slightly graphic towards the end. Proper genitalia names will be used throughout the piece.

I hold a very unpopular belief for the rape-suvivor-supporter community. I do not feel that castrating rapists, or giving them the death sentence is beneficial. My focus, for this particular post, is castrating rapists. Number one, this eliminates female, intersexed, or other identifying genders without a penis. And those people do exist in this world as rapists. But primarily, especially since the recent FBI definition change, rape isn’t just about penile-penetration. Rape is a horrible, horrible trauma. However, we’re forgetting about a few things. Linked to my story, is that chance that you are penetrated with something other than a penis — an object, a dildo, another body part (i.e.: finger), etc. As much as I wish this wasn’t the reality, even if we were to castrate every known offender, they will find ways to penetrate otherwise. I’m sure this happens more often than we know — the rape by an object, versus a body part. And it’d be a shame to see this continue to increase. 

Another large concept — castrating an individual doesn’t take away their desire to feel control and power over someone else. They will still (or, in some cases, use another weapon) to molest, sexually assault, begin partaking in pedophilia, or child pornography, or sex trafficking. Maybe these are extremes, but if you take away a man’s testicles (and again, this eliminates all other gendered-perpetrators), you don’t take away his “need” to over-power someone. You, in my way of understanding, will create reason to prove his “manhood” or “manliness.” Unfortunately, I cannot think of a common drug that has been used to reduce the libido of a male, but it’s often found not to work because they still have these thoughts and often times, react to their thoughts. 

Another reason why I think castration is wrong — how do we judge which perpetrators get castrated? Do we only castrate pedophiles? Do we castrate the ones that are in jail? Do we castrate them if they used their penis? What if they didn’t use their penis — do they get to keep it? Back to the whole, those without penis’ can’t be castrated. So what do we do in the case of women? Women who rape, do we cut off their tongues or fingers? Do we remove their ovaries?  

What about in cases where the man doesn’t get convicted? Similar to abortion being illegal (and more so in previous times), women would get extremely unsafe abortions in back alleys with no pre/post treatment and, typically, not done by true professionals. So, every time someone is raped, are we just going to walk around with knives and cut off a man’s testicles? All we do here, is increase the amount of violence in the world. And, eventually, there’s going to be a lot of lives lost (innocent or otherwise) and we’ll be doing no good to the world we want to live in. 

Castrating a man isn’t going to remove his desire, need, want, etc. to rape a woman. It’s not going to make the world safer. It’s not going to take away the pain of being assaulted or raped. Castrating that man isn’t going to prevent him from hurting another woman. It’s not going to keep children safe. It’s not going to make what’s been done, undone.

We need to understand that our anger is acceptable. Our anger is a process. But our healing is on our own. No action outside of your own process is going to make this pain go away (and this statement, “no action,” is to say that as a whole, not one of these can make the occurrence of a rape better… and I’m guessing when I make the following statement based on other conversations and research i’ve done). Going to court, posting your rapists’ name on the internet, castrating, or seeing your rapist undergo the death penalty isn’t going to make the pain of being raped go away. Some of that may help for a little bit. But your healing process is one that you must go through, fully, round circle — to truly heal. 

Again, if you have any questions about my “unpopular belief,” please don’t hesitate to ask me privately or publicly — my email is ali@rnjstaff.com.