Weiye Loh's Library tagged Victim → View Popular, Search in Google

Dec

2011

Real Fags Join The Priesthood? « Quiet Riot Girl

using hypothetical examples of girls being abused saying if it was girls being ‘sexually abused’ by men priests, people would come up with spurious justifications for it. And yet, the main reason this sexual abuse ‘scandal’ in the priesthood has been newsworthy is that the men doing the ‘abuse’ got away with it for years and years. It’s classic oppression olympics with girls and women always winning the gold victim status medal, even when they are made up examples!

quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/...real-fags-join-the-priesthood

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Victim Gender Stereotype Religion Feminism

Jul

2011

The rape of men | Global development | The Observer

MattyRoy1015
17 July 2011 8:53PM
I would appreciate the report more if the Guardian dropped its trademark liberal condescension, which habitually appears in their reports on developed countries.

And it's just so obvious...the picture and vivid descriptions of the traumatized "native" just above the picture of a confident, manly western saviour and passages like:

"his eyes cast towards the ground, as if in apology for his impressive height. He has a prominent upper lip that shakes continually – a nervous condition that makes him appear as if he's on the verge of tears....I am aghast"

Is this necessary?

And of course, the rape victims are willing to talk, "thanks largely" to a magnanimous white man willing shoulder some of their burden. Really, Guardian? I would have thought the rape victim's willingness to talk was "thanks largely" to personal agency.

www.guardian.co.uk/...the-rape-of-men

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Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

Balderdash: Negligence of Male Rape: what you get when you're obsessed by Privilege

Amusingly, one feminist complained in the comments (ignoring what was the most disturbing part of the article for me: how feminarchy is trying to silence, sideline and ignore male rape):

"Why the hostility toward feminists in some of the readers' comments? Are feminists to blame for male rape (as well as every other evil in society these days)? I doubt any feminist reading the article feels anything but revulsion with regard to the rapists (who were not feminists - just in case you were confused) and I'm quite sure all of us feel nothing but sympathy for the victims. Blame the perpetrators."

Someone pointed her to one of her previous comments:

"Really - should society allow men to comment on crimes of sexual violence?"

She "clarified" that she meant "Should society allow men to comment on crimes of sexual violence against women?", but this just exposes feminarchy even more blatantly.

gssq.blogspot.com/...of-male-rape-what-you-get.html

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Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

Another commenter points out (in response to an affirmation that "the perpetrator class *is* monolithic. In these countries, in these war situations, it *is* exclusively composed of men, acting out masculinity's obsession with the use of sex as violence and power over"):

"Women also use sex as a means of violence and power. Research conducted in the US show that 95% of male victims in juvenile detention centres are abused by women http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/11/the-rape-of-american-prisoners/ and that another report highlighted that women raped in US prisons were more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted by another woman than a man"
when some UK Rape Crisis centres began to accept and help male rape victims they received death threats and even threats of having their offices fire bombed. Apparently these threats came from volunteers at other rape crisis centres
1 more annotation(s)...
- Of course there's someone accusing them of "liberal condescension, which habitually appears in their reports on developed countries", but that's another problematic matter...

Jul

2011

The rape of men | Global development | The Observer

www.guardian.co.uk/...the-rape-of-men

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Rape Victim Gender Equality Gender Stereotype

wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. "They ask me: 'So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?' They ask, 'If he can be raped, who is protecting me?' There's one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man's heart."
As part of an attempt to correct this, the RLP produced a documentary in 2010 called Gender Against Men. When it was screened, Dolan says that attempts were made to stop him. "Were these attempts by people in well-known, international aid agencies?" I ask.
"Yes," he replies. "There's a fear among them that this is a zero-sum game; that there's a pre-defined cake and if you start talking about men, you're going to somehow eat a chunk of this cake that's taken them a long time to bake." Dolan points to a November 2006 UN report that followed an international conference on sexual violence in this area of East Africa.
"I know for a fact that the people behind the report insisted the definition of rape be restricted to women," he says, adding that one of the RLP's donors, Dutch Oxfam, refused to provide any more funding unless he'd promise that 70% of his client base was female. He also recalls a man whose case was "particularly bad" and was referred to the UN's refugee agency, the UNHCR. "They told him: 'We have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.'"
3 more annotation(s)...
- Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict, insists in a statement that the UNHCR extends its services to refugees of both genders. But she concedes that the "great stigma" men face suggests that the real number of survivors is higher than that reported. Wallström says the focus remains on women because they are "overwhelmingly" the victims. Nevertheless, she adds, "we do know of many cases of men and boys being raped."
- But when I contact Stemple by email, she describes a "constant drum beat that women are the rape victims" and a milieu in which men are treated as a "monolithic perpetrator class".
- "The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution. Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates 'female' with 'victim', thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability."

Jul

2011

Keir Starmer: Rape claims retracted out of fear should not lead to charges | Law | The Guardian

Women who retract allegations of rape out of fear of violence should not face criminal charges, according to fresh guidance issued by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC.

His announcement is intended to help prosecutors distinguish between those who pervert the course of justice by inventing false claims and genuine victims in danger of attack from vengeful partners or assailants.

www.guardian.co.uk/...-starmer-rape-claims-retracted

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Rape Claim Retraction Victim

Jun

2011

Gifts of Speech - Camille Paglia

gos.sbc.edu/paglia.html

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Academia Liberal Conservative Feminism Science Nature Rape Victim

if people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative
a lot of people have been driven toward the neoconservative side by the failure of the liberal academic establishment to critique itself. So rather than blaming The New Criterion or Roger Kimball for all the problems of the world, it's time for the liberals of academe to critique themselves, to reform it from within.
25 more annotation(s)...
- my career has been a disaster. And before my book was finally published at Yale Press, it was rejected by seven New York publishers, I could not get published throughout the Seventies and Eighties, I was completely poor. For the first time in my adult life I'm out of debt as of three months ago. I've been on the unemployment line. I have taught in factories. I'm probably the only major voice right now in academe who's actually taught factory workers. As opposed to these people who are the Marxists [makes prancing, dancing, hair-preening gestures], oh yes, these Marxists, like Terry Eagleton at Oxford. Do you know what he makes? Do you know the salary that man makes? Oh, it just disgusts me. This is why he has to wear blue jeans, to show, "Oh, no, I don't have the money." These people are hypocrites! They really are. It's all a literary game. There's no authentic self-sacrifice, no direct actual experience of workers or working-class people. It's appalling, the situation. It's everywhere, it's everywhere in the Ivy League.
- You know, I'm really happy there wasn't all this talk about sex changes back then, since I probably would have gotten this fantasy that I was a man born wrongly in a woman's body, and I think I might very well have become obsessed with the idea of a sex change, which would have been a terrible mistake. Because I think I absolutely am a woman, but I was just a woman born ahead of my time. I was a kind of pioneer, and decade by decade I've acclimated myself to my sex role--thanks to my friendships with gay men and drag queens! Drag queens have influenced me enormously. Their analysis of the mythology of male and female, and the theatre of gender and so on,
- My sense of time-frame is so vast compared to that of people in English departments. When I think about sex, when I think about anything in culture, I'm thinking about a 10,000-year time span, you see, and this is what causes a communication problem with feminists, because most of them, as far as I can see, tend to have their specialties in the late eighteenth century or following. There are a few who have training earlier, but they tend to be very narrowly focused even in that one area. I think my broad expanse of learning and my already world-consciousness
- There was a point where feminism and I agreed. I was thirteen though. It was 1960, okay? That was a time when I said, "Men are terrible. The sexes are the same. Men must change. Society must change. And all the problems between the sexes are coming from the fact that men are so awful."
- That's an unevolved position. It's thirty years later, girls! Let us move on! Oh, God! So I continued studying and, at this point, I became notorious in Syracuse, New York, where I was going to high school, for my Amelia Earhart obsession. The newspaper actually reported this. For three years--this looks forward to Sexual Personae--for three years, I did this Amelia Earhart research. The biographer of Amelia Earhart told me I had done more research in the primary sources than he had! I spent every Saturday in the bowels of the public library going through all these materials, old magazines and newspapers, before microfilm. Everything was falling to pieces. I probably destroyed the whole collection! I was covered with grime. Amelia Earhart to me was an image of everything a woman should be. It remains that for me. Amelia Earhart, my obsession. She is woman alone. Not woman hand-holding in a group and whining about men. Woman alone! Okay, all right? Woman goes up in a plane. If she crashes, she doesn't go, "You men did this to me!" She knows that she is responsible. It's her skill, her preparation. And then nature. Something that's not in her control can be her opponent: nature!
- No one wants to talk about nature now. Meanwhile, the entire student population of the world is thinking about nature, the environment, they're thinking globally, but our faculty are off in their little corners talking about social constructionism. They haven't thought about nature in twenty years, okay, they are so behind. You mention the mere word "nature"--"Essentialism!" That's it. What--? I mean--! The thing about the Sixties is that we had a comprehensive world-view. We saw the injustices of society, and we wanted to remedy them. We focused our negative energy against society to change it. At the same time we saw the enormity of nature. And we honored the enormity of nature. It is appalling, the situation now, that you could think about talking about sex without thinking about nature. That you could claim that you are an expert in gender without knowing about hormones!
- The contempt for science that's going on among humanists is contemptible.
- It's this combination of the sciences plus the arts. "Impossible," you say, today? "Impossible--we're too specialized for that, we're too expert." No, this is exactly what we need. We have to bring this back, this idea of all of culture integrated. This is what we must do for the next generation of students. We must do this. We must make radical reforms of undergraduate and graduate education, to give students this kind of comprehensive vision of culture.
- . When you destroy young people's ability to take pleasure in beauty, you are a pervert! So I stood up, I was very agitated--and she was such a good sport. I mean, here was this maniac she never heard of, my book had just come out, and I was waving my arms around. I said I didn't mean to condemn her, because I understood that what she was doing was the result of ten years of feminists doing this. But nevertheless, I asked, why is it, why is it that feminists have so much trouble dealing with beauty and pleasure, I said, to which gay men have made such outstanding cultural contributions? Why--if gay men can respond? This is why I get along so well with gay men, and I don't get along with lesbian feminists. This is why my sexuality is a complete neuter! I don't fit in anywhere! I'm like this wandering being, the Ancient Mariner--it's just awful.
- You cannot just suddenly open a magazine and look at a picture of a nude woman and then free associate, using Lacan. You cannot do that! Because fashion magazines are part of the history of art. These are great photographers, great stylists--and gay men have made enormous contributions to fashion photography. Anyway, I made a huge statement that night--the whole audience gasped. I went, "The history of fashion photography from 1950 to 1990 is one of the great moments in the history of art!" And everyone went, "How can you say that?" Because obviously fashion is an oppression of women.
- And beauty, according to, um, Miss, um, Naomi Wolf, is a heterosexist conspiracy by men in a room to keep feminism back
- We had this huge fight about the song "Under My Thumb." I said it was a great song, not only a great song but I said it was a work of art. And these feminists of the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band went into a rage, surrounded me, practically spat in my face, literally my back was to the wall. They're screaming in my face, "Art? Art? Nothing that demeans women can be art!" There it is. There it is! Right from the start. The fascism of the contemporary women's movement.
- What I identify with is the prewar feminism of Amelia Earhart, of Katherine Hepburn--who had an enormous impact on me--that period of women where you had independence, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and not blaming other people for your problems.
- I don't feel less because I'm in the presence of a beautiful person. I don't go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], "Oh, I'll never be that beautiful!" What a ridiculous attitude to take!--the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, the don't go [crying], "Oh, I'll never be that fast, I'll never be that strong!" When people look at Michelangelo's David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, "Wow! That is fabulous." When you see a beautiful person: "How beautiful." That's what I'm bringing back to feminism. You go, "What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!"
- We should not have to apologize for reveling in beauty. Beauty is an eternal human value. It was not a trick invented by nasty men in a room someplace on Madison Avenue.
- I say in Sexual Personae that it was invented in Egypt. For 3,000 years at the height of African civilization you had a culture based on beauty. We have two major cultures in the world today, France and Japan, organized around the idea of beauty. It is so provincial, feminism's problem with beauty. We have got to get over this.
- Obviously, any addiction--like if you're addicted to plastic surgery--that's a problem. Of course it's a problem. Addiction to anything is a problem. But this blaming anorexia on the media--this is Naomi's thing--oh please! Anorexia is coming out of these white families, these pushy, perfectionist white families, who all end up with their daughters at Yale.
- All this "Let's unmask Big Daddy"--this obsession with the weaknesses of big figures. This is infantile. It's infantile. You read major figures not because everything they say is the gospel truth but because they expand your imagination, they expand your I.Q., okay, they open up brain cells you didn't even know you have.
- a politics which blames all human problems on white male imperialists who have victimized women and people of color. This view of history is coming from people who know nothing about history. Because when you think of the word "imperialist," if you automatically just think "America," then you don't know anything. Because someone who's studied the history of ancient Egypt knows that imperialism was practically invented in Egypt and in the ancient Near East. If you want to talk about imperialism, let's talk about Japan or Persia or all kinds of things. It's not just a white male monopoly.
- we cannot have this scenario being projected of male rapaciousness and brutality and female victimage. We have got to make women realize they are responsible, that sexuality is something that belongs to them. They have an enormous power in their sexuality. It's up to them to use it correctly and to be wise about where they go and what they do. And I'm accused of being "anti-woman" because of this attitude
- people say to me, "Oh, you're always talking about feminists as if they're monolithic. We're not monolithic. We're very pluralistic. We have so many different views." No, excuse me: the date-rape issue shows that I am correct. Because there is one voice speaking about date rape from coast to coast, one voice, one stupid, shrewish, puritanical, sermonizing, hysterical voice. And where are all these sophisticated feminists supposedly out there? Where are they? Totally impotent, locked in their little burrows wherever they are, whether they're in the East Village or Harvard. Wherever they are, they're impotent. There's not one voice raised to bring some sense into this hysteria. Now, I am an experienced teacher. I sympathize with the problems of freshmen, and so I believe that date-rape awareness is an excellent thing to do when students arrive, not only for the men, to warn the men that breaches of civilized behavior will not be tolerated, but also to warn the women, because unfortunately to me what's happening is that we have a white middle-class problem. I don't notice so many Hispanic women and African-American women going around and carrying on like this.
- The girl has met the guy once before, this is the second time she met him, they were at a party, she invites him back to her room, its three A.M., she falls asleep, and then suddenly something happens, and she charges him with rape.
- We cannot have this, these white middle-class girls coming out of pampered homes, expecting to do whatever they want. They don't understand what's going on, that there's a sexual content to their behavior, that maybe there's a subliminal sexuality, a provocativeness in their behavior. "Don't say 'provocative'! Because then you're blaming the victim!" Well, women will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
- the sexual ideology of current feminism is reactionary and repressive and puritanical and phobic. And it's being produced by many of these women who have succeeded, you see, in the women's studies programs and who don't understand the degree to which their own careerism, their own opportunism is enwrapped with these ideas. They don't understand. They're not sophisticated women, many of them. They're not. They're not cosmopolitan women. To talk about sex, you have to know about literature and art. Literature and art are the best way into the psychology of mankind, because of the ambiguity and mystery. Because that is where you feel the flux, the flux of our sexual desire, the way our spirit is not in these rigid categories of oppressor and victim. Everything is flowing. Fantasy and imagination and all these things, they're always flowing. That's why Freud has been so useful for me, because of the way he is able to study the dream process and to find words to articulate these ambiguous nonverbal phenomena. It's a very, very good exercise for anyone trying to talk about sex. So the present situation is just appalling--just appalling. The language that is being used by these people, the way social-welfare issues have taken over the agenda. We cannot have this.
- what's so ridiculous about this is that these people want "multiculturalism," they want to talk about various ethnic groups. At the same time they want to deny there's any difference between those ethnic groups.

Jun

2011

A critique...of my critique of SlutWalk Singapore? Try again.

While waiting for my final train out of Edinburgh, an attempt to lose myself in an unprecedentedly emotional moment was foiled by a buzz from my phone. Surprise: it was a lengthy letter from Benjamin Cheah himself! (If you don't have a clue who I'm talking about, refer to this (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150219878858774). Anyhow, I'm convinced I ought to share it with the world, just so we enrich their perspectives on rape, the people who talk about rape, and - if that's not enough - the principles of argument. Benjamin has not only granted me permission to re-post it verbatim, but encouraged me to do so.

One thing, though: as Benjamin and I have agreed that this is about greater issues, and not a private disagreement confined between two individuals, I will abandon the standard form of correspondence, and perform an analysis of his email, rather than addressing him directly. Let's hope it will be as illuminating for everyone as I sincerely wish.

www.facebook.com/note.php

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Rape Gender Equality Feminism Victim

The core of my writing is my research. I refer to Marc MacYoung, Rory Miller, and Gavin De Becker amongst others fairly extensively when I talk about self defence. I posted quite a few links to MacYoung's website in my article, because amongst the three MacYoung conducted the most research into the behaviour of rapists. These men have spent their careers understanding criminal psychology and developing personal safety tactics, and are widely-recognised experts in their fields. I don't recognise any of their ideas in your work, so I would like to understand who and what informs your arguments. I don't want to assume that you're a straw feminist drawing from straw feminist theories, but I don't sense any concepts drawn from criminal psychology or personal safety in your article, which I sense should underscore any discussion on criminal behaviour - including rapists.

Nicholas Liu has brought up his quarrel with Benjamin's sources, so I see no need to restate those points. You can view the thread here (http://benjamincheah.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/slutwalk-noble-but-misguided). The reason why Benjamin does not 'sense any concepts drawn from criminal psychology or personal safety in my article' is simple: I unequivocally reject how these concepts inform his conclusions, and the import he happily attributes to them. Nor do I think it is necessary for me to cite who exactly informs my understanding when I am perfectly capable of understanding - and seeing through - things myself. A note of advice from myself: one of the first things we learn, as philosophers, is that citations do not undergird arguments; it's what you do with available concepts, ideas already on the table, that matters.
SlutWalk believes that society pins all the ‘blame’ of a rape on the victim instead of the rapist. On the surface, this is only logical. A rapist committed a rape, therefore the rapist is to blame. But this is a shallow way of looking at rape – the rape probably occurred because the victim didn’t look after herself.

Most rapes occur because a woman took a risk, and got burned. She took a risk by walking down a dark alley, by ignoring the three young men lined up against a wall, by leaving a charming handsome stranger alone with her drink, by continuing to live with her abusive husband, and she paid the price. But these are avoidable risks. Most crimes occur this way. It’s controllable, even eliminated in some cases.

If this isn't victim-blaming, I don't know what it is.
4 more annotation(s)...
- it's true that saying a rapist is responsible for a rape doesn't ensure that other people don't get raped. The last I checked, however, nobody wanted to waste time arguing that rapists were responsible for rapes (we thought it was self-evident, we really did!) until they realised people were going around saying that victims were responsible for their own rapes. If anything, it's essentially a counter-point. Not to mention, I did state that arguing against victim-blaming is perfectly compatible with encouraging personal safety. We do not have a problem with encouraging personal safety. We have a problem with the notion that a person caused her own rape because she wore certain articles of clothing, got drunk, or ventured out late at night, a notion so embedded in our culture that it can reduce rapists' jail time (a reduction that, I may add, Benjamin once argued for - so much for not joining the victim-blaming team).
- It doesn't take a lot to see the hurt and injustice victim-blaming imposes upon rape survivors, by telling them they were asking for their own rape; that it was through their own negligence that they got raped. SlutWalk unites both survivors and supporters alike and proudly stands against victim-blamers. It affords them a loud collective voice to stand up for each other.
- Earlier, when I defended my anger, I mentioned that there is room in argument for emotion. This is because arguments do not take place in objective spaces but between people with values and intentions attached to them. And I cannot help but wonder why many people invest so much effort in proclaiming that rape victims are responsible for their own fates, whether it's in essays, speeches, or everyday conversations. If Benjamin wanted to emphasise personal safety, all he needed to do was write a safety manual for women, on what he thought were the best ways to avoid being raped. Yet his article sets out to claim so much more than that. There seems to me something very unnecessary and dishonourable about the entire exercise of victim-blaming. It implicitly says: hey, you! Weakling! You're the type of person that brings ugly fates upon yourself - unlike me! I don't want to bring politics into this, but to me it seems startlingly similar to the smug, secure, self-satisfied sentiments frequently expressed by economic libertarians, contingent on the suffering of others: hey, you! Laggard! You're the type of person that brings poverty upon yourself - unlike me! My guess is, these people often have little to no real understanding of - or sympathy towards - the events and experiences that their objects of criticism endure. They feel that it could never happen to them, but this is often circumstantial, rather than a direct result of their conduct (it's no coincidence that the majority of victim-blamers I've encountered are cisgendered male).
- Situation: Two girls, X and Y, are in a bar. There is a rapist hanging around waiting to spike the drink of the first girl who leaves hers unattended. X holds on to her drink all night, never letting it out of her sight. Y goes to the toilet and leaves it on the counter in plain view. Y gets spiked and raped after.
  
  This example, while fictional and by no means representative of how rapes usually happen, seems to illustrate Benjamin's beliefs. I cannot deny that, causally speaking, had Y taken some kind of action, she could've avoided rape in this particular case. Yet, are we necessarily led towards Benjamin's overarching assertion that rape victims are responsible for their fates? No, simply because the opportunity for avoidance and moral blame are two different things. Rape didn't follow as a natural consequence of people not holding on to their drinks all night. It happened because a person hung around in a bar deciding to illegally drug a girl and penetrate her against her will. Y was vulnerable to him, but she played absolutely no role in forming the decision to rape. She only became vulnerable because something she did was consciously exploited by a rapist. It is only in the presence of his decision that her behaviour becomes subsumed into a damaging causal chain. Y failed to follow advice that many girls who frequent bars are given and thus could not avoid the intended rape, but her rape is no less the result of a rapist's decision than a girl who learned 10 different kinds of martial arts, wore locked leather onesies, never consumed alcohol, and still got raped.

Feb

2011

BBC News - Should victims have a say in sentencing criminals?

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-12277696

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Victim Ethics Crime

If someone does you wrong, should you have a say in their punishment?
Should victims have a say in sentencing criminals? That partly depends upon what you mean by "have a say".

A weak form of involvement would have a judge listen to a statement from victims, but ensure the judge alone does the sentencing.

A slightly stronger form would be when the impact on victims is considered as part of assessing the moral seriousness of the crime. The strongest form would be when victims have a direct say in the type of sentence.

So which is the more just?
7 more annotation(s)...
- A utilitarian approach, which seeks people's greatest happiness and is associated with the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, can provide one reason why victims should, in part, play judge. It can be called the therapeutic argument.
- However, this might backfire.
  
  Given the choice, many victims might desire longer sentences than the judiciary would allow. When that desire is not satisfied, their anguish might be exacerbated. The therapeutic argument has also been called the "Oprahisation" of sentencing.
- The second, Kantian approach emphasises reason and rights.
- It stresses the law should be rational, and that includes keeping careful tabs on the irrational feelings that are inevitably present during legal proceedings. This would be harder to do, the more the voice of victims is heard.
- More seriously still, strong forms of victim sentencing would reflect the capabilities of the victim. A victim who could powerfully express their feelings might win a longer sentence. That would be irrational because it would suggest that a crime is more serious if the victim is more articulate.
- Taking considerations of moral seriousness into account would fit within a third approach, the one that stresses the common good and virtue and is associated with Aristotle.
  
  Would you want to meet the person who did this to you?
  
  Understanding the moral seriousness of a crime is important because it helps the criminal to take responsibility for what they've done. Victim feelings are also a crucial component in so-called restorative justice, in which the criminal is confronted with their crime, perhaps by meeting the victim.
- virtue ethics approach would be concerned with the moral state of the victim too. Victims may need to forgive those who have wronged them, in order that they might flourish in the future. An impersonal legal system, that does not allow victims a say, might actually help with that, as it ensures objectivity.