As a two time sexual assault survivor, let me say so many of you stupid motherfuckers on this website will turn gleefully fascist at the prospect of punishing sex criminals as if false accusations of sex crime are not THE most common falsehood used to justify hate crimes against minorities, particularly people of color and LGBTQ folk - who, I will remind you, are disproportionately likely to be victims of SA themselves.
Like yeah! Give the government the legal power to sterilize criminals! That will never be a problem! Alan Turing? Never heard of him! It doesn't have horrible implications for the concept of bodily autonomy! Sexual abuse and abortion are famously completely different subjects!
Death penalty for sex offenders? It's not like there are already massive structural inequalities that make the death penalty vastly more likely to be used against people who are non-white, and among the white people it DOES get used on, they are overwhelmingly either poor, mentally ill or both! It's also not like making the death penalty available for crimes that are not murder heavily incentivizes murder as a way of removing a potential witness, since it carries the same penalty!
It's not as if there is a widespread fascist campaign to portray gender-affirming care as "sexual abuse" in the exact same jurisdictions that are also trying to push the death penalty for sex crimes! It's not as if the Tulsa massacre and the lynching of Emmett Till were "justified" by false accusations of sexual misconduct!
As someone who's been assaulted twice, your rhetoric doesn't actually help survivors like me live in a safer world. In fact, it contributes to a climate of thought in which the fascists who are openly gloating about sexually assaulting people thrive. They have the power right now - do you think they're going to use it to punish themselves? Do you think the motherfuckers on the Epstein List have any intention to be held accountable to their own laws?
"Oh, but I'd only use the justice system against real sexual abusers who actually committed sex crimes!" Yeah buddy that's exactly what the fascists said. You do not live in a magical world where you can exclusively punish the people who are actually guilty and will never fall for a false allegation. You will not build that world by doing the exact same things the fascists do and saying the exact same things the fascists say.
And don't think I haven't noticed that a whole lot of the people preaching fire and brimstone upon "only the truly guilty" are also happy to accuse people of being rapists and groomers for such horrific acts as... drawing BDSM art or writing noncon fiction. You know, things a lot of survivors do to process and cope with trauma, and that a lot of perfectly upstanding people do because they're into weird shit. Put simply and impolitely, I don't trust you baying-for-blood rabid fucking animals to know what a "real sexual abuser" looks like. Let's also not forget that some of you think pointing this shit out is the same as "defending sex abusers," because you are deeply unserious clowns.
One thing I never see any of the people who act like this do is actually talk about resources for survivors. In fact, a lot of the people who talk this way are the same people who don't want to spend their tax dollars on rape crisis centers, abuse shelters or comprehensive sex education - and even where they permit them to exist, they love to exclude trans people (who suffer sexual abuse at atrocious rates compared to their cis counterparts) from these services.
A society in which basic human rights cannot be taken away from even the most loathsome, horrendous people is the only one in which any of us can be safe, because it doesn't take as much as you think for the people with the power to convince everyone else that you are the most loathsome, horrendous person.
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