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I was thinking about this thread for a while, mainly because of what occured to me in discussing the LAPD situation with Vindi.
This sort of "code" is a bizarre hybrid of both a culmination of several decades of an anti-male mantra amongst a certain stripe of extreme feminist; the end they've been pressing for, combined with desperation as the public at large grows tired of the feminist message of 20-40 years ago.
From.. oh, about the late 60s up until the late 80s to early 90s more or less, there was a women's movement that, despite the alarming rhetoric of some of its most extreme members, was addressing issues that women really did need addressed. One of these was the handling of rape cases. While it was far from impossible to convict rapists prior to that, it was a lot easier to get off if you'd committed date rape or acquaintance rape, because in the aftermath of the puritanical 50s, many people really did "blame the victim".
In 1991, however, was the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. He was acquitted, with one of his lawyer's comments being "If you find him guilty, it's because he's a Kennedy", a statement with a great deal of truth behind it. We were also treated to the spectacle of women's "advocates" claiming that if he were found guilty, it would be bad for other women wanting to report rape. Most important of all, 3 women who'd claimed he raped them in other, unreported incidents, were excluded from testifying.
This case was important not because of Kennedy himself, but more because of what it revealed about attitudes amongst the sort of people who make rape their life's work. Rape shield laws had begun appearing in the 70s, and were commonplace by that time; it was no longer possible to use the "she's a slut" defense. However, no corresponding law existed protecting the defendant from the appearance of accusers testifying to rapes that were never reported, tried, or convicted, in completely unrelated rape cases. The judge fortunately did not allow this, but it speaks to the attitude amongst "rape advocates" that any accusation must be true that it was considered a legitimate legal tactic to attempt this.
Second, the claims of a "chilling effect" on rape reporting. We do not find people guilty of crimes in our system based on the possible social reprecussions of the decision. There is another, more subtle aspect to this, however. The "chilling effect" was unacceptable to them because it would supposedly reduce rape reporting and almost every rape report was, and is, viewed by rape advocates as legitimate just by virtue of having been made. There is, therefore, a vicious cycle in the minds of rape advocates that drives their thinking: Any individual rape reported represents a crime, and so therefore anything that reduces rapes reported means crimes must be going unreported and unaddressed. It is thus impossible to actually address the problem of rape as they perceive it exists except to convict every person reported for rape. Any reduction in reports means a "chilling effect" has occured, any acquittal is likely to cause a "chilling effect".
Since the Kennedy trial, or at least since somewhere in that general timeframe, the public got tired of hearing about it, however. Rape advocates still loudly rant and scream that any cricticism of the victim's actions is the same as blaming them for the actions of the rapist. They continue to insist that any application of innocent until proven guilty is the same as dismissing the accuser as a liar and a slut. They continue to insist there is a "stigma" that prevents rape reporting, despite the fact that almost no one seriously thinks that being a "slut" means consent, or actually seriously considers a "short skirt" to be a defense.
In fact, this constant insistence that there is a stigma, and that no progress has been made on this issue in the past 30 years, is the problem. The stigma is one of its own making; women are bombarded with the notion that they will be stigmatized and called liars by rape advocates both before and after they are raped. They are told that the application of normal criminal justice processes are the equivalent of being called a liar. Some of these women grow frusterated and angry and therefore feed the idea of "stigma".
This code is the result of failing to get the judicial system to work in a similar way: Those who advocate for it have simply found an avenue, the educational system, where there is more sympathy to their ideas, and more fear of them showing up with placards to protest "misogeny" than in the courts. The problem is not the attitude of society towards rape, but rather people who are still addressing society's attitudes as they existed decades ago because to update their own thinking would mean to have to abandon much of the source of their anger. They're getting away with it, because society still allows unaccountable "advocacy groups" to tell it what its own attitudes are towards things like rape. Society has progressed enormously, but because we're afraid of being called sexist, we still let a few deeply angry people tell us we haven't made any, and sooner or later they find a way to access something like an educational disciplinary system where they can do real damage.
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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."
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