When you are broken and emotionally dead inside, you don’t care about capital punishment. You care about hurting others because you have been hurt.

This is true of a certain kind of rapist, the impersonal predator that makes headlines, grabbing women off a street corner or breaking into apartments, that most men seem to categorize as the only “real rape.” The vast majority of rapes in this culture, though, are date rape. It’s a man she knows pushing past the limit, without consent, like in the story that started this thread, or some idiot like Brock Turner seeing his chance to take advantage of an unconscious drunk girl, thinking there would be no consequences (for himself; obviously he didn’t care about consequences to his victim). If rape had dire legal consequence, like murder does, and everybody understood those consequences would fall like a hammer without concern for the perp’s “feelings,” just like with murder, opportunists like Brock Turner would likely think twice, and stop themselves — out of self-preservation, not sympathy for their victim, but AT LEAST THEY MIGHT STOP. The rape would not happen. Would it stop all rape? Of course not. But it’s hard to argue that it would not stop any. Besides, as I argue here, a strategy that works to undo rape culture is going to have to be one that approaches the problem from many directions at once. It’s not an either/or proposition.