Everyone understands cause and effect, Tangledwood...it is a cinch to understand it. Even small children understand it.    But....there are just a lot of people out there who think they can avoid it somehow by their own cleverness or good luck....or who are simply unable to control their momentary impulses (in the case of crimes of passion or crimes of opportunity).

A wrap over the knuckles would be handy on a cold day, but I think it was a "rap" that you were referring to. ;-)

Much of our present difficulty in controlling crime arises from our loss of traditional community. In a heavily urbanized society where people can easily travel great distances the increasing anonymity of people has rendered concepts like "shunning" null and void. What worked very well in tribal communities and isolated small towns of the past can no longer work, because people in a modern community don't know even most of the other community members.

Silas - I think what the other poster was referring to was that the act of rape often has less to do with sex than it does to do with exerting power. It obviously has something to do with sex, but it may have more to do with exerting power and control in the case of most rapists. After all, we all have powerful sexual desires...but how many of us have the sort of dark emotional issues that would cause us to resort to raping someone? Not too many. It's an act of hatred and anger. Rapes go up tremendously in wartime, and that is encouraged by the macho competition among soldiers to prove themselves to their comrades...which involves being cruel to "the enemy"...and to punish "the enemy". The most vulnerable "enemy" targets in this case are the unarmed civilians, specially the women. I don't call that a sexual issue. I call it a power issue.

By the way, many castrated eunuchs in ancient Rome and Egypt managed to have quite a bit of sex with women in the households they were in...apparently their sexual desires remained strong. Also, castrating a rapist doesn't do a thing to reduce that person's desire to "get back" at other people, it would increase it...and perhaps they would resort to doing worse things than raping people. All this business about castrating rapists is, is it's a sick revenge fantasy that someone is having about "getting even" with rapists. He likes the thought of it, just like the rapist likes the thought of terrorizing and dominating his victims.