Consider legalizing rape as a counterintuitive method of reducing the incidence of rape.
The motivation is, if someone is about to commit rape, the threat of punishment by the justice system is not going to do much to stop them: the biological forces are just too strong. You can't legislate Nature. It's like passing a law forbidding hurricanes from hitting New Orleans.
Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's ethically right. We lean on the law, as a crutch, too much for trying to improve society. Remove the crutch. Instead of falling over, maybe we'll learn to walk.
Rape is undesirable. Without the law to lean on, hopefully society will evolve more effective mechanisms of preventing rape. I truly hope we can better figure out what creates a rapist and produce fewer of them. Perhaps we can get over our averseness toward frank discussions of issues related to sex.
On the other hand...
Unfortunately, there already exist regimes where rape is de facto legal, and nothing seems to be being done to prevent it, other than perhaps segregated society. What has gone wrong? Can we avoid their mistakes? It might be related to women being second-class citizens, but I don't know if that is a cause or an effect.
Our adversarial legal system forces revelation of uncomfortable truths better than any other mechanism I can think of. We need such truths to help push the social discussion forward to counteract our desire not to talk about such things. In the absence of a trial, I worry that what will evolve is horrible vigilante justice based on partial truths.
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