[qeorjpzs] Identifying the serial rapist

The reported strong tendency of date rapists to be serial rapists suggests a way to get past the "he-said, she-said" difficulty of determining what happened: in the serial date rapist will become apparent a serial pattern of accusations from many victims over time.  It'll only be a statistical guess, perhaps not one that will hold up in court, but may be useful for socially labeling them.

Need to normalize by the number of sexual partners (which I worry that the studies reporting the tendency did not do); need to find citation.

This tendency of date rapists to be serial rapists also suggests policy to decrease rape: focus efforts narrowly on identifying and stopping the serial rapists rather than trying to control the entire population, e.g., decreasing "rape culture", or entire male population.

Consider paradoxically decreasing the criminal punishment for rape.  As an analogy, suppose the criminal punishment for necrophilia were reduced.  We would not expect an increase in the normal population engaging in necrophilia: they're just not into it, no matter what the law permits.  Analogously, I do not expect a decrease in criminal punishment for rape to cause more normal people to commit rape.

However, it will cause serial rapists to commit more rape, making it easier to identify them through their serial pattern of many accusations.  And after identifying them, they can be labeled and stopped, though it remains an open question of how to disseminate the information and get people and organizations to act effectively about it. Optimistically, I hope society reorganizes itself so that identified serial date rapists surround themselves with acquaintances who consent often, thereby decreasing the harm they might otherwise cause. I suspect this is already happening.

It also remains open whether the more rapes they commit prior to being labeled is outweighed by the rapes they are prevented from after being identified.

It will likely be possible to game the system.

A wild speculation about two things I've thought about recently: serial date rapists are correlated with inherently careless drivers.  The mechanism is that neither class (hypothesized to be one class) is being deliberately malicious, but they both have a disregard for others' well-being that causes them to act the way they do.  This could be tested if we could only accurately label serial rapists.  If the correlation is true, then we could decrease rape by watching how people drive (or how they do chemistry experiments). The "cowboy": out of control.