A recurring problem with the Cosby versus witness allegations issue is presentism, making the mistake of judging people’s distant past actions by current day social standards. None of us would ever own slaves, and yet, almost all early Presidents and other prominent Americans were slaveowners. We now realize that they were wrong yet they were entirely within their legal rights to own slaves AT THE TIME.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/presentism
presentism
an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences
We cannot judge people’s actions in the past morally as if people existed in a society which has the standards of the present.
For the abused women, most rapes have historically not been reported. For reasons which should be obvious, the proportion of unreported rapes jumps higher for rapes in which roofie-style drugs are involved.
When one implies that one would judge one’s daughter by whether she immediately brought the problem to the attention of the police, one seems to be implying that all the women should have done so in the past. However the unfortunate historical fact is that more often than not abused women were not in a situation in which bringing the problem to the police would have helped.
As to the statute of limitations, first, this is a legal consideration and the answer to the concern will vary for each alleged victim. It is therefore much better for each alleged victim to come forward, at least to the police, rather than to remain silent. Second, remaining silent carries forward that the silence collectively enables the rapists and abusers to continue. Law is (usually) not changed without publicity within the community at large as a precursor. Individuals’ behavior and attitude (outside of the law, such as in cases in which the statute of limitations for whatever reason expires) will not change without publicity. This is implicitly the situation that we as a society have reached and it is the reason why I sense some of these alleged victims might be coming forward.
There is another mathematical reason that is postulated that these women should come forward, which has to do with a math theorem called Bayes’ Formula. I refer to a criminology professor who explains it in the context of Cosby in this article:
basically he suggests that the larger the number of witnesses who come forward and accuse a defendant of certain criminal or injurious behavior, presuming some independence between the witnesses, the more likely that it becomes that those witnesses are telling the truth about the defendant’s behavior. Now it seems true that in theory a conspiracy could exist between the witnesses or there could be some collective deniable or semi-deniable motivation why so many witnesses might be motivated to tell similar stories, as has been suggested. However, according to the criminology professor, this chance generally becomes smaller with each new witness. This does not totally rule out a hidden agenda or conspiracy, but there must be some number of witnesses becomes so large that a hidden agenda / conspiracy can be ruled out. What is that number? 25? 30? 50? 100? 10000? We might want to be upfront about that if we are postulating a conspiracy, to give each other a measurable gauge of our individual reasoning regarding alleged conspiracies and/or hidden agendas. Perhaps there is a distribution such that beyond a certain number of witnesses with a certain degree of probability, such a conspiracy or hidden agenda becomes improbable to that degree (eg gaussian distribution, etc.).
The purpose of law enforcement is at least threefold: one, to act as deterrent to harmful behavior. Two, to prevent individuals from hurting society in the future. Three, to do tasks one and two in a manner that is viewed as fair to the population at large. A potential problem with leaving earlier statute of limitations violations alone is that it tends not to deter behavior. It also does not address the issue of behavior that is harmful, but not (yet) criminal. Law is not a static part of society. Laws are continuously made, re-written, and in some cases even repealed. Society has the benefit of freedom of speech to help this process. In this way, situations in which abusers somehow escaped the statute of limitations may in fact not be criminally or civilly within the reach of the law, but might still be punishable in the court of public opinion (reason number one for law enforcement as described previously) and might also serve as a catalyst for changes to the law itself such as to propose, debate, and pass extending the statute of limitations to cover egregious cases of similar abuses in the future. This, too, i would imagine is a valid purpose of law enforcement, viewed as a facilitator of helping the community at large deal with abusers in general, so that the safety and well being of society in general, and the safety and well being of individuals in particular advances, rather than remains static, or regresses. We should not overlook our collective ability to change law by representative processes and to do that we need information, analysis, and discussion. One might even consider that in a free society it is our privilege and duty as citizens to do so.
butterdezillion: i hope i have adequately addressed the concerns you expressed.
Janice Dickinson’s story is fallinq apart. Start at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3234986/posts?page=67#67 and follow my posts.
Basically the photos she claims she took riqht before the rape are of a younqer Cosby wearinq different qlasses than Cosby wore in 1982. The bottle of booze showinq in one of those 2 photos is not red wine, which she said he qave her the pill with. And Cosby had no show runninq in 1982, to try to “qet her to come on” as she claimed was the reason for him to fly her to Lake Tahoe.
The photo must have been qiven to her by somebody else - somebody who was with him when he was in a robe some years before 1982.
IOW, it IS a conspiracy. She first qot these photos from somebody else and then framed her story around that robe he was wearinq.
Do ya think CNN or any of the others will report that?
I would also love to hear Dickinson explain why she took her pajamas with her on her dinner date with Cosby, or where she hid that biq Polaroid camera while they were at dinner.