This is the worst of the victim blaming comments.
What was a mother of 2 doing drinking champagne with strangers for? That is very naive. Did she think they were just going to offer her some champagne and then leave – like the ‘Champagne Fairy’ or something. People who are this naive deserve to have their video on Youtube!
I hope it’s ok to suggest here that any woman thinking of employing, befriending, or dating Andrew Nyazai of Godalming, who made the above comment, should think again. Someone who thinks that if you have champagne with a stranger you deserve to be gang raped and have it broadcast to the world, is not someone you want to have in your life.
There are also a bunch of eejits talking about the evils of serving champagne to minors, as if this doesn’t happen at weddings and other family events all over the country every day.
I click on those threads because i keep thinking “well surely THIS case is so clear cut that no one will try to blame the victim!” I continually underestimate the extent to which misogyny will grasp at any available straw.

Has there been much psychological research on the victim blaming reflex? I suspect it is a side effect of authoritarian personalities, but other groups of people do it too. I’d like to know how you go about mitigating this irrationality in people.

There’s likely a fair number of those 599 who got it randomly–or, if they tagged it with something innocuous, inadvertently–saw that it was porn, and turned it off without realizing the full extent of what it was. The view number doesn’t indicate how many people watched all of it, just how many accessed it. 600 views and one complaint doesn’t necessarily translate into 99.8% of the YouTube-viewing populace being completely okay with rape, violent/rape-porn, or sexually explicit content involving minors.

“The fact that this rape video made it on YouTube begins to make me worry about all the ‘hot teen stripteases’ you can find on YouTube and just how many of them are performed and then put on consentingly”

Pretty much any piece of amateur pornography obtained from a p2p service or from a site where the content is user-generated raises that question. The rape video making it onto and remaining on YouTube doesn’t really have much to do with this. It was an issue before, and even if we had a sure way to keep that from happening again, it would still be an issue. Professional US-based porn has its problems, of course, but you can be relatively sure that, in modern productions, at the very least the participants are adults who know they’re being recorded and are aware that it will be distributed.

With amateur porn of unknown origin, well…you can’t. Photos and videos get stolen and uploaded by scumbag acquaintances or service techs. They occasionally get uploaded accidentally. They get uploaded by psycho exes. They might have been coerced when that psycho ex was still an abusive partner. They might have been made without the knowledge of the subject(s). They might involve minors. You can sometimes tell, but that requires viewing and by extension participating in it. It’s been a worry for a while.

What’s disgusting is 600 people saw this video, and only ONE PERSON flagged it. That meant 599 people watched this video and didn’t think “Oh, this is off.”

Now, I’m sure there’s a few people who clicked away in disgust, or thought it was a hoax, but they still didn’t flag it. They just went on with their day and didn’t look twice. But how many people either watched it and laughed, watched it and got aroused, or watched it and didn’t even register that anything was wrong with it?

Then when YouTube was petitioned to take it down, they did so reluctantly. Why? They wanted to make sure that users had as many opportunities to post whatever they liked on their site without fear of reprimand.

So this says two things to me:

1) Your average viewer of YouTube is either apathetic or delights in the perverse material they stumble across

and 2) YouTube isn’t all that bothered by 1)

The fact that this rape video made it on YouTube begins to make me worry about all the ‘hot teen stripteases’ you can find on YouTube and just how many of them are performed and then put on consentingly

I suppose I understand this in an intellectual sense, but this impulse is emotionally alien to me.

Right there with you. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that when I see behavior beyond the pale I try to find some recognizable rationale or reason to extend the benefit of the doubt; none of these things being possible in this instance. I could speculate about the state of mind required to commit crimes like this, but I think it is only necessary to understand that it is not a temperament recognizable to any healthy person.

Mostly I try to stay emotionally detached while reading things like this, lest I end up mental myself.

I’ve thought about it for a while and here’s what I’ve come up with: They committed this crime so that they would feel powerful and significant — I would readily wager that they are marginal and powerless otherwise. They publicized it to get peer approval and to broadcast their relevance.

That’s as good as explanation as any and is certainly congruent with the psychological aspects (at least as I’ve been told) of a crime like rape. I suppose I understand this in an intellectual sense, but this impulse is emotionally alien to me.

person:

ou guys know the sun is a tabloid right? A few weeks ago they had an article about a ghost along with fake ghost footage.

The fact that the Sun is a tabloid doesn’t, in of itself, prove that the story is false. On top of that, the Times (definitely not a tabloid) covered the same story.