Thursday, August 12, 2010

Rape Victims and Lie Detectors.

As a fun quip about sexual assaults and lie detectors in principle about the accusations against Al Gore (I'm a big fan by the way) there was the claim made that the individual who made the accusation failed a lie detector test several times. To which a friend noted that they can't be wrong (lie detectors are notoriously terrible and complete bunk) and I added:

Yeah, Maggie. I mean how is a device that measures your heart rate, breath rate and sweat rate and determines you're lying by the fact that you start sweating, breathing harder, and have your heart rate increase going to be fooled into thinking a woman is lying when she's talking about a time when she was sexually assaulted. I mean, she's clearly lying if she can't talk about her sexual assault without being cool as a cucumber.

And, now I'm actually kind of worried. How often are these machines employed to figure out of a woman was raped or not? Because, frankly I don't see how any rape victim could pass accordingly. Is it actually common? And if so, how terrible is that! Lie detectors try to show you're lying by picking up signs that you're nervous at some particular point. Well what if you have a good reason to be nervous, isn't that going to be called a lie?   --- Apparently it's very common and often a prerequisite for beginning an investigation.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey I'm in your blog! Cool.

Tatarize said...

Hm. I suppose your somebody. Though I suppose I also don't know who you are. Either way, stay and enjoy it makes it that much easier to assure myself that I have lurkers when in reality I don't seem to.

Tatarize said...

you're*

Unknown said...

Well, since you named someone in the post, one could assume that I'm that person named in the post.

Though I did say "blog" and not "post", which does imply more of a generalness.

Tatarize said...

One could so assume, I assume. But one could also assume the statement being that you're in the blog by being in the blog, thereby anybody could say that had they said that.

Though, the seemingly number most likely candidate seems more likely now, so I'll just run with my earlier suspicions.