Aside from trolls and people that just hate the victim most people don't think rape is ever acceptable or excusable. The issue is that not everyone defines rape to be the same thing. Let's look at the extreme of both ends. On one end you have someone that was beaten and held down by multiple rapists, everyone would agree that this is rape. On the other hand you might have someone that had sex with their date, but the didn't really want to, they didn't say yes with there words, but they were still sort of into it and got caught in the moment, but they regretted it later. Not everyone would consider that to be rape, and as you can imagine there is a variety of possibilities in between. Often people read physical signs if they get no verbal signs, and if there are obvious enough physical signs, like the girl taking off her clothes, people assume no verbal confirmation is needed, which you can disagree with, but still. I find that people have the most disagreement on what is rape and what isn't when there is no physical violence involved.
Another issue (the reason we need the court) is that nobody knows for certain what actually happened. However, it's pretty easy to see, without hearing much of the story or evidence, that the guys involved are really bad people, which makes it easy to not care about any of the details, throw them in jail you might say, they deserve it either way.
The Steubenville case seems to fall somewhere in the middle of what is perceived as rape; depending on the evidence you look at, and how you interpret it.
Here is an article with the text messages that were sent between the boys,
http://www.mobilebroadcastne ws.com...lle-Rape-Trial
From this it's hard to tell how "dead" she really was. At some points they say she was dead, but we know for a fact that they are exaggerating, the question is how much. Was she passed out, or did she just look out of it? I don't want to get into the graphic details here, but they go onto say things that would suggest she was awake while it happened, and that she actually physically participate (in a very minor way). It also says that she went
looking for her phone after, which comes into the victims story.
http://www.theatlanticwire.c om/nat...stimony/63192/
She says here that she was interested in Trent Mays, the accused, which makes it seem more likely that she would have sex with him consensually.
However, she goes onto say that the last thing she remembers is leaving the first party, and then
waking up and looking for her phone, and that would imply that she was passed out for a time, which would mean she was raped. Again though, people tend to forget things when they drink a lot, for example we know that she didn't pass out right when she left the party.
The victim original sent at text to the accused saying "We know you didn't rape me" but later said that she didn't know that digital penetration was also considered rape.
So before you scream at someone for not instantly taking the victims side know that there is some evidence to support
both sides.
