thread: 2005-05-16 : Violence
On 2005-05-17, Ed H wrote:
"Would someone who's informed say something about nonviolence and rape? What changes when you aren't putting your integrity up against being hit or beaten or killed, but being raped? Is nonviolence, as it seems to me to be, simply a different proposition if you're a man than if you're a woman?"
The people whose work on nonviolence I am interested in allow for protective use of force when other options are not open. Protective use of force has to be minimal and a last resort, but it's quite conceivable that the process of concluding that it *is* one's only resort could take only a fraction of a second.
It is also a fact that nonviolent communication can sometimes prevent assaults, attacks, and rapes from happening in the first place. It has happened. Reacting neither with fear, submission, and compliance, nor with retaliative violence, can change the dynamic of a violent situation, because it is unexpected. A rapist or an assailant expects you to retaliate or to submit and comply. A choice which is neither can change the interaction completely.
But yes, protective (minimal needed to protect oneself or another, non-retaliative) use of force, in e.g. a rape situation, would be totally legit by the "nonviolent" standards I'm interested in at the moment.
Others might differ on that.
