Life in prison for stealthing…

[rawTOP]

South Australia (a state in Australia) looks like it will be passing laws that penalize stealthing with a maximum penalty of life in prison…

https://apple.news/AEfwiUADPRoidLpepN2skrQ

To me life in prison seems completely bonkers, over the top, and completely out of line with the damage done to the victim.

Apparently other Australian states (Tasmania and the Capital Territory) have already passed similar laws, but the article is unclear what the maximum penalty is in those situations.

[Bbdude78]

Yeah, I'm with you on the fact that it's bonkers.

I mean, assuming we agree that stealthing = rape, because the victim did not consent to unprotected sex, and you still went for unprotected sex without their knowledge or consent = no consent = rape, then my question would be: why not align the max penalty for stealthing with the max penalty for rape? A quick google search reveals that the maximum penalty for assault with intent to commit rape in Australia is 14 years imprisonment. 

And then of course you could have aggravating factors that would make the penalty longer, such as knowingly / willingly transmitting an STI.

But yeah, going for a "max life" penalty does seems disproportionate.

[viking8x6]

11 minutes ago, Bbdude78 said:

A quick google search reveals that the maximum penalty for assault with intent to commit rape in Australia is 14 years imprisonment. 

According to my slower google search it appears that the maximum penalty for rape in Australia varies from state to state, and is actually life imprisonment in South Australia, 14 years in NSW. But it's surprisingly hard to tease out such detail from most of the sites.

[FFPuppigboi]

I agree on aggravating factors, if there was no STI/STD transmission then why would that have a similar impact as someone who knowingly passed and infected someone with one? The risky one I can see might be Syphilis as not everyone will show the rash/skin symptoms and they may only find out when it’s at the organ damage stage while takes years to develop and only if untreated.

[ellentonboy]

Let me pose this question to the OP or any other BZ members with knowledge of the law.  This is specific in that in means someone "tampered" with a condom, knowing they were HIV positive, correct?  This DOES NOT mean spreading HIV by lying about your status to a potential sex partner?  I ask because I know of a situation in south Florida where two guys were prosecuted for going to the baths in Fort Lauderdale and trying to infect as many guys as possible.  So the activity I just mentioned would not fall under this Aussie law, correct?

[downtownswallow]

If the stealthing results in an STD infection, I'd start at 10 years max.  If it involves HIV then I can see a life term.

Edited November 4, 2022 by downtownswallow

[BootmanLA]

1 hour ago, ellentonboy said:

Let me pose this question to the OP or any other BZ members with knowledge of the law.  This is specific in that in means someone "tampered" with a condom, knowing they were HIV positive, correct?  This DOES NOT mean spreading HIV by lying about your status to a potential sex partner?  I ask because I know of a situation in south Florida where two guys were prosecuted for going to the baths in Fort Lauderdale and trying to infect as many guys as possible.  So the activity I just mentioned would not fall under this Aussie law, correct?

I can't see the exact wording of the South Australia law in question so I can't answer your query specifically (and neither can anyone else, unless the exact wording is provided). I can only say that in some places, all the examples you cite (tampering with a condom or lying about positive status) would be penalized. 

[Vancrawman]

i'm not POZ (hopefully that will change sooner or later) but stealthing with a tampered condom is always wrong, of course. the new law would criminalize that as it should - although yeah, i agree life imprisonment is too much - but would appear not to criminalize lying about one's status, which is considered by many to be a form of stealthing as well.

personally, i never ask anyone their status so they never need lie.

[PozBearWI]

So many of our laws still consider HIV in the context of life in the 1980's.  In my opinion it should fall under the same set of rules as HSV and HPV (which in my generation was common).  How we consider HIV should evolve to more like that context.  Individuals who wish to prevent HIV infection have ways to prevent that and still bareback.  

I assert that man of the medical advances and treatments and even cures we're experiencing now is the human benefit resulting from the AIDS crisis.  If as a society we wish to control disease; we need to make it readily available to everyone without price as a barrier.  At the moment there are programs still around whose roots are in the 1980's here in Wisconsin.  Affordability is for now less an issue here.  Of course that could change drastically with a different administration.  

Germaine to this topic; socially I assert we would be better off decriminalizing disease.  For HIV specifically there are methods of controlling that are not dependent on whether someone withheld information or even outright lied.  

[Leather69]

Re - life in prison

Several Australian states use the term "life in prison" for a number of crimes eg murder. Unlike the USA where life means life ,in actual effect it is for a period of some 20 years, but with a good lawyer, depending on the crime can be reduced to a fixed term. 

Some states eg New South Wales and Victoria judges have the ability to nominate longer actual terms with a non-parole period.  

[PozTalkAuthor]

I admit I can't be fully rational, being pozzed unwillingly. Not stealthed in the real sense, but cheated for years... 

Prison for life? I don't think it's appropriate; rather I'd LOCK his penis in chastity permanently. So he can not stealth anyone. 

I recognize it might not be rational thinking, but if you're offending someone sexually, you need to respond in that way. Even if there is another issue: people who use sex -rape, stealth, and so on- to harm their victims, do not rely on sex or STD'S themselves; they do it for the sake of feeling powerful. Superior to others: "I can decide what to do of your body and mind". 

So, if the offender has this way of thinking, involving his sex organs might not work as they can use other methods. 

I heard yesterday about a young guy, 24 years old, who killed himself after being involved in one-year-long virtual relationship with who he thought to be a girl, but he was a 64-years-old man instead. A man using a model's photos and manipulating the guy's mind till the end. But after the guy's death, this awful person began to hook up with other men on Instagram pretending to be the same girl. Same photos same names same words and vain love promises... 

I don't know if lifelong jail is too much for stealthers, rapists, or evend mental manipulators who use love as a weapon. The concept leading to this road, is the same! The desire of taking full control on other people. And, in case of stealthing with HIV involved, it's an unrecoverable damage you cause to another person forcing them to a lifelong medical condition. Eventually not like a physical injure that brings you on a wheelchair permanently. I'm poz myself and do not compare my condition to others; but if I could have decided, I would have stayed neg. 

Nowadays I believe that more foresight is needed. Maybe jailing the stealther gives you a false sense of safety. Then the chapter closes... Till next time. The real battle to fight should be, PrEP available to ANYONE sexually active in the world. For stealthers, I don't know. Some years of jail for sure but being aware that independently on how hard the punishment is, no one gives us the neg sign back. 

[hntnhole]

5 hours ago, FFPuppigboi said:

not everyone will show the rash/skin symptoms and they may only find out when it’s at the organ damage stage

Which is why getting tested regularly for sti's is so important if you're sexually promiscuous.  The sooner the medics find out, the sooner they can treat whatever we come down with.

[hntnhole]

6 hours ago, rawTOP said:

South Australia (a state in Australia) looks like it will be passing laws that penalize stealthing with a maximum penalty of life in prison…

This seems breathtakingly harsh.  I'm wondering if there's a "tradition" of particularly cruel prison sentences dating from when  was a penal colony for the British Empire?  NSW only lasted for several decades as an official penal colony, but - old habits die hard too.

[ejaculaTe]

For the law nerds in the crowd, the act is the Criminal Law Consolidation (Stealthing) Amendment 2021. It amends Section 46 of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935, the section that defines consent to sexual activity. Section 46(2) says a person consents to sexual activity if the person freely and voluntarily agrees to the sexual activity. Section 46(3) says a person is taken not to freely and voluntarily agree to sexual activity if any of a list of circumstances occurs, for example, the person is forced, intoxicated, unable to understand the nature of the activity. The amendment adds new paragraph (ga) which reads: “the person agrees to engage in the activity because of a misrepresentation by the other person about the use of a condom; or….” 

In slightly plainer English, section 46(3) with the amendment will read in relevant part: “…a person is taken not to freely and voluntarily agrees to sexual activity if   * * * (ga) the person agrees to engage in the activity because of a misrepresentation by the other person about the use of a condom;"

Section 48(1) defines rape [there are other definitions, but I'm trying to keep this simple]: he or she engages, or continues to engage, in sexual intercourse with another person who —

(a) does not consent to engaging in the sexual intercourse; or

(b) has withdrawn consent to the sexual intercourse,

and the offender knows, or is recklessly indifferent to, the fact that the other person does not so consent or has so withdrawn consent (as the case may be).

Maximum penalty: Imprisonment for life.  ----- So if you get someone to agree to sexual intercourse by saying you'll use a condom and you don't use a condom, the person hasn't consented to engage in intercourse with you. You can be charged with rape and you could get life imprisonment.

 

[BootmanLA]

15 hours ago, PozTalkAuthor said:

I admit I can't be fully rational, being pozzed unwillingly. Not stealthed in the real sense, but cheated for years... 

Prison for life? I don't think it's appropriate; rather I'd LOCK his penis in chastity permanently. So he can not stealth anyone. 

I recognize it might not be rational thinking, but if you're offending someone sexually, you need to respond in that way. Even if there is another issue: people who use sex -rape, stealth, and so on- to harm their victims, do not rely on sex or STD'S themselves; they do it for the sake of feeling powerful. Superior to others: "I can decide what to do of your body and mind". 

So, if the offender has this way of thinking, involving his sex organs might not work as they can use other methods. 

I heard yesterday about a young guy, 24 years old, who killed himself after being involved in one-year-long virtual relationship with who he thought to be a girl, but he was a 64-years-old man instead. A man using a model's photos and manipulating the guy's mind till the end. But after the guy's death, this awful person began to hook up with other men on Instagram pretending to be the same girl. Same photos same names same words and vain love promises... 

I don't know if lifelong jail is too much for stealthers, rapists, or evend mental manipulators who use love as a weapon. The concept leading to this road, is the same! The desire of taking full control on other people. And, in case of stealthing with HIV involved, it's an unrecoverable damage you cause to another person forcing them to a lifelong medical condition. Eventually not like a physical injure that brings you on a wheelchair permanently. I'm poz myself and do not compare my condition to others; but if I could have decided, I would have stayed neg. 

Nowadays I believe that more foresight is needed. Maybe jailing the stealther gives you a false sense of safety. Then the chapter closes... Till next time. The real battle to fight should be, PrEP available to ANYONE sexually active in the world. For stealthers, I don't know. Some years of jail for sure but being aware that independently on how hard the punishment is, no one gives us the neg sign back. 

I agree that most of this post is not rational.

Part of the problem with it is that while rape is a sexual offense, it's also a crime of violence, and locking up someone's dick doesn't remove the capability to commit violence. That need will just find another means of expression. Thinking of rape in strictly sexual terms, and treating it with strictly sexual-control measures, doesn't do shit. You allude to this, but it's the central point: we should think of rape and similar offenses less in terms of "sex crime" and more in terms of "violent crime".

As for the 64-year old man: I get that this young guy killed himself, but it sounds to me like he had mental issues of his own. A rational, healthy-minded person doesn't die of suicide because he found out someone he thought was close to him was a fraud. And frankly, while 64-man posing as 20's-girl is kind of extreme, people pose as all sorts of things online all day long. Look at this site, where hundreds of guys jack off every day thinking about getting pozzed while not actually doing the first damned thing to actually GET pozzed.

Now, I will agree that deliberately giving someone HIV without his consent ought to be criminalized - at least, conceptually. It's no different than inflicting any other condition or disease on the person. But the problem is that it's very, very difficult to prove "deliberately". Aside from the credibility concerns of "I told him I was poz" vs "No he never said he was", you have credibility questions for the victim - could it have been someone else who gave it to him? Has he had unprotected sex with anyone else? If he says no, how do we know he's telling the truth? Not many guys who are out to stealth-infect others are likely to leave an auditable trail of messages wherein they confess what they're doing.

Separately, though, others have suggested that there are ways for people to protect themselves (ie PrEP). But the problems there are myriad: there's the education issue, where a huge portion of people in this country don't know what PrEP is. Many of those who do assume it's something only gay men need, and for them, only the slutty ones. PrEP needs to become both as non-toxic as a multivitamin and as widely used, so that anyone sexually active in the slightest can get on it.

The good thing about condoms - to the extent that we can say "good thing" about them - is that they were already widely recognized as useful for some purposes in the community at large when they began being promoted for safer sex. PrEP needs to be as ubiquitous as condoms before it can really be considered an adequate way for the average person (as opposed to the well-informed gay or bi man) to protect him/herself against HIV.