It's like a train wreck....

Teresa (13):

Alternately, you can raise your right hand and swear that all of your interactions with the opposite sex are governed by your concern over the available food supply and your desire to reproduce.

Tell me you honestly believe that no woman has ever married a man because she believed he would be able to provide for her and her current and/or future children.

We do not consistently see this kind of violence or this level of violence accompanying food shortages or famines; and the violence that is taking place is not a function of competition over food.

You mean like in New Orleans after the hurricane?

The kind of physical damage many of these women are suffering is incompatible with your theory that the rapes are motivated by a desire to reproduce.

Have you never known people who do things without thinking them through or realizing why? I wasn’t positing that these explanations were on a conscious level. Do all the men you know who have sex with their wives and girlfriends do it because they're trying to make babies? And yet it appears to be a basic human drive.

It doesn't affect the rapists' food supply.

Do you think they feed these women after brutalizing them? Do you believe they don’t take whatever food is there? Do you think that if they were well-fed and safe in their hometowns they would even be in the military?

The most effective way to address this problem is to give help to the women who've been hurt, protect women in these areas from further assaults, and reestablish peace and the rule of law.

Helping the women who have been hurt does indeed address their immediate problem at this moment in time. But just how would you propose protecting them in the future, and reestablishing peace and rule of law? Sending in Blackwater?

You know why these guys are committing these appallingly brutal rapes? Because they can, and because they're egging each other on to worse and worse behavior. That's stoppable. It's hard, but it can be done. And we can help do it.

Yes, because they can. And because they were raised that way. In an environment where life is cheap and people die all the time, so what’s another woman, more or less, especially one that isn’t even related to you.

Nonsense, also, because we aren't such slaves to our biology.

-WE- aren't such slaves to our biology. Those of us who are lucky enough to have been born into a place where we don't have to worry about if we're going to eat tomorrow, or finding the best place to hide from raiders, or watching over half our children die from disease or starvation. Not being a slave to the basic issues of staying alive long enough to produce and raise at least a couple of children to adulthood is, indeed, a luxury we enjoy. Not everyone in the world has that luxury.

I wasn’t trying to diminish the plight of these women, or rationalize why one shouldn’t offer help to them. What I WAS trying to do was make some sense out of this, because I can't help but believe that such things could be prevented if one is able to determine the root causes.

So, yes – help the women who are hurting now. AND seriously try to figure out why it is happening now in order to prevent this from happening to their daughters and granddaughters.

Considering that these kinds of atrocities have been associated with warfare since prehistory, it seems that there might be some adaptive reason for it.

In animal behaviors, we see competing groups killing each other when food is scarce. Competing males kill infants in order to send the females back into estrous so that the winner's genes are propragated.

What we are seeing here is a combination of the two behaviors - rape so that the conquerers genes are dispersed into the conquered population, but the brutality of the acts killing or reproductively maiming, so that there is less competition for finite resources.

The most effective ways to stem these behaviors would be to address the issues of food and birth control. Unfortunately, the leaders of these countries rarely care about what is best for their people, individually or as a whole, and Western humanitarian efforts are siphoned into the coffers of those using it to their own ends.

Which is not to say that donations to these women are wasted - I'm sure the individual women appreciate them very much. But it won't stop this from happening next time.