Is corrective rape justified?

A lot of people believe that lesbians and gays do not deserve the same respect as homosexuals. Most people believe that women who chose to be lesbians so as to rectify this mistake or fault but the million dollar question is it justified for people to take the law into their own hands and rape innocent women.

Rape myths play a large role in the high incidence of rape. 'Corrective rape' is when a lesbian woman is raped in order to “make her heterosexual”. Men have stated that “fixing” these lesbian women is part of their duty as men within their community.

The media has addressed this issue numerous times in films, drama and soapies. For instance in Intersections there was a girl who was raped because she was a lesbian and the rapist threatened that if she were to tell the police. They would rape her girlfriend are lesbians safe in our society or are they treading on thin ice. 

I suppose one reason I don’t like it is that it’s an incredibly detached technical term for describing something which is a horrific experience to go through. The horrific experience it’s describing, in case you don’t know, is lesbians being raped in order to cure them of being lesbians. You might think that being raped by a bunch of men does not sound like a very effective cure for lesbianism.

Which is another reason I don’t like the term ‘corrective rape’: there’s no such thing as corrective rape. This is punitive rape. It’s rape as punishment for transgressing gender and sexual norms. It’s rape to remind you of what your place is, what your function in society is. The rapists might try to justify it by calling it corrective rape, but we all know that there’s no such thing as ‘corrective’ rape. This is because lesbianism cannot be corrected, since one can only correct that which is currently incorrect, and lesbianism is not incorrect. This is also because rape cannot correct anything.

On a conclusive note, I believe that lesbians should be respected and their happiness considered. If being a lesbian makes them happy who are we to deprive them of their respect.