Originally posted by vivify
This actually comes from the Bible (Deuteronomy 22:23-24):
"If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—[b]the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife." ...[text shortened]... many conservatives are fundamentalist Christians, this kind of thinking is prevalent among them.[/b]
It's great that you can quote, but you suffer (as most do) from the inability to adequately or accurately interpret.
If a woman (or man, for that matter) has an opportunity to plead for the help of others in an otherwise helpless situation, she was expected to make use of that opportunity.
In other passages covering the same topic, if the woman had reason to believe she wouldn't be heard, i.e., out in a part of land which it wouldn't be reasonable to expect someone to hear her, she would not be held responsible for the act.
The presumption here is that a man initiating the act will be rebuffed by a woman who will either fend him off herself or plea for help.
If a woman neither attempts to fend him off herself or cries for help, there must be mitigating circumstances to excuse her failure, or she will be considered complicit in the act.
It's not a very difficult distinction to conceptualize, really.