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I had a somewhat surprising conversation one time about why rape is--as TV Tropes puts it--a special kind of evil. I won't say who, but one of us thought it might be because it's hard to understand the motivation, while the other said this was, and in fact true.
So I'm not talking about how someone could be "bad enough" to rape, but rather why they would want to do it at all.
It's mostly about power. We had a disturbing (We have plenty of disturbing rape cases in Sweden ...) case where this 96 year old woman were raped by a young African male ... And that can't have been about anything else but power.
I think that the issue with rape is that if a man grows up with the belief that a woman is a lesser being he has little issues with raping her if he doesn't view her as an equal.
This is the issue with a lot of immigrants that commits despicable rapes in my country.
Then we have the other kind of rapist, the one who gets drunk and takes a girl home ( Here I have to say that as a girl I'd NOT join a drunk man to his place unless I wanted to have sex with him ...) and once they get started she says no because she does not wish to have sex with him. He doesn't listen to her because he's really horny and in his drunken state he believes that she just needs some convincing.
Girls and women are more than defenceless victims though, you gotta be smart and careful when you are out and involved with strange men. This is the sad truth.
But if you over and over again see the same sort of negative view of women from people that's from a certain religion or a certain place you do start to wonder about all of them. This said I'd never treat someone bad because where they origin from but I will not be surprised when they do/Say something that I expected from them.
I hear the power thing a lot. Can you explain it? Sometimes it is obvious that that's the case but doesn't seem true in the majority of rapes I hear of. I think rape appears to be more often due to biological urges and momentary loss of control rather than some kind of power game.
Studies show that the major motive for rape is power, not sex. Sex is used as a weapon to inflict pain, violence and humiliation. Most rapists appear to have normal personalities with an abnormal tendency to be aggressive and violent. Between 2/3 and 3/4 of sexual assaults are planned in advance.
Why people rape? Well, because it is actually not such a big deal. There are just as many robberies and murders each day, yet, we seem to remain unsettled mostly about the rapes. It is something that can happen in an instant, without previously planning it or making a deep judgement about it.
There are different gradations of rape. If a husband has sex with her wife even though she refused previously, it can be considered rape already. If a man does something slightly different from what was agreed on with a prostitute, it can be rape too. If a couple has sex, but both are absolutely drunk, it can be rape.
And yet, we get other extreme cases, in which the victim ends up beaten up or even dead. Or when someone has sex with a little child, even if it is from the same family. Or when they drug or kidnap someone to get sex.
So... pretty much for me, rape itself is something we can all get close to. Rape alone is a regular crime, but the context surrounding the action is what defines whether or not it is a serious offense.
You wake up the day after, but you don't remember having sex. That's all.
Who would be at fault? Well now that is another debate, as in our society many people still believe that men cannot be "raped" by women. Another issue might also be that, for men and women, there are different standards of what is considered a raping.
Based on what I remember, it looks as though they temporarily lose their sanity and they seem almost as shocked as you. Except for them the out-of-body like experience is pleasing whereas for the victim it's a defense mechanism. It doesn't really hit them until afterwards that they just raped someone. Rape is probably one of the least planned out crimes, so the motive isn't usually clear. It's usually a momentary lapse in judgement.