This is absolutely not a stupid question! More prominent anarchists have wrestled with this question then almost any other question. There are entire multi-volume sets of books written about exactly this. I mean, it is really the central stumbling block to anarchism as well as the number one argument the state makes to justify its existence. I’ve gotten this question a couple of times myself, and I really can only provide my own answer, but I might use your question as a jump-off point to really go into this as much as I can, as well as list a bunch of additional resources that talk about this.
So – your question actually includes two assumptions that need to be dealt with. The first assumption is that people will definitely still rape and murder each other under a state of affairs completely different from this one. The second assumption is that people who do those things deserve some form of punishment, delivered by some body endowed with authority to carry it out. These are both assumptions that make complete sense in the current world. But let’s analyze those and see if we can’t deconstruct them a bit.
The first thing an anarchist would do is figure out why people are raping and murdering each other. In the vast majority of cases, people are raped or murdered by family members, co-workers, employers, or people that otherwise hold power over them in someway. People that they are otherwise forced to trust or are forced to be in contact with. Any in depth analysis of this would point to various internal societal hierarchies that lead people to feel entitled enough to take violent actions like this. Patriarchy is one of the leading culprits, particularly regarding rape, but other hierarchies are involved as well. So what would a world in which men hold no huge imbalance of political, social, and economic power look like in regards to rape? Would rape even still be the problem that it is? It isn’t very easy to answer that question since we live in this world and not that one. But that’s why anarchists are working to build the better one.
Another way to look at this is by looking at the alienation capitalism places us all under. We don’t feel close to each other and we are unable to feel close to each other because we are forced to compete with one another for the resources controlled by the capitalist class. This sense of alienation and isolation is another reason that people likely lash out violently. People seek to control others since they are unable to control their own lives or their own access to the things that make life worth living. Again, it is worth it to ask if murder would even be the problem that it is if everybody had access to food, shelter, water, and luxury in a free society based on mutual aid.
But let’s go ahead and assume that people are still going to be murderous, even in a much better society. Now we have to look at the second assumption – the idea that people who do act out in this violent sort of way deserve punishment.
Punishment regarding social crimes is an interesting thing, because it is rarely ever questioned, even though it ruins countless of innocent lives when innocent people are convicted for things they never did. But why do we feel that perpetrators of social ills deserve to be punished in some way? A lot of people point to punishment as some form of deterrent – if people are treated badly when they do bad things, people won’t do as many bad things. But this has never proven to actually be true. We have lived in societies with prisons and acts of violent punishment for a millennia, and people still regularly commit violent crimes. So if it doesn’t act as a deterrent, what other reasons do we have? Well, in many cases, it just feels right, like some form of justice has been achieved when the wicked are burned. But revenge in this sense has never proven to result in more social cohesion or a happier populous. In fact, societies in which criminals are punished the least and sentences are the lightest tend to be the happiest. The Nordic countries today have some of the lightest prison sentences and the most well-cared for prisoners, and they both have the lowest prison re-entry rate and the highest happiness ratings in the world. This same phenomena can be seen throughout the world in various indigenous societies as well. Cultures that have comparatively light forms of punishment, with clear roads back to societal acceptance for the perpetrators, tend to be happier and more cohesive as a whole.
Okay, so if people that commit these crimes don’t need to be punished particularly harshly, what needs to happen? There is no doubt that people who do these things need to separated from any additional victims. They also need to be told in no unclear terms that what they have done is wrong and will not be accepted in society. But do we need an authoritarian body to do that? Not necessarily. I mean, community groups tasked with protecting victims already do a much better job of achieving justice than police officers in the current world. Women’s shelters in particular have done far more for battered women than any police officer or justice system has likely done. So groups like that would still absolutely exist in an anarchist society, and the justice sought by the victim could be individual and based on both restorative and transformative justice. The perpetrator would be clearly taught how wrong their action is, they would be separated from any additional victims – but a road for societal acceptance would still be open to them and redemption would still be possible.
I hope this has answered the question to some degree. Let me know if you have any additional questions or if something wasn’t clear. As I said, this has been written about extensively by many anarchist thinkers over the years, and this is just my answer. But here are some additional resources on this issue:
This is going to be a stupid question but what would happen to people who do bad things in a anarchy word? Say they raped or murdered someone, with no government there would be no system to give them punishment or even send them to trail
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