Over at Abyss2hope.
Included in this edition is a post that explores why people are taught that it is selfish to take self-protective actions based on what our intuition tells us about the people we interact with.
Shifts in the legal system and public opinion have made it easier to prosecute women who molest boys in their pubescent years, experts say. And cases continue to draw public attention. But those who work closely with victims such as Diana’s grandson say rite-of-passage myths still make it hard for many, including jurors, to sympathize with older boys in such cases, who are also less likely to tell parents or police about abusive relationships with older women.
[...] Pam Hobbs, who heads the children’s court services program in Harris County district courts, said she’s seen police and prosecutors taking underage boys’ allegations more seriously in the past decade. Potential jurors, though, are another matter.
[...] When [Richard] Gartner [a psychologist who works with male sexual abuse survivors] started talking to fellow psychologists about the subject in the early 1990s, he said, he got a lot of “blank stares.” People thought he was exaggerating the problem. Now, there are national organizations, conferences and online listserves dedicated to the topic.
This continued belief in a dangerous myth is no surprise to me since the successful prosecution of any type of sex crime can be derailed by any number of dangerous myths which allow sexual predators to be seen as people who haven’t done anything clearly criminal. These myths are designed to prevent victims from speaking up and to prevent people from believing once the victim does speak up.
Besides being useful to sexual predators, these myths are useful to people who want the illusion that there isn’t a problem. If they refuse to see the problem then the problem doesn’t exist anywhere near them or theirs.
Only it doesn’t work that way.
(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.
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THIBODAUX, La. - The man suspected of being a serial killer had been accused of rape on two occasions before the killing of his alleged first victim, but he never stood trial, newspapers reported Saturday. Ronald Dominique was indicted on nine counts of first-degree murder earlier this month. Held in lieu of a $9 million bond, he has yet to enter a plea.
In 1993, a Houma man told Thibodaux police that Dominique tied him up and raped him at gunpoint, but an officer chose not to make an arrest, the Daily Comet and the Courier newspapers reported. In 1996, a Thibodaux man went to the same police officer with an almost identical account, but while Dominique was arrested and jailed, he was released three months later without prosecution.
If men think that ineffective investigations of rape allegations never impact their own safety, this case shows how wrong they are. It also shows in stark terms that women rape victims aren’t the only ones who have reason to be reluctant to report what happened to them.
In both of the reported rapes, the alleged rapist claimed that the sexual contact was consensual and even explained away his brandishing of a gun.
This case makes me wonder how much getting away with certain acts of violence emboldens rapists while the inadequate criminal justice response reminds them that rape survivors pose some danger to their continued violence.
We must do better for all victims and in response to all types, ages and genders of perpetrators.
(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.
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Whenever a case like the one at Duke comes up, too many people will say that if the case falls apart this alleged victim has harmed future — real — rape victims.
That’s a false charge.
The false-accusation theorists are the ones who harm present and future real rape victims. They never wait for pesky evidence that proves their theory before launching personal attacks against alleged victims. They sit like vultures waiting for the next case where they can get their claws into an alleged victim.
They also shift personal responsibility from themselves to the alleged victims they attack for the fallout of their attacks on all rape victims. If their attacks are proven to be against real rape victims they play the innocent victim and at best offer a putrid, oops. More often they fly silently away until their next target comes into sight.
Women they can label as sluts are a favorite target of these vultures. Often it seems like it only takes being an alleged rape victim for some vultures to label an alleged victim a slut when the alleged rapist isn’t someone totally repulsive.
If any charges are dropped they swoop in triumphant while making enough of a ruckus to attract other vultures. The kill is all that matters since they don’t need legal proof that the alleged victim is a liar who committed a crime by reporting rape.
The interesting contradiction about these vultures is that many of them will also feast on select alleged rapists. Any disreputable alleged rapist with male alleged victims is a prime target. That target becomes tastier if he is a minority and any of his victims are not.
Alleged rapists who are classified as illegal aliens are also favorite prey of these vultures.
Vultures accuse those who assume all alleged victims to be credible — until proven not credible — of being vultures out to destroy innocent men. That is a false accusation and a projection of their own habits onto those who oppose them.
That vultures say they oppose false or unfounded accusations at the same time they make them is the ultimate vulture irony.
Legal proof is only needed when the accusation is against someone they identify with. Which raises the question of why so many vultures identify with alleged rapists.
If you don’t want to prevent rape victims from getting justice, don’t be a vulture.
(Crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
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A children’s T-shirt has aroused the ire of a local shopper. The T-shirt depicts two panels of stick figures, with a male figure pushing a female figure out of a box. Captioned “Problem Solved,” the shirt has appalled people engaged in deterring domestic violence.
“I thought that shirt was very offensive, and I’m sure people who made that shirt thought it was cute,” District Attorney Evert Fowle said Friday. “But when you prosecute 728 domestic violence cases a year, it’s not cute.”
The shirt was removed briefly after a customer protested — but later returned to the shelves of the Augusta Kmart.
To me the term offensive doesn’t accurately describe the message of this T-shirt.
In the first frame the girl stick figure is jumping up in excitement while the boy stick figure appears to be frowning at her with his hands at his waist. Underneath that frame is the word Problem.
In the second frame the boy figure is smirking and has one arm fully extended toward where the girl was, but now there is now only empty space beside him. The far wall of the second frame has been shattered sending bits of the frame wall out. Two lines show the path of the girl’s descent and she is shown falling head first. Underneath the second frame is the word Solved.
Her crash landing is left to the imagination. Which makes sense since what happens to her isn’t relevant to this boy’s problem and his solution.
This attitude T-shirt is unintentionally educational.
In only 2 frames it captures the dynamics of a common and sometimes deadly form of interpersonal violence that happens in the real world. It perfectly illustrates the imbalance between the stimulus and the response. She annoys him and he shoves her through a wall. He’s left with a feeling of satisfied power and that’s all that matters.
Just as with this T-shirt, many people don’t understand why the dynamic captured in this T-shirt is offensive. They think nobody should make a fuss about this because it’s a cartoon. Those who do make a fuss must be missing a funny bone.
This isn’t satire or humor. It is reality in stick-figure form. And it makes some people smile or laugh.
That’s the real problem.
So often when a man murders a woman in his life, people ask where this violence comes from. How could an otherwise nice man do something this horrific? This T-shirt gives the answer.
Murder as simple problem solving. She was annoying and now she’s not.
That leaves the question of how we would illustrate a third box in this same style if the back of the T-shirt continued this story.
If the boy stick figure ended up in the hangman’s noose with the caption Justice (printed hangman style), would those who find the original version funny still be laughing or calling this T-shirt cute?
Would they think the revised T-shirt would be an appropriate Christmas present?
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
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WSJ: ‘Unprotected’ by Danielle Crittenden
Unfortunately, the young women described in “Unprotected” have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their “sexual choices.” And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.
Thus the danger of sexually transmitted diseases is too often overlooked in the lifestyle choices of the young women at the unnamed college where the author works.
These college women are either interacting only with other women or Ms. Crittenden is implying men are not making any choices when it comes to sex and that they shouldn’t be expected to do so. Since rape is a serious problem on college campuses, the further implication — through omission — is that being raped is the woman’s choice.
The author meets patients who cannot sleep, who mutilate themselves, who exhibit every symptom of psychic distress. Often they don’t even know why they feel the way they do. As these girls see it, they are acting like sensible, responsible adults: They practice “safe sex” and limit their partners to a mere two or three per year.
They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can’t understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong. As the author observes, surveys have found that “sexually active teenage girls were more than three times as likely to be depressed, and nearly three times as likely to have had a suicide attempt, than girls who were not sexually active.”
Ms. Crittenden is quick to decide that all of this is the result of bad decisions by women based on modern psychology, but as someone who had all those symptoms of psychic distress except self-mutilation and who didn’t know why I felt as I did, I know this psychic distress is neither irrational nor self-inflicted. For years certain memories were just too painful to think about and I mistakenly believed I had put what happened to me firmly in the past.
Too often a girl or woman is described as sexually active even when she was raped or sexually abused. As in my own case after rape, I drank alcohol to numb the pain and then was seen as someone men could freely exploit. Then I had people like Ms. Crittenden scolding me for for my sexual choices while letting those who raped or used me off the hook.
That rape and sexual abuse is so outside of Ms. Crittenden’s thought process speaks volumes about her lack of understanding about the topic of her op-ed piece.
Near the end of this piece Ms. Crittenden finally addresses the sexual behavior of a man. Only he’s gay.
So Ms. Crittenden makes her point crystal clear by omitting straight men from her op-ed piece. Sexual responsibility is for everybody but heterosexual men and boys.
From the beginning to the end of her op-ed piece Ms. Crittenden caters to the male dominated audience of the Wall Street Journal. “Hey, men whatever you do with or to women is her responsibility. You will not be held responsible for your sexual choices.”
Very convenient.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
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The headline on this news story makes it seem like everyone involved in prostitution in Atlantic City, New Jersey and elsewhere have chosen to play a dangerous game, but for many it isn’t a game, but a trap, one that benefits pimps, Johns and other exploiters.
Selling sex on the streets of this gambling capital is a dangerous pursuit: Streetwalkers have been strangled, smothered, slashed and set ablaze. [...] Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz said the Atlantic City cases were sufficiently different from the Egg Harbor deaths to make authorities believe they were carried out by different attackers. He also resists speculation that the four ditch bodies were the work of a serial killer, noting that autopsies could not determine the cause of death for two of the women. No arrests have been made in any of this year’s attacks in and near Atlantic City.
In any case, the attacks illustrate how dangerous it is for prostitutes, who are statistically 18 times more likely to be killed than other women, and 40 times more likely to die from other than natural causes, according to national studies.
These stark statistics are aided by the disdainful attitudes many people have toward those trapped in prostitution. The girls and women become something less than human. If something bad happens to them, they either brought it upon themselves or it’s no great loss.
The nation’s most notorious prostitute killings were committed in the Pacific Northwest by a single attacker who came to be known as the Green River Killer. In pleading guilty in 2003 to the murders of 48 prostitutes, Gary Leon Ridgway told a judge he targeted street walkers “because I thought I could kill as many as I wanted to without getting caught.”
Unfortunately, the view some people have of other people as a commodity contributes to people like this. Whenever someone says about a crime victim or alleged victim, “she’s just a hooker” they are robbing her of her humanity and they are revealing a lack within themselves. At its worst, this perceived lack of humanity can cause a person to rationalize committing crimes they otherwise wouldn’t commit.
It can cause teenagers to think of attacking and murdering the homeless as nothing more significant that a little fun.
Like many prostitutes in similar situations, Spazz, who said she was beaten by a “trick” two years ago, didn’t call police when it happened. Like all four hookers found dead behind the motels in Egg Harbor Township, and like 85 percent of prostitutes nationwide, Spazz has a drug problem.
I suspect that many of these women who are at the highest risk have a long history of problems that drugs keep at bay. For some it is childhood sexual abuse, for others drugs may be their only coping mechanism. Any drug treatment program that doesn’t deal with suppressed issues sets most participants up for failure.
Unfortunately, those who don’t break free of drugs and/or prostitution are usually given all the blame for ineffective programs and the cynicism of the program drop outs. If they fall victim to the ultimate preditors, too many of us are unwilling to call them innocent victims.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
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Check it out at Abyss2hope.
Included in this edition is information about the increase in charges being filed against women after they report being raped and a post about the guilt many rape victims feel because they couldn’t stop their rapist(s) from raping again.
The rush to judgment against alleged rape victims directly contributes to victims reluctance to report rape and their misplaced guilt over remaining silent.
Those who back laws and policies which scare victims away from reporting are helping rapists. If anyone — other than rapists — should feel guilty about not stopping rapists it is them.
As in this comment thread over at Alas, some people keep insisting that women lie about being raped while insisting that men don’t lie about rape.
[Update (12/17): Per Daran's request I am clarifying that my use of "insisting that men don't lie about rape" incorrectly labels his words on the linked thread. If I understand his correction what he continues to assert is that it hasn't been proven that men lie about rape.
I see that as playing word games. He disagrees.
Here is his own explanation of his position:
Feminist cannot object to the statement "Women do (sometimes) lie about rape-and men don’t". Because:
1. Construing "lie about rape" to mean "falsely report to the police that they were raped", the statement is true, or at least, feminists cannot show that it is false.
2. Feminists cannot object to that construction, because they were the ones who used that construction in the first place when they circulated the 2% false accusation myth.
Edited to add:
3. While it is debatable to what extent individual feminists can be held responsible for the actions of other feminists, feminists who make generalised group-based complaints about the actions of non-feminists, cannot object when they are hoist on that petard.
end update]
If challenged, they will explain that by denying that men lie about rape, they are referring only to a very specific scenario where the man is the alleged victim who filed a police report.
It’s a very useful redefinition for alleged rapists and those who want to dismiss the pervasiveness of sexual violence against girls and women.
I’ve been thinking about how this dual “statement of facts” creates an unfair bias against female alleged rape victims.
What “women lie about rape, men don’t” does is plant the idea that when a rape case comes up where a woman is the alleged victim she must be treated with open skepticism. Can’t take her word for what happened because she’s female and girls and women lie about being raped. If there is anything about her that people won’t like or won’t trust then it can seem like she must be lying about being raped.
However, if a rape case comes up where the man is the alleged victim he must be treated as a real victim. Heck, there’s no need for the word alleged. He’s simply a victim. No criminal trial needed to know who is innocent and who is guilty. All he has to do is self-identify as a sexual assault/abuse victim and everyone must believe him even if he makes that claim during a crank and obscene call to a rape crisis line.
“Women lie about rape, men don’t” also plants the idea that when it comes to a particular sex crime case where a key part of the evidence is testimony, men are always honest while women will resort to lies for a whole list of reasons.
This implication of male honesty vs. female dishonesty is nonsense, but because it is supposedly based on solid research many people never question it and let it color their perception of what they hear.
This is an attempt to misuse probability theory both in the determination of probability statistics and the use of those statistics. The probability when flipping a balanced coin is 50:50 that it will be heads. But that probability does not predict the outcome of the next flip of the coin.
What the “men don’t lie about rape” statement does is make people assume that statistics on false accusations predicts who you should believe in so-called “he said, she said” rape cases.
Unlike the probability of a flipped coin, accurate statistics of convictions for false accusations are not the same as accurate statistics for false accusations. Just as some of those convicted of rape are later cleared through evidence such as DNA mismatches, some who are convicted or charged with fabricating a charge of rape are proved to be innocent or are convicted based on judgments about the alleged victim’s character and honesty. She seems like someone who would lie therefore she’s judged as a liar.
I can almost hear the men who say, “men don’t lie about rape” screaming that I’m supporting their view that alleged rape victims should be assumed to be dishonest. If any women have lied about being raped then we must assume that this rape victim is a liar until there is enough evidence to prove she’s telling the truth. We can’t use the claim that only 2% of rape claims are false to show anything about this alleged victim.
What they want is a starting belief of, “she’s lying.” I not only don’t want this, I will show that this belief impedes justice. Instead, I believe there should be a starting assumption of credibility.
My support for the assumption of credibility in the report of a crime is not based on statistics. It is based on how assumptions impact the collection of evidence. Once investigators assume the alleged victim is no victim at all, they may feel justified in interrogating a real rape victim until she decides she won’t get justice and abandons her case or until she is treated so abusively that she breaks and tells her interrogators whatever they want to hear. Either way, the outcome is the illusion that the negative assumption has been proven to be fact. These cases are then classified as unfounded or false.
This injustice then reinforces the case being made by those who say that huge numbers of girls and women lie about being raped.
For rapists, this is a good thing since it increases the odds that they will get away with their crimes without being charged with even a misdemeanor.
When the assumption about the alleged victim is credibility (untainted by the “women lie about rape” bias) that allows for the ethical collection and evaluation of evidence, including testimony from the alleged victim. Sometimes there will be enough evidence to bring charges and sometimes there won’t be. With the assumption of credibility the mere lack of evidence doesn’t get twisted into confirmation of a lie.
For rapists, this is a bad thing since it increases the odds that they will be charged for their crimes and that they will be convicted and it reduces the odds that their victims will be labeled liars and criminals.
Despite what many people claim, assuming an allegation is credible and working from there does not doom innocent men to false convictions.
For rapists, busting the myth that “women lie about rape, men don’t” is a bad thing. They are counting on the power of this myth and the fear innocent men have of false rape convictions to keep rape laws from being enforced.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.
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So often when people bring up false convictions, they talk about maliciousness as if that is the only cause. The implication is that those who report crimes are the ones mostly to blame for false convictions. Nowhere does this belief seem to be stronger than when discussing rape.
The perceived solution to this problem is almost always a call for lax enforcement of rape laws or a removal of rape victim shield laws. If only we’d stop protecting alleged rape victims, no innocent men would be sent to prison.
But Injustice Anywhere has a post about faulty assumptions about the forensics of how to determine whether a fire was the result of arson. Those assumptions are now in question and may have led to thousands of false convictions. Maybe even the execution of the innocent.
That means that the assumptions about wrongful rape convictions must be thrown out and replaced by the data of how wrongful convictions really happen.
Blaming the victim might be easy, but easy isn’t always accurate.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.
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[Please note the comment guideline change described at the end of this post.]
For years, [Madison, Wis] police and city lawyers refused to believe a blind woman who said an intruder raped her at knifepoint. They even charged her with lying about it. Now, five years after DNA connected a sex offender to the attack, the city has apologized to the woman, known as Patty, and is offering her $35,000. Outraged by a book detailing her skeptical treatment by authorities, the City Council approved the payment last month and ordered police to draw up new policies for interviewing crime victims. [...]
The resolution gives Police Chief Noble Wray 90 days to recommend new techniques for interviewing of victims of sensitive crimes, including how to eliminate “the use of lies, coercion, deception, ruses or other techniques designed to break down individuals” in all but the rarest of circumstances.
This non-monetary portion of the resolution is something that all police forces should resolve to do. Rape victims deserve to be treated ethically and not with assumptions that they are criminals who must be broken.
It shouldn’t take the publication of a book such as Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice
In 2001, the state crime lab discovered that DNA from Joseph Bong, a convicted sex offender, matched the semen. Bong was convicted of Patty’s rape in 2004 and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
I wish all cases where the police refuse to believe real rape victims ended with the conviction of the rapist and the clearing of the rape victim’s good name, but that just isn’t the reality for most rape victims who are treated like they are the real criminals.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
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Parts 1, 2, and 3 analyzed the comment itself, but there is a problem related to false accusations that anonymous didn’t attack. I touched upon it in my analysis, but it deserves more attention.
False and/or unfounded accusations against rape victims and those who advocate on behalf of rape victims.
Ironically, those who are most vocal about the problem of false rape accusations against men are often the worst offenders. I’m sure some people will see my analysis of the anonymous comment as an accusation or an attack, but I didn’t attack him, I challenged his statements and his insinuations about those who identify themselves as rape victims or survivors. If he didn’t want me to respond to his comment he could have chosen not to comment on my blog.
I was even accused of lying about receiving this comment and accused of writing it myself as a straw man I could then prove wrong. Because the comment calling me a liar crossed the line into an attack it was deleted — as the person who made the accusation stated would happen — I’m sure there will be those who consider me a double liar because I didn’t approve the spam comment on my post about the Duke rape case and because I deleted the personal attack.
Hey, I wish no real people spouted the beliefs contained in that anonymous comment, but they do and that is no false accusation. The person making the accusation against me apparently didn’t bother to follow the link I gave in part 1 to this comment or to do even a single search on chunks of that comment to find other copies of it with slight variations. In this linked variation of the comment anonymous has no problem making an accusation against the alleged victim in the Duke rape case and no problem deciding on her punishment.
Apparently, for anonymous due process is for men only.
When there is a report about the percentage of primary rape suspects whose DNA did not match the DNA from the actual rapists, there are plenty of people who will twist that data to make the accusation that the same percentage of rape victims have made a false accusation. They frequently go further and give that percentage of rape victims a motive like “gotta blame someone.”
When it comes to attacking rape victims and those who advocate for them, no proof is needed. All they need is something they can distort and turn into an accusation. On occasion, a few will take on the identity of an alleged rape victim such as in the Duke rape case in order to reveal the “truth” about that person.
Telling malicious lies with the intent to hurt others isn’t limited to those who file a police report. It’s a convenient myth that only women make false accusations about rape. But every time a rapist lies and says, “she asked for it,” he’s making a false accusation. If that accusation results in him escaping accountability (through no charges being filed or through a not-guilty verdict) and her being called a liar, real damage has been done and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as if it were nothing. It’s even worse if his lies result in his victim being charged with a crime or if those lies cause someone to feel justified in threatening or assaulting or murdering a rape victim.
We all deserve better than that.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
I analyzed the opening of an anonymous comment in part 1 and the supporting statistics, quotes and studies in part 2, now this 3rd and last part of the comment includes his claims about rape trials.
Note: For anyone wondering why I didn’t simply delete this post when I rejected it, read this report about college students who were suspended because of their insistence on filing a complaint about a detective investigating a reported rape.
Now to the remainder of anonymous’ comment:
Making it too easy to convict a person of rape, while at the same time making it difficult, if not impossible, to defend against it is wrong! False accusations will destroy a person’s life and reputation. A false conviction will lead to long prison sentences and having to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
And where are we given even a shred of evidence that is it impossible to defend anyone against rape charges or that it is easy to convict a person of rape? The only supporting material from this comment (in part 2) that could be related to convictions is mismatches in DNA evidence.
The supporting evidence from prosecutors and studies of police departments suggest that the majority of false or unsubstantiated accusations don’t result in criminal charges. In the cases that are deemed unfounded none will be prosecuted unless new evidence comes to light that changes the case’s status.
Certainly the rape case that was dismissed because the prosecutor was late doesn’t sound like it’s part of a system designed to give those accused of rape the shaft 100% of the time.
If this claim were true there would be no acquittals in rape trials yet they happen regularly and too often in cases where there was solid evidence of rape and solid evidence that the defendant committed the crime. Only the juries in each of those cases knows why they believed there was a reasonable doubt.
As the Duke rape case shows, plenty of people will jump in to make blatant accusations of wrongdoing against alleged rape victims — including using the word hoax — long before the case gets resolved in the criminal justice system. In a variety of cases, conviction of the alleged rapist does nothing to stop the personal attacks against rape victims.
Give authority to make an accuser’s past medical and sexual history admissible at the judge’s discretion if it’s relevant to the case.
It’s interesting with the cited statistics relating to DNA mismatches that the use or omission of DNA evidence isn’t at the top of his list of needed changes. But this is his only recommended change to the criminal justice system. He isn’t recommending changes to the process of identifying suspects in stranger rapes or asking for changes in the way officers gain confessions. Neither is he advocating to make it easier for convicted rapists to have additional DNA testing done so those who can be proven innocent will be given the chance they need.
He only wants defense attorneys to be able to use more information about the alleged victim.
Since he is asking for a change from the current rules of evidence, I suspect this man believes that information about the alleged rape victim (notice repeated use of accuser) is always relevant as long as it doesn’t make the defendant look bad in some way. He seems to have no problem with a seek and destroy policy toward someone in a rape case as long as it isn’t the defendant.
If there is a concern of further potential trauma to the “alleged-victim”, then further counseling should be encouraged.
By his wording, he makes it clear that he isn’t concerned about the trauma to rape victims. He doesn’t even seem certain why anybody else should be concerned about the trauma to rape victims. Then there’s his use of scare quotes that calls into question the term alleged victim.
If he isn’t sure any alleged victims who are to be cross examined are real rape victims, it makes me wonder if he believes that the only real victim is a dead one or one injured so badly that she can’t remember being raped.
While this man is opposed to men’s lives being destroyed by rape accusations, he seems to dismiss the trauma of being raped and the trauma of pursuing justice through the courts. A little therapy is the most “alleged-victims” might need.
A speedy means just to convict anyone should never be an option.
I don’t know what he’s referring to here unless it’s a general implication that rape suspects are denied due process.
Rape is a horrible crime, but false accusations of rape are every bit as horrible. They are a form of psychological rape that can emotionally, socially, and economically destroy a person even if there is no conviction. The stigma attaches to the falsely accused for life. Few believe them and few care.
Of course, he has to close his comment with the disclaimer that he’s not dismissing the severity of real rape while at the same time minimizing rape by saying it’s never worse than being falsely accused of rape.
But that equality between true rape victim and alleged rapist isn’t enough. He goes one further and turns men accused of rape into rape victims, but he details the additional trauma of this type of rape while describing real rape in one word: horrible.
Would this man tolerate a girl or woman accusing a boy or man or society at large of psychologically raping her and claiming that was as traumatic as physical rape? I don’t think so.
Nowhere in this comment does he acknowledge that men who say they aren’t real rapists might be the true liars. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that being in denial about guilt (publicly and/or privately) is not the same as being not guilty.
Comments like this one do nothing to further true justice for those who really are falsely convicted of rape or those accused when their actions never strayed into exploitive or criminal behavior. And that’s a shame.
Update: Q grrl caught something that I missed in my analysis and that is that he makes all of the false accusers female. Further, people who share his belief will often posts comments that men can be victims too and that we should never refer to rape victims as she since that unfairly excludes males.
That logic implies that he is unfairly excluding males from the ranks of false accusers.
Part 4 gets into a type of false accusation this comment doesn’t attack.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
This is in response to Richard Jeffrey Newman’s comment about male survivors of sexual abuse/assault being left out of the sexual-assault discourse.
It’s a real problem that merits attention. Too often it gets mentioned as a way to attack efforts to fight sexual violence directed at girls and women or as an excuse to attack feminism or feminists. That exploits male victims and they deserve better.
Unless RJN loosens the restrictions, comments can only be made by male survivors.
This is the second of 3 posts on an anonymous comment I received. Check out part 1 including a comment (on abyss2hope) from someone who tells me what “no means no” really means.
Here’s the next section of the anonymous comment:
I was surprise of how many false rape accusations have been made by several independent surveys reveal that 42% to approximately half of all accusations made are false. Most cases involve divorce battles involving the custody of children, some for revenge for withdraw of affection, monetary gains, an excuse for infidelity, or misidentification.
Yeah, right. Surprising. But it’s not so surprising that he isn’t as skeptical of this claim as he is of rape accusations.
It’s also interesting how he slips in misidentification since those are cases where a rape occurred and the only problem is identifying the rapist. I suspect those are stranger rapes and rape/murder cases such as this one where the confession to rape/murder is being disputed or this one where the DNA evidence cleared a man who is still a sex offender because of another conviction which hasn’t been overturned.
By bringing up the issue of custody, he seems to be including any reports of suspected child sexual abuse and calling any unproven claims of that type false rape allegations.
His intent is to convince people that it’s been proven that nearly half of all girls and women who report rapes were not raped or sexually assaulted but he can throw in everything but the kitchen sink to count as a valid false accusation.
I suspect that if there is a loophole in the law (marital rape excluded from rape law, for example) the person who reported the rape automatically becomes someone making a false allegation according to this commenter’s view of false allegations. That same problem may exist in crime statistics collected by different government agencies as well.
While he brings up false rape allegations, he doesn’t bring up the strategy of rapists and those accused of rape to make allegations against the alleged victim such as the rape trial of the father of a chess prodigy or the stranger rapist who claimed he was breaking into a woman’s home for more consensual sex.
By the logic used by many people like anonymous if these people are convicted of rape, they should also be convicted of making a false allegation when they make claims about the victim that are subsequently proven to be false.
According to the FBI, one of every 12 claims of rape filed in the United States are later deemed ‘unfounded,’ meaning the case was closed because the alleged victim recanted or because investigators found no evidence of a crime.
This is a blatant attempt to distort data that says one thing to mean another. Just because someone can’t prove a crime was committed, or classifies it that way, doesn’t mean it wasn’t committed. Just because someone doesn’t believe a victim doesn’t mean that victim was not a victim. Recanting a rape allegation is as problematic as confessions given by those accused of rape.
Howard County Police classified one out of every four rape allegations as unfounded in 1990-91.
Just because they did this doesn’t mean one out of every four rape allegations was false as this comment is implying. Or that this number reflects only cases where a girl or woman says she was raped.
The National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers says around 600 teachers a year are falsely accused - a trebling since the 1989 Children’s Act.
I looked up this claim and the subject of false allegations was not specific to allegations of rape. One of the problems that leads to unsubstantiated allegations and damage to reputations can be shoddy, incomplete investigations. If claims appear to be dismissed too easily by those in charge, more people will abandon the system of investigation and take their claims public. Rather than the solution being a gag order, the solution should be thorough investigations that document what happened so that the innocent party is protected whether that is a student or a teacher.
Citing a recent USA Today article, discussing the miracle of DNA and FBI studies of sexual assault suspects, DNA testing exonerated about 30% to 35% of the more than 4,000 sexual assault suspects on whom the FBI had conducted DNA testing over the past three years.
Since they had DNA, the problem was not false reports of rape. This mixing of identification of unknown rapists and rapist/murderers with women who accuse specific men of raping them is no accident but a deliberate strategy to inflate the number of women who lie about being raped.
Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, in over 40% of the cases reviewed, the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1994).
There are serious flaws in this study, yet people who want to appear as if they have done full investigations always neglect to point out anything that doesn’t support their assertion. This number could as easily be caused by the way those charged with investigating rape treated alleged victims. If victims come in scared and traumatized and are treated like suspects who must be badgered and threatened, it wouldn’t be that hard to break many of those victims.
1985 the Air Force conducted a study of 556 rape accusations. Over 25% of the accusers admitted, either just before they took a lie detector test or after they had failed it, that no rape occurred.
This data is meaningless since one of the ways to get false confessions is to use props such as lie detector tests to induce a confession. Where’s the study of the matching alleged rapists and the results of their lie detector tests? Oh, wait. Alleged rapists have rights.
1996 Department of Justice Report, of the roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases analyzed with DNA evidence over the previous seven years, 2,000 excluded the primary suspect, and another 2,000 were inconclusive.
Again we get the mixing of unknown rapists with the assertion that no rape occurred.
Linda Fairstein, who heads the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit. Fairstein, the author of Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape, says, “there are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about 50% simply did not happen.”
But what data supports this assertion reportedly made in Penthouse magazine in the late 1980s? And what constitutes a report of rape? Does it include calls where someone says they think someone is being raped or sexually abused? If a call came in about a rape in progress and the police find nothing and nobody related to the call, is that considered a false allegation? If a cop refused to believe a report and labels it a false report without any investigation, how do we know the cop’s instincts were correct?
Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous prosecution of rapists during his 16-year career, says that false rape accusations occur with “scary frequency.” As a regular commentator on the Bryant trial for Denver’s ABC affiliate, Silverman noted that “any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes.” According to Silverman, a Denver sex-assault unit commander estimates that nearly 50% of all reported rape claims are false.
This is so generic we have no way of knowing what all of the scenarios are which are being called false. Just because he was zealous in the rape cases he prosecuted doesn’t mean he’s skilled at assessing the validity of all rape cases.
And how do we know honest veteran sex assault investigator always equals skilled at assessing cases between people who know each other and where there wasn’t great physical trauma? Sometimes veteran equals cynical and eager to be rid of the half of the cases which are assumed to be false. Get an ex-con victim with an attitude and a drug habit who says she was raped? False report. “Next!”
I’m sure coping with the workload is easier if you believe that the cases which were dumped are all false reports.
Through all of the proof given to show that nearly half of those who report rape are liars, this commenter shows that he only cares about beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof when it comes to accused rapists. Accusations against alleged victims don’t need no stinking proof just the lack of a convicted rapist.
Where are the statistics on the number of convictions for making false rape accusations? What’s the ratio between convictions on sexual assault charges and convictions on false accusation of rape charges?
The possibility of a report on real criminal behavior being labeled nothing more than a false allegation seems beyond this commentor’s comprehension or it brings up issues he’d rather pretend don’t exist. Yet he can think of every possibility where innocent men are called rapists. Does that fit under the label of being objective? I don’t think so.
Part 3 gets into the issues of the rape trial.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
Someone left an anonymous spam comment on my post “Duke Rape Case: The Danger Of Screaming No Rape” on my home blog and I rejected the comment since it repeats many myths and distortions about allegations about rape, and those who report being raped.
However, for the same reason I rejected it, this comment is worth analyzing. First, I know it was a spam comment because I’ve seen variations of this comment before. From reading the full comment, I believe this anonymous person is male and therefore will refer to him as a he.
I find it telling that he posted as anonymous rather than giving his name. He’s willing to make accusations, but isn’t willing to take ownership of those accusations or his personal motivation. Ironic considering his condemnation of false accusations.
Here’s the opening:
False accusations of rape destroys lives (Whether accidental or malicious)
This is an allegation rather than a fact which in many cases are clearly false (Tucker Carlson was falsely accused of rape and his life wasn’t destroyed) and it manages to slip in the idea that many girls and women who say they’ve been raped are delusional. He isn’t saying that false allegations can destroy lives and that omission of the word can is not by chance.
By the recommendations made later in this comment (which will be included in part 3), the commenter is willing to destroy the lives of rape victims to help men avoid being convicted of rape.
Rape is a horrible crime, and anyone who commits it should be punished to the full extent of the law.
Here we get the standard disclaimer given by all those who attack rape victims — alleged and proven — meant to give the person a free pass to recommend changes that help rapists avoid being punished to the full extent of the law and which harm real rape victims.
This is a very hot and emotional topic, but we must not get so emotional that we lose our objectivity, and create laws that condemn the falsely accused.
Here we get the implication that anyone who disagrees with him has lost objectivity and that he is being purely objective (not a rapist or anyone who was ever or could ever be accused of rape) and nothing he does harms or condemns real rape victims.
His implication is that detachment from the pain of rape is good. Viscerally understanding rape and caring passionately about justice for rape victims is bad and should exclude people from talking about rape laws and the enforcement of those laws.
Once the accusation is made, the “accused” is assumed to be guilty by just referring to the “accuser” as a “victim”, and not as an “alleged-victim.” This attitude colors the public’s, police, and juror’s perception as “victim” versus “the accused”; thus implies guilt.
I find it interesting in this claim about the power of semantics that he says calling someone a victim is wrong while leading with the word “accusation” rather “a report of rape.” We are supposed to use “alleged victim” but he uses “accuser” which has definite negative connotations and implies her guilt.
The bottom line seems to be that word choice can be used to color perception, but only when it favors the defendant at the expense of rape victims or alleged rape victims.
Part 2 will include an analysis of his statements about the number of false rape reports and part 3 will include an analysis of his positions on rape trials.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
over at Abyss2hope.
This edition includes a variety of topics including the story of how the criminal justice system contributed to the suicide of a teenaged rape victim. Note: For those who think I should be obligated to call her an “alleged” rape victim, she endured the trial, including the attacks on her character contained in her cross examination, and her rapist was found guilty.
That’s what too many people still want before they accept that a rape happened. Some of those will be generous and forgive rape victims for not resisting if a weapon is involved and that weapon is being controlled by a stranger.
Many people won’t believe boys and men are rapists if they take sex without going through a stage where the victim shows stereotypical resistance such as scratching at the rapist’s eyes or screaming non-stop. That a victim was sexually violated doesn’t matter, the rape must happen in a way that the victim’s response traumatizes the rapist.
The premise is that if the rapist isn’t traumatized neither is the victim.
The excuse for this is a warped version of reasonable doubt. The doubt becomes not whether the person committed the crime, but whether the person who did the crime is a bad person who sets out to hurt others. Maybe it was nothing more than an honest mistake.
To use the consent defense, what is needed is not proof of lack of consent (stereotypical resistance) but proof that the alleged victim gave true, legal consent. If the alleged rapist says the alleged victim consented then proving that claim should be the defense team’s burden. Unfortunately, many legal statutes are written with the bias favoring men who exploit vulnerable girls and women. Being vulnerable becomes defacto consent.
The sexual violation just happened. A no-fault rape, at best. At worst, the victim had it coming or is delusional because she sees sexual violation where none existed.
To understand the warped view of rape where the defense says it was consensual, think about embezzlement cases. It doesn’t matter whether the embezzler acted from pure greed or to punish the person he embezzled from. What matters is the embezzlement itself. The person took funds he (or she) wasn’t authorized to take. Jurors don’t ignore the evidence simply because the embezzler seems like a nice guy or because the victim trusted him and gave him access to the funds he stole. If the defense claims that the money was taken legally, it is up to the defense to counter the prosecution’s evidence of embezzlement. And if the proof were: “She didn’t say I couldn’t take that money from her” no jury would give that claim any merit at all.
But that’s exactly the logic people buy when they insist on proof of resistance in rape cases.
In addition, this betrayal from within is understood to be a trauma added to the financial loss. But in rape cases when a boyfriend rapes his girlfriend people frequently assume that this relationship reduces the trauma of rape to the point where some people would call her a liar if she calls herself a rape victim — even when they believe her version of events. She may even be told that she has no right to compare herself to someone who experienced the real trauma of rape.
The problem is that there is an assumption that girls and women have a rapist radar. She has to know what’s about to happen before her options run out. If she’s so careless that she doesn’t see trouble coming she’s the irresponsible one. Yet we don’t excuse or decriminalize embezzlement because the victim trusted the embezzler.
This expectation in rape cases is based on the very dangerous myth where people believe that all real rapists are total and obvious monsters and that some women have it coming to them.
Sometimes people attempt to erase proof of resistance to rape by recharacterizing what happened in a way that changes the underlying actions. “He asked her several times and she eventually agreed” sounds innocent while, “he wouldn’t let her out of the room until he got the sex he felt entitled to” shows premeditation and actions meant to overwhelm resistance.
The reason the first statement sounds innocent is that all signs of guilt have been purged. People will often claim they are properly summarizing the truth in their characterizations when in fact they are attempting to obscure the truth.
The same goes when people say a man was unfairly charged with rape after drunk sex. The characterization implies that both parties were equal participants.
This same deception by recharacterization is done toward those who advocate for rape victims. Calling non-violent rape real rape becomes calling all less than perfect sex real rape. Calling the exploitation of women too intoxicated to fight off unwanted sex real rape becomes calling all sex under the influence real rape.
Distort and then make a point about the distortion as if it isn’t a distortion.
When people who say they oppose all types of rape do this sort of distorting at the expense of rape victims what message does that send to rapists?
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists’ efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you only want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
In response to the post Alas, a blog: Isn’t it Good We Have Men To Tell Us What To Do several commenters have argued that certain scenarios aren’t rape because the person who claims to be a rape victim had the power to get away from the person trying to use them. They go even further and say that those of us who disagree with them are robbing girls and women of their power.
This approach to understanding what is and isn’t rape feeds into dangerous myths about rape and can lead to boys and men taking the attitude of “if she doesn’t leave when I know she could have, what I do to get sex from her cannot be rape as long as I don’t use overt physical violence.”
The intent may be to empower girls and women to get out of bad situations but by combining the discussion about how to escape wih discussions of the definition of rape the result is to blame the victim who didn’t respond to exploitive behavior properly and to let the rapist off the hook.
The denial of an exploiter’s control that doesn’t involve overt physical violence actually disempowers victims in those types of situations by making the victims responsible for the actions of those who victimize them.
The patient who doesn’t realize how her doctor can use the dynamics of the doctor/patient relationship to facilitate rape is likely to wonder what was wrong with her that she didn’t run screaming into the street when something first felt off kilter.
The ignorant response is to decide that she had low self-esteem or other problems which led her to consent to actions she didn’t want. But the truth is that she never consented to those actions. The problem which leads to unwanted sex does not belong to the person who didn’t initiate sex. The problem belongs to the person attempting to get sex.
The key to breaking abusive control is to acknowledge it, not to deny it.
This type of control is why states such as Minnesota make it a crime for counselors or pastors to have sex during counseling sessions and why “it was consensual” is not a valid defense. This doesn’t treat those counseled like they are infants, but protects them from a very real and systemic danger. It reduces the danger and reduces the number of attempts to coerce sex out of patients.
That’s good for patients and it is good for ethical counselors. It is only bad for unethical counselors who want to get away with sexual exploitation.
The same abusively controlling patterns can exist in personal relationships and the key to breaking those patterns is to acknowledge them and not to blame the victim for being controlled.
When we go to the doctor we need to drop our defenses and our normal boundaries and we expect the doctor to uphold his or her sworn duty not to abuse patients.
Often when it comes to rape we expect women to drop their defenses (don’t view all men as potential rapists) and to keep their defenses on high alert (if you don’t react as if your life depends on it, you consented) and be fully responsible when it comes to sex.
No wonder so many rape victims feel crazy even when people aren’t calling us liars or delusional.
That leads to nonsense like this:
A study which reveals many sexually assaulted women may have had too much to drink rather than been drugged has sparked a debate over how much the victims themselves are to blame. [...] And it is argued that these women are behaving irresponsibly and putting themselves at risk of being sexually assaulted or raped.
Again while the intentions might be good (wanting fewer rapes), the message that comes across is that rapists of intoxicated women are not to blame for their decision to rape and that men who are around women who drink don’t need to act responsibly.
It is the potential victims who are at fault if they are raped. This is flat out victim blaming and also ignores all of the rapes committed when the victims are not intoxicated. This shows apathy at best toward men’s treatment of women under the influence. The responsibility for rape does not belong to the men willing to exploit women as it should and the implication is that men who exploit drunk women are never rapists.
Abstaining from alcohol is no guarantee of safety from sexual assault as the polygamist Warren Jeffs case shows:
In court documents, prosecutors say the bride, identified as Jane Doe No. 4, objected to the marriage and later begged to be released. The Associated Press does not identify victims of sexual assault.
The ceremony at a Nevada motel in 2001 was “one of the most painful things I’ve ever been through. I just want to move on with my life and forget it happened,” the woman testified.
She said she refused to say “I do,” take her groom’s hand or kiss him. Finally, she relented, submitting to a “peck” and then locking herself in the bathroom. “I felt completely trapped and defeated,” she said.
If we truly want to empower women we must stop making them responsible for other people’s actions directed at them and we must stop blaming them when their exploiters succeed at reaching their goal.
The full responsibility for rape must always be put on the rapist whether he uses a knife or manipulation to control the person he wants sex from. To call a rapist who uses tools other than brute force anything but a rapist is to disregard the harm done to that person’s victim.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists’ efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you only want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.
over at Abyss2hope. Go check it out.
