Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"?

The Guardian
By Jessica Valenti
Curbing College Rape is Great—What About the More than 50% of Victims Under 18?
June 5, 2014

This week, three star athletes were arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a young woman at a post-prom party. It wasn't in Steubenville, or Torrington, or Maryville, or Louisville, or Grand Rapids, or a thousand other towns where the victims haven't and maybe won't come forward. But the new case from Calhoun High School in Georgia does bring together high schoolers, alcohol, bystander apathy and athletes once again.

It also arrives a little over a month after the Obama administration published its comprehensive report on curbing college rapes and during the same week that US Senator Claire McCaskill held the second in a series of roundtable discussions on how to stop sexual assault on campus.

The administration, politicians and campus activists have worked hard to put together recommendations for universities and students on how to prevent and appropriately handle sexual assault and rape cases – and they should be applauded for it. But in the wake of case after case of high school sexual violence, it's clear that we're taking action way too late – or, more accurately, when people are way too old.

Forty-four percent of US sexual assault victims are under the age of 18. And while we now have a White House task force to combat college rapes, and a willingness to at least propose legislation on the issue, we still have no national education, prevention and enforcement standards on dealing with sexual assaults that happen before students get there.

But rapists don't restrict themselves to targeting those with high school diplomas.

Though it might be easier for some to think of sexual assaults that happen in high school as misunderstandings between drunks kids – the lawyer of one the accused in Georgia already bemoaned how the alleged perpetrators' lives "are changed forever" – the truth is that such assaults are always brutal for victims regardless of the ages of the rapists.

The men at Calhoun High, for example, are charged with aggravated sexual battery under Georgia law: the three seniors allegedly decided to penetrate the unconscious teen girl with a foreign object as a fourth man held the door. Gilmer County Sheriff Stacy Nicholson said in a press conference, "I've been here 23 years, and her injuries were substantial." As in many other high school rape cases, Nicholson also noted that other party-goers knew what was happening and didn't intervene to stop the assault.

How many times do we have hear another version of the same awful story before we do something to address the problem?

Yes, college campuses have specific needs around rape and sexual assault – particularly as it pertains to campus adjudication processes. But the Title IX protections that are now being used to protect college assault victims also apply to high school students. And the bystander intervention models that are so often taught as the gold standard at universities are badly needed in high schools across the country – because this is not the first time high school students stood by and watched a young woman be violated.

For instance, one of the witnesses in the Steubenville rape case walked in on the rape and didn't stop it because "it wasn't violent – I thought [rape] was forcing yourself on someone". And in 2009, as many as 20 onlookers watched and did nothing as a 15 year old was gang-raped outside of a homecoming dance in Richmond, California.

But not everyone is just standing by. When Ali Safran was sexually assaulted as a high school senior, she felt that going through the criminal justice system didn't offer her any justice. So on the third anniversary of the attack, she went to the spot where she was assaulted and hung a sign telling her story to urge readers that "we can stop this violence from happening".

Today, Safran is the Director of Surviving in Numbers, and helped implement an anti-rape curricula in two high schools in Massachusetts (where she just graduated from college).

"There is no focus on high school rape at all" Safran told me. "Part of it has to with people not wanting to talk to high schoolers about sex at all, let alone sexual assault – they prefer to ignore it all together." Safran's program focuses on bystander intervention, open discussions about consent and how to support your peers without victim-blaming.

Safran hopes that she can grow her program and that others do the same. "We can't pretend these things don't happen in high school," she said.

Sadly, cases like the one at Calhoun High remind us that rapes do happen in high school. Often. And if we can teach anti-bullying or sex education, there's no reason that we can't teach high schoolers about rape and sexual assault. After all, they already know it happens – sometimes, they're watching it right in front of their eyes.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/curbing-college-rape-great-what-about-more-50-victims-under-18?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Georgia county police charge three student athletes over alleged post-prom sexual assault
By Staff Writer
Jun 04, 2014

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that three senior and student athletes of Calhoun High School has been indicted for the alleged sexual assault of a girl at a Gilmer County cabin. According to local police, two of the three students who were charged were under the influence of alcohol when the sexual assault happened.

On Wednesday morning, Fields Chapman, Avery Johnson, and Andrew Haynes had turned themselves in to the Gilmer County jail. The alleged sexual assault reportedly happened 18 days prior to the surrender of the three, Gilmer Sheriff Stacey Nicholson said.

Nicholson detailed about the sheriff's detectives' process into building a case against the three, telling reporters at a press conference in Ellijay, "As late as yesterday, we interviewed an individual and obtained very valuable information," he said Wednesday afternoon. "In a case, especially involving teenagers or young people, once you make an arrest, the information flow tends to shut down. We wanted to get all we could get before we put people in jail. This has been a very emotional case, certainly for the city of Calhoun and Calhoun High School. We have worked as fast as we could work to bring an end to this case. But we did not work on Calhoun's time or on the media's time line."

According to an incident report by the county police, the girl said that she was raped by multiple guys in the early hours on May 11 at a cabin in Coosawattee River Resort. The girl, who is aged 18, had been observed to receive substantial injuries from the assault....

County police and officials received a beating for their initially apparent lack of action from locals who have heard about the sexual assault case. When police mentioned the influence of alcohol in the case, local columnist David Cook defended the victim, and said, "It's not about how much beer the teenagers drank after the prom. It's not about how much liquor or wine they had with them at their resort cabin party in the North Georgia woods. This is about sexual assault. And aggravated sexual battery. It's about three men - 18 years old, graduating seniors - who police say committed sexual battery against an 18-year-old woman. A classmate. A graduating senior, just like them."
http://www.lawyerherald.com/articles/5723/20140604/georgia-county-police-charge-three-student-athletes-over-alleged-post-prom-sexual-assault.htm#zKzkzt4spVD8BK7j.99

3 Star Athletes Allegedly Orchestrated Horrifying Post-Prom Gang Rape
by Erin Gloria Ryan
6/03/14

Star athletes from a powerhouse high school athletic program. A sexual assault that occurred in the middle of a party full of witnesses who knew exactly what was going on but did nothing. Underage drinking. Online rumors. While the sexual assault of an 18-year-old Georgia high school senior by three of her classmates had many of the elements of a Steubenville-esque embarrassment, this time around, things are different. Local authorities have filed serious charges against the three men who participated in the assault, and have promised that more serious charges are forthcoming.

The alleged assault occurred more than two weeks ago, on Calhoun High School's prom night, when a small post-prom gathering at a cabin in the woods became a raucous event involving 27 students and hours of drinking, according to local authorities. After alcohol had been consumed for several hours, four male party attendees "ended up" in a room with an 18-year-old classmate ("ended up" is the phrasing used by a local news account that flirts with CNN's now-infamous "THESE BOYS' LIVES ARE RUINED NOW!" hand wringing). The victim told authorities that she didn't remember who raped her, just that it was "multiple guys" who inserted a "foreign object" into her vagina, causing tearing and severe trauma that the local sheriff called "substantial" during a press conference last week. Other attendees of the party knew what was happening but did nothing. According to some accounts, the fourth boy in the room was there to barricade the door closed.

Almost immediately after the May 11th incident, rumors began swirling online, specifically on Facebook. Why weren't authorities doing anything to prosecute the attackers? Was the school district protecting them, since they were all top athletes mere weeks from graduation? As rumors picked up steam, some Calhoun students and community members began posting under a #standforHER hashtag in support of the victim.

But authorities were investigating. During the ensuing days after the party, they interviewed more than 50 witnesses, and based on the information they gathered, last week, they announced they'd gathered enough evidence to arrest football quarterback Fields Chapman, wide receiver Andrew Haynes, and star baseball player Avery Johnson, who had committed to playing college ball at Georgia Highlands College next year, on sexual battery charges. All three 18-year-old seniors turned themselves in the next day and were barred from participating in their high school's graduation exercises that Friday. The Gilmer County Sheriff promises that all of the students who were drinking at the party will be charged, and that rape charges may be forthcoming against Chapman, Haynes, and Johnson. Only months before, both Haynes and Chapman had faced underage drinking charges. No word on what the fourth student in the room — the one who watched the brutal assault occur without doing anything — will be charged with anything.

At least one other student who attended the party has lawyered up, and after his classmates and fellow partygoers turned themselves in, his attorney posted a confusingly triumphant statement to Facebook.


Being present at a party where a brutal gang rape occurred and probably knowing it was happening but doing nothing is nothing to brag about, dude. The **** is wrong with you? This is the legal equivalent of yelling I DIDN'T FART! before anyone even smells anything.

Another frustrating detail in this case is the fact that the three defendants were immediately allowed to bond out after turning themselves in, which means that they didn't spend a single night in jail. And there's no guarantee that one won't sell the others out in exchange for a reduced sentence; depending on the totality of charges when the dust settles, each of the accused could be facing decades behind bars. And the fate of the girl — who, again suffered severe internal injuries from the assault — is still forever altered.

But there are heartening aspects to this awful case. For starters, unlike other recent high-profile cases of male athletes allegedly raping women who lack the football status of their abusers — Steubenville, Ohio and Florida State University, for example — authorities appeared to take the charges seriously from the day after the crime and actually seem to have made an effort to conduct a thorough investigation. Authorities shouldn't be applauded for doing their jobs, but given this country's embarrassing history of prioritizing sports achievement over the right of women to not be raped, when police actually give a damn, I reflexively feel like I should applaud. That's how low the bar is.

Secondly, community response — at least that which is glean-able from the murk of internet comments and social media proclamations — has been overwhelmingly supportive of the female victim and condemning of the entitled, monstrous fuckery of the three accused, athlete status be damned. Yesterday, in response to a flurry of "kids shouldn't drink so much!" commentary from media outlets, local columnist David Cook opined in the Times Free Press:
"Know what causes rape?

Rape mentality causes rape.

And while alcohol can be a preferred weapon used by rapists, the foremost question we need to be asking ourselves as a society: What causes rape mentality, especially at a time when one in five college women is sexually assaulted?

"Most often, it's by someone she knows," reads a recent White House study.

This is not about alcohol; it's about something wedged into the male mind, something premeditated that says it's OK to sexually assault women. It is the pornographication of relationships: In 2013, a U.N. international study showed that 70 percent of men who admitted to raping women did so because they felt entitled.

As if they owned her body."

Can you imagine reading that from a male columnist in a small city newspaper pre-Steubenville? I'm from a small town, and I sure as hell can't.

http://jezebel.com/3-star-athletes-allegedly-orchestrated-horrifying-post-1585334287

the percentage of false allegations appears to be fairly low, between 2%--8%,

Oh, shut up. Even if those figures are true, 6% of the U.S. male population is NO small number of people, neither is 8% of UK males or 2% of Aussies.

that you jumped to that idiotic conclusion, just shows how out of your depth you are when it comes to understanding the topic.

That your response to that information was to post another 4 year old news story

This thread is to discuss actual crimes of sexual assault/rape

Quote:
This thread is to discuss actual crimes of sexual assault/rape

Correction, it's to discuss ONLY how horrible sexual assault/rape is for WOMEN. That's why it's called "Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"? and not "Hey, can SOMEONE ask to be raped?"

Because you're a misandrist twat. You don't give a **** about men. Your only concern is whining about an ALREADY privileged group of people because they don't have cart blanche do ANYTHING they want to with no repercussions!

Correction, it's to discuss ONLY how horrible sexual assault/rape is for WOMEN. That's why it's called "Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"? and not "Hey, can SOMEONE ask to be raped?"

Because you're a misandrist twat. You don't give a **** about men. Your only concern is whining about an ALREADY privileged group of people because they don't have cart blanche do ANYTHING they want to with no repercussions!

And that's what you are firefly; you're prejudice against men.

I can certainly be an asshole.

But I'd rather be an asshole than a bigot

Sexual Assault Statistics

How often does rape happen to women?

• One in four college women report surviving rape (15 percent) or attempted rape (12 percent) since their fourteenth birthday. (1)
• In a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease control of 5,000 college students at over 100 colleges, 20% of women answered "yes" to the question "In your lifetime have you been forced to submit to sexual intercourse against your will?" Thus, one in five college women has been raped at some point in her lifetime. (2)
• In a typical academic year, 3% of college women report surviving rape or attempted rape. This does not include the summer, when many more rapes occur. (3)
• In the year 2000, 246,000 women survived rape and sexual assault. This computes to 28 women every hour. (4)
• A survey of high school students found that one in five had experienced forced sex (rape). Half of these girls told no one about the incident. (5)
• Rape is common worldwide, with relatively similar rates of incidence across countries, with 19%-28% of college women reporting rape or attempted rape in several countries. In many countries, survivors are treated far worse than in the U.S. (6)

Are men raped?

• 3% of college men report surviving rape or attempted rape as a child or adult. (3)
• In a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control of 5,000 college students at over 100 colleges, 4% of men answered "yes" to the question "In your lifetime have you been forced to submit to sexual intercourse against your will?" (2)

Who are the perpetrators?

• 99% of people who rape are men, 60% are Caucasian. (7)
• Between 62% (4) and 84% (1) of survivors knew their attacker.
• 8% of men admit committing acts that meet the legal definition of rape or attempted rape. Of these men who committed rape, 84% said that what they did was definitely not rape. (1)
• More than one in five men report "becoming so sexually aroused that they could not stop themselves from having sex, even though the woman did not consent." (8)
• 35% of men report at least some degree of likelihood of raping if they could be assured they wouldn't be caught or punished. (9)
• One out of every 500 college students is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. (10)
• First-year students in college tend to believe more rape myths than seniors. (11)
• Sexual assault offenders were substantially more likely than any other category of violent criminal to report experiencing physical or sexual abuse as children. (7)
• In one study, 98% of men who raped boys reported that they were heterosexual. (12)

Who are the survivors?

• 41% of college women who are raped were virgins at the time. (1)
• 42% of rape survivors told no one about the rape. (1)
• False reports of rape are rare, according to the FBI, occurring only 8% of the time. (13)

Circumstances of rape

• 57% of rapes happen on dates. (1)
• 75% of the men and 55% of the women involved in acquaintance rapes were drinking or taking drugs just before the attack. (1)
• About 70% of sexual assault survivors reported that they took some form of self-protective action during the crime. The most common technique was to resist by struggling or chase and try to hold the attacker. Of those survivors who took protective action, over half believed it helped the situation, about 1/5 believed that it made the situation worse or simultaneously worse and better. (7)
• 84% of rape survivors tried unsuccessfully to reason with the man who raped her. (1)
• 55% of gang rapes on college campuses are committed by fraternities, 40% by sports teams, and 5% by others. (15)
• Approximately 40% of sexual assaults take place in the survivor's home. About 20% occur in the home of a friend, neighbor, or relative. 10% occur outside, away from home. About 8% take place in parking garages. (7)
• More than half of all rape and sexual assault incidents occurred within one mile of the survivor's home or in her home. (7)

What happens after the rape?

• In a study done in the 1980s, 5% of rape survivors went to the police. (1)
• Throughout the last 10 years, the National Crime Victimization Survey has reported that approximately 30% of rape survivors report the incident to the police. (4)
• Of those rapes reported to the police (which is 1/3 or less to begin with), only 16% result in prison sentences. Therefore, approximately 5% of the time, a man who rapes ends up in prison, 95% of the time he does not. (4)
• 42% of rape survivors had sex again with the rapist. (1)
• 30% of rape survivors contemplate suicide after the rape. (1)
• 82% of rape survivors say the rape permanently changed them. (1)
• The adult pregnancy rate associated with rape is estimated to be 4.7%. (17)

Sources

1. Warsaw, R. I Never Called it Rape. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.
2. Douglas, K. A. et al. "Results From the 1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey." Journal of American College Health 46 (1997): 55-66.
3. Tjaden, P., and N. Thoennes. "Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey," 2-5, Research in Brief, Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 1998.
4. Rennison, C. M. "National Crime Victimization Survey, Criminal Victimization 2001: Changes from 2000-2001 with Trends 1993-2001," Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 187007, 2002.
5. Davis, T. C, G. Q. Peck, and J. M. Storment. "Acquantaince Rape and the High School Student." Journal of Adolescent Health 14 (1993): 220-24.
6. Koss, M. P., L. Hiese, and N. F. Russo. "The Global Health Burden of Rape." Psychology of Women Quarterly 18 (1994): 509-37.
7. Greenfeld, L. A. Sex Offenses and Offenders: An Analysis of Data on Rape and Sexual Assault, Washington, D. C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997.
8. Peterson, S. A., and B. Franzese. "Correlates of College Men's Sexual Abuse of Women." Journal of College Student Personnel 28 (1987): 223-28.
9. Malamuth, N. M. "Rape Proclivity Among Males." Journal of Social Issues 37 (1981): 138-57.
10. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Rape Fact Sheet. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
11. Gray, N. B., G. J. Palileo, G. D. Johnson. "Explaining Rape Victim Blame: A Test of Attribution Theory." Sociological Spectrum 13 (1993): 337-92.
12. "Sexual Abuse of Boys," Journal of the American Medical Association, December 2, 1998.
13. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Justice, 1995.
14. Koss, M. "Rape on Campus: Facts and Measures." Planning for Higher Education 20 (1992): 21-28.
15. O'Sullivan, C. "Acquaintance Gang Rape on Campus." In A. Parrot and L. Bechhofer (eds.) Acquantaince Rape: The Hidden Crime. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991.
16. Kilpatrick, D. G., C. N. Edmunds, and A. K. Seymour. Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. National Victim Center, 1992.
17. Homes, M. M., H. S. Resnick, D. G. Kilpartrick, and C. L. Best. "Rape-related Pregnancy: Estimates and Descriptive Chracteristics From a National Sample of Women." American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 175 (1996): 320-24.

http://www.oneinfourusa.org/statistics.php

More than a Million Rapes in U.S. not Counted in Statistics Due to Police Mislabeling of Sexual Assaults
Wednesday, July 02, 2014

As many as one million rapes were wrongly recorded by police departments across the country over the course of more than a decade, according to a new academic study (pdf) on the underreporting of sexual assaults in the United States.
http://blogs.law.uiowa.edu/ilr/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/A5_Yung.pdf

The mislabeling of rapes often begins at the point of first contact with law enforcement, when 911 dispatchers receive calls from victims, Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, found.

Writing in the Iowa Law Review, Yung discovered that nearly 70% of all police departments in 2012 relied on dispatchers—many of whom lack proper training—“to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.” He also determined that police officers sometimes fail to write reports after interviewing rape victims.

Also, it’s been found that police departments occasionally destroy their records and mishandle evidence, which sometimes results in the dismissal of rape cases. Additionally there is a massive backlog of rape kits, which hold evidence of possible rapes, waiting to be tested. There are 400,000 untested kits in the U.S., some sitting and expiring in storerooms. Furthermore, many cities and states don’t keep records of these kits or the rape exams themselves.

All of these factors have contributed to the undercounting of rapes.

Yung estimates that from 1995 to 2012, between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assaults were wrongly categorized by local police, which forward their numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nationwide crime estimates.

He also found that among large cities he studied (those with populations of 100,000 or more), 22% of the 210 police departments studied had “substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.”

Consequently, many calls of reported rape have gone down as something else, which has skewed national statistics on this crime.

Also, it’s been found that police departments occasionally destroy their records and mishandle evidence, which sometimes results in the dismissal of rape cases. Additionally there is a massive backlog of rape kits, which hold evidence of possible rapes, waiting to be tested. There are 400,000 untested kits in the U.S., some sitting and expiring in storerooms. Furthermore, many cities and states don’t keep records of these kits or the rape exams themselves.

All of these factors have contributed to the undercounting of rapes.

Yung estimates that from 1995 to 2012, between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assaults were wrongly categorized by local police, which forward their numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nationwide crime estimates.

He also found that among large cities he studied (those with populations of 100,000 or more), 22% of the 210 police departments studied had “substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.”

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/more-than-a-million-rapes-in-us-not-counted-in-statistics-due-to-police-mislabeling-of-sexual-assaults-140702?news=853572

How Did the FBI Miss Over 1 Million Rapes?
Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.
Soraya Chemaly
June 27, 2014

Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to “quit crying.” After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, “They’re not going to be able to find him with the information that you’ve given.” This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher’s lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.

That’s important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don’t have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.

Yung used murder rates—the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape—as a baseline for his analysis.

After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

That’s more than 1 million rapes.

The estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, in order to consistently analyze the data over time, Yung looked only at cases defined by the FBI’s pre-2012 definition of rape (one established in 1927): “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” This definition did not include anal or oral rape, cases involving drugging or alcohol, or the rape of boys and men. The Federal Criminal Code was recently broadened to include these categories. Second, the FBI and crime experts estimate that anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of rapes are never reported to the police.

Yung’s analysis, which focused on cities with populations of more than 100,000, found that 22 percent of the 210 studied police departments demonstrated “substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data.”

“It’s probably true that in all cities there is undercounting,” explains Yung. “However, forty-six outlier cities appear to be undercounting on a consistent, high level, which makes sense because you have to show [improved crime statistics] results year over year, and you get into a trap where you have to improve upon already low numbers.” Even worse, the number of jurisdictions that appear to be undercounting has increased by 61 percent during the period studied.

How are police departments undercounting sexual assault?

One of the primary ways is that officers discount victim testimony, categorizing complaints as “unfounded” or reclassifying allegations of rape as “noncriminal” minor offenses. In 2013, a 196-page report by Human Rights Watch documented widespread, systemic failures in the Washington, DC, police department’s handling and downgrading of sexual assault cases. Last month, an externally run audit of the New Orleans police department found that 46 percent of forcible rapes were misclassified. The New Orleans study indicted the department for having submitted rape statistics that were 43 percent lower than those from twenty-four comparable cities. And in Baltimore, reported rapes showed a suspicious 80 percent decline between 1995 and 2010, compared with a 7 percent national reduction. Yung also reveals that officers sometimes simply fail to write up reports after rape victims are interviewed.

Second, police departments have been found to destroy records and ignore or mishandle evidence, which leads not only to undercounting but dismissal of cases. Many of the jurisdictions showing consistent undercounting are also, unsurprisingly, those with rape kit backlogs (there are more than 400,000 untested kits in the United States). Many cities and states don’t even keep accurate track of the number of rape exams or of kits languishing, expired or in storerooms—but when they do, the numbers improve. The arrest rate for sex assault in New York City went from 40 percent to 70 percent after the city successfully processed an estimated 17,000 kits in the early 2000s. However, it is only in the past year, after embarrassing and critical news coverage, that most departments have begun to process backlogs. After being publicly shamed for having abandoned more than 11,000 rape kits, the Michigan State Police began testing them, identifying 100 serial rapists as a result.

Third, police departments continue to ignore rapes of women thought of as “fringe,” including prostitutes, runaways, trans women, drug addicts and people considered transient. Women of color in particular face difficulties. For example, for years, women repeatedly went to the police in Cleveland to report that Anthony Sowell had raped, beaten or otherwise violently assaulted them at his house. Little was done until 2009, when police finally found eleven decomposing bodies of women there.

Fourth, people making complaints are often harassed out of pursing them. In 2012, the police department of Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, was held liable in a case in which police accused a reporting victim of lying during her interview, at one point telling her, “Your tears won’t save you now,” and failing to pursue the investigation. In St. Louis, victims were strongly urged by police to sign Sexual Assault Victim Waivers absolving police from responsibility to investigate or report the crime as a rape to the FBI. Yung points out in his report that until relatively recently, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department defied the law by using so-called “corroboration requirements” and reporting only those assaults deemed, in the words of LA police and prosecutors, “winnable” in court (“corroboration requirements,” referring to evidence supporting victims’ claims such as bloody clothes or bruises, have deep roots in jurisprudence but are no longer legal in most of the country, including California).

Victims of sexual assault still encounter hostility, doubt and aggressive questioning. When they do not conform to officers’ preconceived ideas about how rape victims “should” act, officers’ implicit biases come into play and, as a result, victims often feel they are the ones being investigated. These issues are often compounded by racism. Native American women, who suffer the highest rates of sexual assault in the country, describe being questioned about mental illness, drug use, alcohol abuse and more when reporting assaults. While some jurisdictions have substantially improved their policies, with many women reporting compassionate treatment by police, many others continue to report the opposite.

These preconceptions, rooted in myths about rape and a still-powerful cultural predisposition to blame victims, are serious and consequential. Police officers display the same implicit biases as the general public, a tendency also evident at colleges and universities, where campus police are often more focused on investigating the credibility of victims than in whether or not their vulnerability was exploited in a predatory way. Studies show a strong correlation among police officers between rape-myth acceptance, sexist attitudes and an unwillingness to process or investigate reported assaults.

Interestingly, the longer an officer has worked in a sexual assault unit, the less likely he or she is to believe in false claims. A majority of detectives with between one and seven years of experience believe that 40 percent of claims are false—in some cases that number is as high as 80 percent. But among officers with more than eight years’ experience, the rate drops precipitously, to 10 percent. On campus or off, these beliefs persist, despite the fact that rates of false allegations of rape are well understood by criminologists and other social scientists to be between 2 percent and 8 percent, in line with false allegations of other crimes.

The other aspect of bias is that it informs not only attitudes toward victims but also those regarding perpetrators. Racism and sexism conspire both in police assessments of the credibility of victims and in the targeting of potential perpetrators. Estelle Freedman describes the sex- and race-based historical roots and contemporary legacies of both of these biases in
her sprawling examination of rape in America, Redefining Rape.

While police departments are not immune from these legacies, change is possible. In 1999, the Philadelphia Police Department improperly handled 2,300 out of 2,500 rape cases. As late as 2003, the unit investigating sex crimes was jokingly referred to as “the lying bitch unit.” In the wake of widespread criticism and protest, the department began a partnership with the Women’s Law Project to improve response to sex crimes, in an approach that subsequently became known as “the Philadelphia Model.” Both Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and WLP executive director Carol Tracy testified at a 2010 Senate hearing that reviewed police handling of sex crimes, and in 2011, Ramsey convened a Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) summit. The resulting 2012 report, Improving the Police Response to Sexual Assault, which included research and commentary from multiple jurisdictions and advocacy groups, concluded that while progress is being made, many of the problems that existed in Philadelphia persist in other police jurisdictions.

Two weeks ago, Tallahassee police chief Michael DeLeo agreed to allow PERF to review and analyze his department’s policies, largely because of critical coverage of his department’s egregious mishandling of the 2012–13 sexual assault case involving Florida State University football player Jameis Winston. Almost all of the common procedural failures responsible for undercounting were illustrated in that case, so it is unlikely the complaints against Winston were included in the FBI’s annual count.

If we are to improve the handling and reporting of sexual assault crimes, external audits are critical, as is training of police departments by advocacy groups like the WLP. The fundamental approach of most police departments hasn’t change much in thirty years: training is not uniform or reliable, and often comes only at the behest of community advocates. Last year, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, whose membership comprises 21,000 departments, received a $450,000 grant from the federal Office on Violence Against Women to conduct training. While heartening, that comes out to roughly $22.50 per department.

In the meantime, as Yung puts it, “the sheer magnitude of the missing data…is staggering.” Of course, we need far more than improved police work, and undercounting is only part of the problem. Even when cases are properly recorded and investigated, the patterns evidenced in Yung’s analysis and the PERF report are reproduced in courtrooms, where rapists in most states still have the right to sue for custody of the children born of their assaults. And only 3 percent of rapists are ever imprisoned—that’s a crime we aren’t talking about.

Yung believes that these statistical distortions have significantly altered the nation’s historical record and understanding of rape in America. Accurate counts are vitally important—not only for the historical record, but because the data are used by academics, analysts, legislators, law enforcement officials, social justice advocates and media to determine trends, analyze crime, set policy and allocate resources. Law enforcement officials who are dedicated to addressing these problems understand that higher reporting numbers are a sign of trust in police departments.

Yung’s report, by the way, is titled “How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America’s Hidden Rape Crisis.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/180441/how-did-fbi-miss-over-1-million-rapes#

The thread was started in response to a particular ad campaign

despite the fact that the power and wealth in our society is still largely dominated and controlled by men and the responsibilities for child care still rest largely with women, and despite the fact that women still do not earn equal pay for equal work.... blah, blah, blah

Quote:
And that's what you are firefly; you're prejudice against men.

I don't think you can cite any remarks I've made in this thread to justify that statement.

hold bigoted, overly generalized, negative, stereotypical views of women.

Firefly does not care about the welfare of young women, she for whatever reason is full of hate and fear toward young men an is always on the lookout for means to destroy them.