FBI seeks to expand definition of rape

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It's about time!!! BBB

September 29, 2011
FBI seeks to expand definition of rape
By Justin Fenton | McClatchy-Tribune News Service

BALTIMORE — The FBI is moving to change the federal definition of rape for the first time in 80 years, which authorities and women's advocacy groups hope will lead to improved tracking of the crime and an attitude shift among investigators.

Critics have maintained that the current definition is archaic, too narrow, and leaves crimes uncounted in police statistics, resulting in fewer resources for victims and law enforcement.

A subcommittee of the Criminal Justice Information Service of the FBI plans to take up the task at an Oct. 18 meeting in Baltimore. Its recommendations will go to an advisory board and then to FBI Director Robert Mueller for approval.

Greg Scarbro, the FBI's unit chief for the Uniform Crime Report, said the agency has been discussing revisions since last year.

"From the highest levels of the FBI, there's an understanding that this needs to change. We just need to make sure it happens in the right way," he said.

Since 1927, rape has been defined as forcible male penile penetration of a female - which excludes cases involving oral and anal penetration, where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol, and male victims.

"In order for the public to combat violence in our communities, we need to know where it exists and what it looks like," said Carol Tracy, director of the Women's Law Project, which helped spur reform in Philadelphia a decade ago and has taken a leading role in the push to update the FBI's definition.

The New York Times first reported on Thursday the potential for change after police chiefs, sex-crimes investigators, federal officials and advocates convened in Washington to discuss the limitations of the federal definition and the wider issue of local police departments not adequately investigating rapes.

Among those who spoke at that meeting was Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who said he supports a change.

"Revising the definition of rape would result in a higher and more accurate number of rapes that are reported nationwide each year," Bealefeld said. "As we in Baltimore know all too well, the accurate and complete reporting of sexual assault is critically important in order to build victim confidence and trust, as well as to understand the nature of the problem nationwide."

According to statistics released by the FBI this month, there were 84,767 sexual assaults nationwide last year, 5 percent fewer than in 2009. Sexual assaults have long been among the most underreported crimes, with an estimated 80 percent of assaults not referred to police, experts say.

"We know that data drives the allocation of resources," Tracy said. "The undercounting of serious sex crimes that has been taking place for the last 80 years probably means that the resources that law enforcement should have to fight sex crimes is not adequate."

Scarbro said any change would be an unfunded directive, and the FBI wants to make sure that state, local and tribal police agencies understand the changes and support them. He said the subcommittee meetings occur in different cities and that there was no specific reason why the next one will be held in Baltimore.

"We're hoping that at our Oct. 18 meeting we come out with a sound definition ... and do so in a fashion that lessens the impact on resources at the federal, state, local and tribal level," Scarbro said. "I think we're going to be successful at that - it's just going to take some work."

Officials say they expect sexual assault numbers to jump across the country if changes are adopted.

In Baltimore, reported rapes increased nearly 70 percent last year after police overhauled the way the department investigated sex crimes following a Sun report that revealed that detectives here had been marking cases "unfounded" - meaning the incident did not occur - at a rate five times the national average.

Records and interviews with victims revealed that, in many cases, detectives pressured victims to recant.

Data showed that the city's reported rapes had tumbled nearly 80 percent since 1995, while nationally such cases had fallen just 7 percent during the same time. Amid the city's reported decline, the number of "unfounded" cases rose to more than 35 percent in 2006. No other city in the country consistently reported 30 percent of its cases as unfounded.

Bealefeld has said that the problems developed over time and were rooted in officers' lack of understanding of the complexities of sex-crimes investigations. The department has since turned over the unit, and has sent new detectives to training.

Local women's groups, who were brought in to help reform investigations, say city leaders have shown a genuine commitment to fixing the situation, but said this summer that complaints continue to come in about "victim blaming" and poor treatment of victims by some detectives.

Similar problems have been reported across the country in recent years, including Philadelphia, St. Louis and New Orleans. In 1999, police in Philadelphia reopened 2,500 cases going back five years, the statute of limitations in Pennsylvania; of those, police auditors determined 2,300 were incorrectly handled.

While no cities reported an "unfounded" rate as high as Baltimore, some reported no unfounded cases at all, which experts say should also raise concerns.

"We need a paradigm shift away from focusing on victims and what they've done wrong, and 1/8instead3/8 looking at the serial nature of offenders," Tracy said.

Justin Fenton writes for The Baltimore Sun.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/09/29/125703/fbi-seeks-to-expand-definition.html#storylink=omni_popular#ixzz1ZSNxgJRN

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@BumbleBeeBoogie,

We all ought to expand the definition of violence to any act, however slow in results that is aimed at, and results in injury... That definition would include our whole economy, and most of the acts of goverment designed to support the economy... Injury to one is a gain for another, and the gain in this society is going all to a few, and is enjoyed by far too few to be justice by any measure...

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Quote:

The New York Times
December 14, 2011
Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted
By RONI CARYN RABIN

An exhaustive government survey of rape and domestic violence released on Wednesday affirmed that sexual violence against women remains endemic in the United States and in some instances may be far more common than previously thought.

Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported having been beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report.

“That almost one in five women have been raped in their lifetime is very striking and, I think, will be surprising to a lot of people,” said Linda C. Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey.

“I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population,” she said.

The study, called the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, was begun in 2010 with the support of the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Defense. The study, a continuing telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 16,507 adults, defines intimate partner and sexual violence broadly.

The surveyors elicited information on types of aggression not previously studied in national surveys, including sexual violence other than rape, psychological aggression, coercion and control of reproductive and sexual health.

They also gathered information about the physical and mental health of violence survivors.

Sexual violence affects women disproportionately, the researchers found. One-third of women said they had been victims of a rape, beating or stalking, or a combination of assaults.

The researchers defined rape as completed forced penetration, forced penetration facilitated by drugs or alcohol, or attempted forced penetration.

By that definition, 1 percent of women surveyed reported being raped in the previous year, a figure that suggests that 1.3 million American women annually may be victims of rape or attempted rape.

That figure is significantly higher than previous estimates. The Department of Justice estimated that 188,380 Americans were victims of sexual violence last year. Only 84,767 assaults defined as forcible rapes were reported in 2010, according to national statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But men also reported being victimized in surprising numbers.

One in seven men have experienced severe violence at the hands of an intimate partner, the survey found, and one in 71 men — between 1 percent and 2 percent — have been raped, many when they were younger than 11.

A vast majority of women who said they had been victims of sexual violence, rape or stalking reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as did about one-third of the men.

Women who had experienced such violence were also more likely to report having asthma, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome than women who had not. Both men and women who had been assaulted were more likely to report frequent headaches, chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, limitations on activity, and poor physical and mental health.

“We’ve seen this association with chronic health conditions in smaller studies before,” said Lisa James, director of health for Futures Without Violence, a national nonprofit group based in San Francisco that advocates for programs to end violence against women and girls.

“People who grow up with violence adopt coping strategies that can lead to poor health outcomes,” she said. “We know that women in abusive relationships are at increased risk for smoking, for example.”

The survey found that youth itself was an important risk factor for sexual violence and assault. Some 28 percent of male victims of rape reported that they were first assaulted when they were no older than 10.

Only 12 percent of female rape victims were assaulted when they were 10 or younger, but almost half of female victims said they had been raped before they turned 18. About 80 percent of rape victims reported that they had been raped before age 25.

Rape at a young age was associated with another, later rape; about 35 percent of women who had been raped as minors were also raped as adults, the survey found.

More than half of female rape victims had been raped by an intimate partner, according to the study, and 40 percent had been raped by an acquaintance; more than half of men who had been raped said the assailant was an acquaintance.

The public release of the report was postponed twice, most recently on Nov. 28. The findings are based on completed interviews lasting about 25 minutes each; they were conducted in 2010 with 9,086 women and 7,421 men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html?_r=1

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FBI seeks to expand definition of rape

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