Rolling Stone Article on Rape at University of Virginia Failed All Basics, Report Says

[joes33431]

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;47481356]If punishment was predicated on burden of proof beyond a shadow of a doubt on the falsely accused in a counter-suit, actual rape victims would have nothing to fear in coming forward.

What penalizing people who levy false rape claims for personal gain or satisfaction would do is bring at least a tiny form of justice to the falsely accused (whose life is now permanently and irrevocably ruined,) and it would make rape accusations be taken a bit more seriously. If we can punish the false claims as deterrent, there would be even less filling the system, meaning that the actual victims of rape can see justice sooner and their claims will be more likely to be believed.

Actual rape victims and the falsely accused would benefit from penalizing false rape claims. Those liars don't only harm the reputation of the people they accuse, but they harm actual rape victims because rape victims are more likely to be seen as liars. This is a win/win situation.[/QUOTE]

all of that would be well and nice if it weren't for the fact that rape cases are hard to prove to begin with

if a person is raped and nobody else witnessed it and the victim didn't immediately go to the police, then much of the evidence linking a person specifically to the act is lost (many victims feel dirty and thus feel the need to bathe in order to wash out fluids, dirt, etc) and the rest is hearsay:

[quote]The third defense defendants use - that the sex was consensual - is the most common and the most difficult to defeat, Zug said. "I've never won an acquaintance rape jury trial," he said, often because of skeptical jurists. Women jurors aged 35 and older are the toughest demographic in rape cases, Zug said. "I went a long time trying to pack cases with women [jurors]—until I started talking to them." At that point he realized older women could be tough judges of victims; in cases where the victim had something to drink (and was drunk or not), older women jurors feel that "she was putting herself in that position" while they excuse the defendant's drinking. "There is nothing that justifies a rape. Ever. Never," Zug said.

Zug said that unfortunately the women who are raped often compromise their own cases. Women, for example, could turn the potential defendant's consent defense into a "it wasn't me" defense by washing after the rape. "You are washing my evidence away," he said. In one case he handled, a woman smoked crack in front of the defendant before he raped her; the defendant argued that she offered him sex for more crack. A jury could have viewed the victim negatively after learning of her drug problem, Zug said, but after the victim gave compelling testimony in her case during a preliminary hearing, he was able to bargain with the defendant to accept a guilty plea for a reduced sentence.

Zug said that deciding between pushing for a trial or plea bargaining can be difficult in tough cases, but if there is a 50-50 chance of winning a trial, he goes with the victim's wishes.[/quote]

and when left up to police officer testimony, [URL="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/06/why_cops_don_t_believe_rape_victims_and_how_brain_science_can_solve_the.html"]many officers mistakenly believe that rape victims are lying[/URL], specifically because rape victims respond and act differently when interviewed by police than what police would typically expect.

here are the highlights for the article, if you're wondering:

[QUOTE]When Tom Tremblay started working for the police department of Burlington, Vt., 30 years ago, he discovered that many of his fellow cops rarely believed a rape victim. This was true time after time, in dozens of cases. Tremblay could see why they were doubtful once he started interviewing the victims himself. The victims, most of them women, often had trouble recalling an attack or couldn’t give a chronological account of it. Some expressed no emotion. Others smiled or laughed as they described being assaulted. "Unlike any other crime I responded to in my career, there was always this thought that a rape report was a false report," says Tremblay, who was an investigator in Burlington’s sex crimes unit. "I was always bothered by the fact there was this shroud of doubt."

...

A number of recent studies on neurobiology and trauma show that the ways in which the brain processes harrowing events accounts for victim behavior that often confounds cops, prosecutors, and juries.

These findings have led to a fundamental shift in the way experts who grasp the new science view the investigation of rape cases - and led them to a better method for interviewing victims. The problem is that the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies haven’t been converted. Or at least, most aren’t yet receiving the training to improve their own interview procedures.

...

In the past decade, neurobiology has evolved to explain why victims respond in ways that make it seem like they could be lying, even when they’re not. Using imaging technology, scientists can identify which parts of the brain are activated when a person contemplates a traumatic memory such as sexual assault. The brain’s prefrontal cortex - which is key to decision-making and memory - often becomes temporarily impaired. The amygdala, known to encode emotional experiences, begins to dominate, triggering the release of stress hormones and helping to record particular fragments of sensory information. Victims can also experience tonic immobility - a sensation of being frozen in place - or a dissociative state. These types of withdrawal result from extreme fear yet often make it appear as if the victim did not resist the assault.

This is why, experts say, sexual assault victims often can’t give a linear account of an attack and instead focus on visceral sensory details like the smell of cologne or the sound of voices in the hallway. "That’s simply because their brain has encoded it in this fragmented way," says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who trains civilian and military law enforcement to understand victim and offender behavior.

...

Cops must also learn that trauma influences victims in ways law enforcement won’t necessarily understand. One notorious example is victims' flat affect. This always puzzled senior officer Holly Whillock, a 13-year veteran of the Houston Police Department. She expected victims to be enraged or visibly anguished, but instead they spoke coolly, without emotion.

While Whillock thought the muted response might be the result of trauma, she also knew it would be a weakness in court. Defense attorneys question detectives on a victim’s bearing, often asking: "How could she have been raped if she didn’t react when you asked her about the assault?" It’s a simple way to destroy a victim’s credibility - unless a cop can explain why a victim’s lack of affect is a normal response following a traumatic experience. It can actually support the victim’s account, says Dr. Rebecca Campbell, a professor of ecological-community psychology at Michigan State University who recently trained the Houston Police Department.[/QUOTE]

[B]tl;dr:[/B] the justice system is already hard on false rape accusations [I]by being hard on rape accusations to begin with, not because of inherent sexism, but because the structure and approaches that the legal system takes are not well-adapted for the uncertainties that rape cases necessarily bring.[/I] you can't divorce false rape charges and actual rape charges and handle them separately because [I]if a jury fails to prosecute on a rape case then the assumption can be that the accusation was false to begin with,[/I] which means that innocent people, rape victims no less, who don't have their cases prosecuted, are then accused of lying, which is exactly what they were afraid of to begin with.

and if that particular assumption isn't made, then it means that someone has to prove to a judge or jury that a rape accusation was explicitly falsely filed. if trying to prove that a rape occurred in the first place hard, then trying to prove that a rape was explicitly falsely filed is even harder, because there are too many questions up in the air. not to mention that the criteria for whether or not a rape case was falsely filed are so subjective in our system of common law that even the slightest biases on part of judges or juries can have huge implications for thousands of innocent people.

[editline]9th April 2015[/editline]

edit's broke due to weird characters so here's the link to the first quote that i brought up:

[url]https://www.law.virginia.edu/html/news/2001_02/zug.htm[/url]