<p>“86% of rape cases that are reported to police are not even referred to prosecutors, because the police don’t believe the accusers.” The problem is not always that the police do not believe the accusers. The problem with rape is that there is is often not enough evidence. The DA offices do have standards as to what cases get referred to them, and they will advise the police as whether it is a prosecutable case for those that meet those standards. In the Hannah Graham case, there was some friction between LE and the DA’s office as the DA did not want to levycharges when LE wanted to do so. DAs do not want unwinnable cases. They also do not want to be inundated with such cases brought to their attentions by the police, so standards are set. The problem is that rape is often a case where there is unsufficient evidence to charge. </p>
<p>I believe that some changes need to be made as to how rape reports are handled. Just as it’s not up to university officials to decide if the case is worthy of report to LE, the LE should investigate the case to make sure there is not sufficent evidence for some thing. Some report of the complaint should be made, some visit to the accused, something to make everyone understand that this is a serious accusation. If I reported suspicious sounds from a house, that is not grounds for charges, but the police would go investigate. A rape report should get at least some investigation. I know police will check out any number of complaints that are highly unlikely to result in charges, and many of those things are far more trivial than rape.</p>
<p>I agree. For the most part police do the best they can under the circumstances that exist. The vast, vast majority get up, go to work and try very hard to protect us and to help victims of crimes. It is disingenuous to paint the police with broad strokes. We can help by pushing for more training in sexual abuse for investigators and officers and we can help by pushing states to have well defined criminal sexual behavior laws. In my state the lowest form of criminal sexual behavior punishable by up to two years in jail requires coercion without injury. In my state a woman who went with a guy and had sex without coercion or at least could not illustrate coercion in the conversation with an officer would probably not meet the criminal standard and I’m guessing some officers would take the time to 'investigate" but some might not but that woman could still file a complaint with a colleges Title IX office and the uni/college would be obligated to investigate at this point in time.</p>
<p>The problem with the police “sorting it out” is that they sort it out wrong in many, many cases.</p>
<p>OK, so hypothetically I go out with a guy. I invite him back to my house for coffee. He rapes me. I’m not unsure if that’s a crime; I know it’s a crime. Rape is a crime, and I never consented to this. So I go to the police, and their way of “sorting it out” is to decide that I wasn’t raped because I invited my rapist into my house. They’re wrong. </p>
<p>Well, that is what dstark was talking about in the link yesterday…if you cannot put your story together accurately, ask for time to recover from whatever shock or trauma you are suffering that is not allowing you to get your story in order. Actually, I’d probably tell you to call the lawyer first, before you go to the police,but that’s just me.</p>
<p>"Kathryn Russell, who says she was raped by a fellow UVA student in February 2004, disputes any notion that women frequently file false claims.</p>
<p>FBI statistics, she says, put the number of false rape reports at roughly eight percent. Since UVA’s Sexual Assault Board’s conviction rate is just 50 percent, Russell says it all comes down to math.</p>
<p>“Forty percent of rapists at UVA get away with it,” she concludes."</p>
<p>We have a huge disconnect here. The FBI says 8 percent of the accusers lie and a study says, 86 percent of accusers don’t get their cases sent to the DAs. </p>
<p>I am sorry. I understand presumed innocense in a court room but when an accuser goes to the police, somewhere around 92 percent are telling the truth. Therefore, 86 percent of the accusations tossed away is preposterous. </p>
<p>So your advice for an 18-year-old crime VICTIM is that she should know to get a lawyer before reporting a crime? And if the police are questioning her in a hostile manner, she should tell the police to stop questioning her in a hostile manner?</p>
<p>Once again, this is victim-blaming. </p>
<p>If the police don’t believe this 18-year-old, it’s her fault, She should have gotten a lawyer (this is the first time I’ve ever heard that a crime VICTIM is supposed to get a lawyer), and if she doesn’t it’s her fault. She should go right away to the police, and if she doesn’t it’s her fault. She should wait the three days until her body has time to recover from the hormone surge of the sexual trauma, and if she doesn’t it’s her fault. She should tell the police they are questioning her wrong-- yeah, that’ll be well received-- and if she doesn’t it’s her fault. If she tells the police to slow down, and they interpret that as a sign she is lying, that’s her fault. </p>
<p>Does anyone else think this is a preposterous, not to mention contradictory, burden to put on a crime victim?</p>
<p>When a policeman is traumatized, he or she is given 2 days to recover before heavy questioning. </p>
<p>During a traumatic event, the brain sends out hormones. This affects a person’s memory and reasoning skills. We should understand that this applies to rape victims too. </p>
<p>Policemen complain that rape victims come in and they don’t make sense. Of course they don’t. The brain is not functioning in a normal way.</p>
<p>Many policemen understand this to be lying. No. Since around 8 percent of accusers lie, it isn’t likely to be lying. The incoherence and lack of memory comes from brain trauma. Alcohol doesn’t help either. Alcohol can also cause memory losses. But the 8 percent includes alcohol.</p>
<p>Suspected lying is really not the issue. Unwinnable cases is the issue. That doesn’t mean the cops don’t believe the claims although that may be victim’s perception. Sometimes there just is no proof a crime occurred. Alcohol definitely doesn’t help. It’s important to remember that the accused will have a defense attorney and the case has to be proven somehow otherwise an arrest is not going be satisfactory, either. The linked Hylton case basically ended in a compromise settlement because of a lack of evidence. </p>
<p>You do realize, and I know you do, that until these women began to come forward in the media from universities all over the place, that NOTHING had been done, nothing had changed on any campus, vis a vis rape, for decades and decades. </p>
<p>You should read what Yale’s policy was before the DOJ investigation.</p>
<p>There aren’t 86 open cases because it’s been going swimmingly well.</p>
<p>All movement, all change has happened recently, and it has happened because of these young women. Maybe, eventually we will get down to the issue of how these rapes are investigated. Because this “it’s he said/she said” bs is applied wayyyy too liberally as a cover for very sloppy police work, imho.</p>
<p>I’m not saying she shouldn’t have come forward, I’m saying that I think she now, in my opinion, has a moral obligation to work with the criminal investigation. I presume she is doing so…now. </p>
<p>Suspected lying IS the issue. Women don’t want to report their rapes, because over and over, the women who report their rapes say that the police don’t believe them.</p>
<p>The Campbell research that dstark reported is remarkable. Campbell wanted to know why so few reported rapes resulted in conviction of rapistss. She looked at reported rapes from start of their trip through the system to end of their trip. She thought that the police and the accusers would have different stories about why so many reports don’t make it through to prosecutors. She thought the victims would say the police didn’t believe them, and the police would say they believed the accusers but there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.</p>
<p>But that’s not what she found. She was half right-- accusers said the police didn’t believe them. But the police also said they didn’t believe the accusers! Police weren’t failing to send cases to prosecutors because the police thought there wouldn’t be a case. They were failing to send cases to prosecutors because they didn’t believe the accusers.</p>
<p>“Complainant refused to prosecute. Case closed.” — And there we have attrition.
So bringing together this quantitative and qualitative data, it gives us some insight into how case attrition might be happening. But why is it happening? Why does this process unfold? Let’s go back to the very first part of this quote. I love this quote — very useful quote as a researcher. The very first thing that came out of this detective’s mouth was “The stuff they say makes no sense. What victims say when they come to me, it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s puzzling. I don’t understand it. It makes no sense.” And when I went back into my interviews with law enforcement over the course of my career, I see this theme over and over again.
So here is a sampling of quotes from a variety of different projects that I’ve done with law enforcement: “The stuff they say makes no sense.”
“I see them hedge, making it up as they go along.”
“They lie all the time. I can tell.”
“No way it’s true. No one would act like that if it’s true.”</p>
<p>I have no idea how accurate any of the statistics are. The police certainly have to become for victim sensitive to rape victims. But a huge problem is that there is insufficient evidence. If you invite a person to your place for coffee and he punches you in the eye, there is that evidence. Even then, unless you call immediately, getting an assault conviction is not a certainty. But with rape–all that can often be discerned is that sex occurred. If the other party says it’s consensual, and there is no evidence that it is not, where can the case go? The DA is absolutely not going to take a case without a chance for conviction. And that’s the case with rape many times. The problems is that the act of sex itself is often consensual, can be with consent, and it comes down to the word of the victim afterwards. </p>
<p>There have been improvement on how rape reports are handled, but a long way to go. Also, police say they are frustrated by the ever so many assault and rape cases where there is evidence and the victim chooses to rescind charges. Happens a lot. </p>
<p>I don’t dispute that. But we see from the research that the police are dismissing the cases even before they find out if there is evidence. In some of these cases, there might well be evidence, but it’s not going to be discovered if the police don’t look for it.</p>
<p>“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a very high standard of proof for a reason. There has to be evidence beyond a reasonable doubt before someone is locked up for 30 years for rape. </p>
<p>There was a case on the news last night where a woman had spent years in prison after being wrongly convicted of an assault on a homeless person because one witness lied. There was the infamous Dotson case in Chicago many years ago in which the ‘victim’ later said she made it all up (rape). The Duke case almost ruined those young men’s lives on the perjured testimony of the prostitute and an overzealous DA who, if memory serves, had to resign. </p>
<p>Remember in some states like mine, the lowest ‘level’ of criminal behavior only requires coercion. But a person who is claiming they were coerced needs to be able to articulate the details in a manner that can be prosecuted. Many things go before the court that have no more than circumstantial evidence. For instance, if you went to a party and left with a guy, had sex but felt you were incapacitated in the morning and taken advantage of it would not help if 15 people at the party told the police you were dirty dancing and hanging all over the guy and they saw you walk out with him, because it would be exceedingly difficult for a DA to prove you were coerced. Now if those 15 people said you were staggering around, could barely talk or walk there’s more to go on. </p>
<p>I don’t understand your point, momofthreeboys. There are two different issues here: definition of the crime, and standard of proof. Whatever the definition of sexual assault/rape is, the standard of proof to expel a student from college for that assault should be lower than the standard of proof for convicting someone of that assault in the criminal justice system.</p>