The Sheila Variations

At last...

...An editorial by Cathy Young in a major newspaper discussing the rights of the defendant in rape cases.

It's about TIME.

Attitudes toward sexual assault victims have changed greatly in the past 30 years -- and thank goodness for that. In the early 1970s, juries in many states were still commonly instructed to consider evidence of "unchaste character" (such as going to bars alone or using birth control) as detracting from a woman's credibility or suggesting that she was likely to have consented. Rape shield laws forbidding the use of the complainant's sexual past as evidence are rightly seen as an important accomplishment of the women's movement.

And yet many people, including feminists such as Columbia University law professor Vivian Berger, have cautioned against going too far in protecting the accuser at the expense of the accused. In some cases, the woman's past -- including her sexual past -- can indeed be relevant to the man's guilt, particularly in he said/she said cases without much physical evidence.

What if the woman has a record of making false accusations of rape or other crimes? What if she is so mentally unstable that she has trouble distinguishing between imagination and reality? What if she has engaged in sexual acts that could provide an alternate explanation for the physical evidence which the prosecution is using to prove sexual assault?

Damn - even just ASKING these questions is inflammatory. I can see the smoke shooting out of Susan Faludi's ears from miles away.

Cathy Young, the author of this piece, acknowledges fully that rape is not, and can never be, a black and white issue - due to the he said/she said nature of the crime - and also because it is true that you can be raped by your husband, it is true that prostitutes can be raped, none of that stuff can be ignored. All kinds of information has to be taken into account, and we cannot hold women on such a pedestal that the mere mention of a woman having sex somehow besmirches her in our eyes.

"So she's had a bunch of one-night stands? She's a slut - she was asking for it."

Yawn.

Women have to be responsible for their own safety, and not put themselves in compromising positions, yes. But you know what? At some point, that caution doesn't matter. Women get attacked for no reason, meaningless things happen, things you cannot avoid. I am no fight for a big strong man, and I am a SPITFIRE. If a man decided to drag me into the shadows, he may have to fight with me a bit - but not all that much. Short of locking ourselves in our rooms, and only going out with chaperones, women have to risk a bit if we want to live free lives. You have to weigh the risks.

As in: "Okay. I am not going to travel at 3 am all the way up to Washington Heights, by myself, to meet someone for a drink". If I chose to do such a thing, then - well, I still will not say "asking for it" - but I will say that I was then being WILDLY irresponsible with my own safety and should not be shocked if I were harassed, mugged, what-have-you.

Young says, with stunning simplicity (so simple that it made me realize how we do not hear people outside the blog-world making this point all that much):

Some victim advocates worry that even if the woman in such a case has not been raped, she may be brutally abused by the legal process. They seem to forget that being falsely accused of rape is a terrible form of abuse as well.

Young also writes:

Rape is a despicable crime, and an accusation of rape should be taken very seriously -- but the rights of the accused should be rigorously protected. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, feminist attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim." Yet as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and the victim are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law.

Gloria Allred's blinkered position scares me. He's the 'DEFENDANT' during the trial, not the 'RAPIST'. That is the whole point of our justice system, that is the whole point of Western freakin' civilization, woman.

He hasn't been convicted yet, remember?

Posted by sheila