Also, I'm with Sirius on this. People should stop crying wolf about rape. If I remember correctly, there was this one woman back in the nineties who claimed that she was raped by police officers, and later shown to be lying.
Tawana Brawley.
And goddamn CNN for making Dave Blount partially right about something.
Since I'm the one who got Ultie stirred up on this, I feel I should make my thoughts clearer:
I know that rape and other sexual crimes are underreported and that, statistically, people are much less likely to make such false reports than for other crimes. BUT, I also feel that, as a society, we carry too much presumption of guilt when it comes to sex crimes. With obvious exceptions such as Stubenville and Maryville, where the perpetrators are given the benefit of the doubt and tragically light sentences because of their high social status, most reporting on sex crimes in the media is slanted toward the side of "lock 'em up and throw away the key." Rather than simply present the facts that are available and allow viewers to make up their own minds, we are encouraged to automatically presume guilt, and it has been shown that the accusation of a sex crime can be enough to ruin a person's life, even if they are later exonerated, as with the people caught up in the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s and 90s.
While the vast majority of the accused in these cases DO turn out to be guilty, we still get cases like the Duke lacrosse case, where a woman accused the team of essentially gangraping her and the entire country was calling for their heads until it came out that the woman had lied. In a recent legal case I had to go through, I was accused of indecent exposure, with various ancillary details to shore up the claim, and the prosecutor tried to push through with the case even as more and more forensic evidence came out that directly contradicted the stories presented, even indications that the prosecution had destroyed or tried to destroy evidence that would have helped me. If it weren't for my past criminal record and the fact that indecent exposure is a sex crime, however minor, I doubt the case would have been pursued at all, and even if it had, the charges certainly would have been dropped when evidence against them started piling up. And yet, I can't help wondering if my victory will make the prosecutors more hesitant to pursue legitimate cases, for fear of damaging their careers.
My point is, false crime reports are a problem no matter what the crime is. False reports of robbery or assault often end up reinforcing racial stereotypes, for example, and that reinforcement can stick even when the falsehood is revealed. While sex crimes are already underreported and make up only a tiny percentage of false reports, they have a disproportionately greater impact both on the ones accused and on the perceptions of outsiders; they can ruin the lives of the accused beyond recovery, and they give ammunition to rape apologists. As I said before, I can't help wondering if my victory against my false charges will make the prosecutors more hesitant to pursue legitimate cases.
My heart bleeds for the victims in Stubenville and Maryville. While I don't agree with a "throw away the key" philosophy or with sentencing juveniles as adults, I do believe the perpetrators should have received much harsher sentences than they did, and the media's obvious sympathy for them is disturbing at the very least. At the same time, I can't help wondering what kind of environment would so warp a teenager's thinking that they would think this sort of crime is acceptable, even celebratable. They didn't appear in a vacuum, after all. I think if someone did a little digging into their backgrounds, they'd find a pattern of bullying or other behaviors that were never properly addressed. I can't imagine what it would be like to be so lacking in compassion, which is considered by most to be an essential part of the human experience. And for that reason, I also hope that the perpetrators are somehow eventually able to realize the true impact of what they did. Making amends is probably impossible, but I hope they can somehow find a way to help leave the world better than they found it, despite what they did.
