Placing the blame: the result of victim blaming and false reporting
On Tuesday October 27, Northwestern sent out an e-mail notification about a reported sexual assault against a student that occurred in Chicago. Less than a day later, another e-mail was sent with the subject line “Sexual assault report false.”
Rape and sexual assault, varying slightly in definition, are both topics on which people tend to hold very rigid and gendered views. Naturally, a false report of sexual assault stirs up quite a bit of discussion on campus.
As students picked apart the details of the story, everyone seemed to come to different conclusions. “Why would you be on the El alone at 1:00 in the morning?” was a common question, a classic example of victim blaming. Too often we rationalize that the victim was out too late at night, or that she (or he) was drinking too much that night, or “well, didn’t you see what she was wearing?” as if it gives the attacker some excuse in the assault. But the simple fact is that it’s wrong. The victim is never at fault when it comes to sexual assault, harassment or rape. In fact, victim blaming is wrong in the case of any violent crime. Regardless of the choices leading up to an attack, it does not give the attacker the right to invade someone’s body.
Dr. Donald Misch, executive director of health services on the Evanston campus, says that one of the reasons victim blaming is so common is because it fits into society’s “just world hypothesis.” Basically, people want to believe that they are in control of their fate and that the world is fair. “[People think] if we play by the rules and don’t take risks, then we won’t get hurt. So when we hear about incidents of sexual assault and rape we want to blame the victim for taking the risk,” Misch says.
While it’s hard to wrap your mind around a person claiming a sexual assault that never actually occurred, it’s even more troubling to think that an assault that did occur might be labeled “unfounded” by officials. It is important to point out that there is reality in both scenarios. The second email sent out to students had the subject heading of “sexual assault report false,” however within its contents, students learned that the Chicago Police Department determined the reported assault was “not a bona fide incident.” So is this a case of crying wolf or misplaced judgment by the police?
The answer is that we don’t know. The only people who know what really happened in the case are the ones who were directly involved: the victim and her alleged assailant. Other interpretations are formed from second-hand information of the incident, and according to Misch, should be “taken with a small grain of salt.” He says that, unfortunately, false reporting does happen and for the reasons that we might assume: as an alibi, for revenge or to garner support. Percentage of false claims on sexual assault statistics are varying and range anywhere from two to 40 percent. However, Misch likes to think that it happens “no more often than false claims of other crimes: between one and two percent.” On the brighter side, students didn’t readily believe that a person would lie about sexual assault, and comments like “it was just a bad one-night stand” (although distastefully) reflect this attitude. False reporting is not only illegal, but becomes detrimental to future cases by perpetuating skepticism against victims.
Sexual assault reports labeled by police and investigators as “not bona fide” are sometimes the results of such skepticism. For example, if an official determines that the victim showed no resistance to her (or his) attacker, did not show enough emotion during the interview, or did not report the crime in a “timely” manner, they may declare that the event did not qualify as a sexual crime. These conclusions are unfairly influenced by society’s perception of a “typical” sexual assault and manage to ignore its very definition: sex without consent.
Other reasons for ruling a case unfounded may be procedural: perhaps there is not enough evidence against the perpetrator or a witness refuses to testify. Remember, just because a case is unfounded doesn’t mean that someone wasn’t raped or sexually assaulted. The unfounding of cases does the most potential damage to the willingness of rape and sexual assault victims to participate in the legal system. In fact, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network approximately 60 percent of sexual crimes are never even reported. Facing the aftermath of a sexual crime is a difficult and emotional process for a victim, and finding skepticism when turning to the police is not exactly encouraging.
In response to what happened early last week, students should not let skepticism get in the way of sympathy. We do not know the whole story, nor do we know the personal experiences of the people around us. Someone you know may be struggling with a similar experience, and Northwestern needs to be an environment where people feel comfortable talking about sexual assault and rape without judgment.
Myrtie Williams is a contributor from Sexual Health & Assault Peer Education
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Dear NbN
I write to express my concern about your use of the term “victim” to describe the accuser in the above-referenced story. By labeling her the “victim” before a single scrap of evidence has been admitted at trial, much less an adjudication of guilt, you have unwittingly rushed to judgment and declared her allegation to be factual.
Such a description does a grave disservice to (1) the presumed innocent who are accused of such crimes since, by necessity, they must be guilty if their accusers are, in fact, “victims”; (2) actual rape victims, because you trivialize rape when you include among its victims women who might only be false accusers; and (3) your readers, who are entitled to accurate reporting but receive something less than that when you transform an accuser into a “victim.”
It is well to note that every objective study ever conducted on false rape claims shows that they are a significant problem. The only fair manner of reporting on these cases is to refer to accusers as exactly what they are: accusers.
I implore you to exercise greater care in reporting on such stories, and to show sensitivity to the presumed innocent and their families, by not suggesting that the trial is over even before it has begun.
Thank you.
Michael
November 9, 2009 at 4:37 am
This is going to anger some folks because it doesn’t fit with the sexual grievance industry’s victim metanarrative. I founded the world’s leading internet site on false rape claims, The False Rape Society, and I am thoroughly familiar with the major rape studies. Our site does not espouse a political agenda, but we spend a lot of time debunking politically correct assertions such as ones found in your article. The sad fact is that a lot of people seem to think we can’t be opposed to rape if we acknowledge the reality that false rape claims are a serious problem.
“Misch likes to think that it happens ‘no more often than false claims of other crimes: between one and two percent.’”
This assertion is incorrect. The sexual grievance industry’s standard two percent canard was long ago debunked. E.g., here is a law review article that traced it to its murky origins: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf
Every serious, unbiased study puts the prevalence of false claims much higher, typically ranging from 25 to 60 percent. Because standards for assessing false rape claims are not consistently applied, and because police are often able to dispose of most false claims very quickly, it is impossible to collect nationwide data, but the single most authoritative study ever conducted, by a feminist icon no less, Dr. Eugene Kanin, found that 41% of all rape claims in a Midwestern town over a nine year period were not just false but recanted. The number of false claims was likely higher, possibly much higher. Kanin did a follow-up study with respect to two universities and found the false rate there was 50%. (When we say the false rate, we are talking about a floor — those claims we know for certain were false.)
For most, or close to most, rape claims, we do not know what happened because of the “he said/she said” nature of the claim, and to suggest that we should automatically assume all of these are actual rapes is erroneous in the extreme. Let’s talk about what we do know. We can be reasonably certain that approximately 15% of all rape claims were actual rapes because that’s the conviction rate (we know that some innocent men and boys are convicted of rape, but for the sake of argument, we will assume that this number reasonably represents claims we know were rapes). On the other end, we are reasonably certain some rape claims are false. We’re not sure of the percentage, so let’s settle on Kanin’s 41 percent, which is lower than some other trustworthy studies, and which only counted recanted claims, not the totality of false claims (it is fair to assume that not all rape liars recant). So it is a conservative number — the minimum, the floor. That means that for rape claims where we are reasonably certain what happened one way or the other, 41 out of 56 are false. Obviously, some rapists are not convicted, but it’s also fair to assert that some (and likely a lot more than “some”) false claims occur that aren’t definitively ruled as false claims. It is dishonest and unjust to lump claims of which we are not reasonably certain of the outcome in the “rape” column, which, sadly, has become the politically correct thing to so. Some persons do it to advance a political agenda. I am not attributing any motivation to Misch because I know nothing about him aside from what is written here.
Moreover, the FBI has put the rate of false rape charges at four times the number for other crimes it tracks. D. Subotnik, “HANDS OFF”: SEX, FEMINISM, AFFIRMATIVE CONSENT, AND THE LAW OF FOREPLAY, 16 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Social Justice 249 (2007). That number, by the way, is likely much, much higher in actuality.
As for underreporting, the entire field is so terribly politicized, that it is impossible to rely on the assertions of the paid sexual assault community.
We need not pretend the falsely accused are a myth to be justifiably outraged about rape. Too many people seem to think we do, and in the process, they are hurting innocent persons.
For shame.
Pierce Harlan
November 9, 2009 at 9:39 am