@Hunt, do you have documentation that the conviction rates for rape are typically around 90%? What I read is that they are much lower.
It’s hard to know. But for the average person, twice as many rapists behind bars trumps something about conviction rates, I’d imagine. At least, if I were running the reelection campaign for the DA, I’d be happy to put Twice As Many Rapists Behind bars in my ad campaign, and I’d also trumpet Serious Investigations of the Serious Crime of Rape. Your daughter is safer, now that these sleazeballs are behind bars! My opponent wants to let rapists go free! Serious Crimes, Serious Time.
I think a bigger emphasis on rape investigations would be defensible at election time.
Close, but instead of going back to 100 per year it goes to 50 because women don’t want to go through the hassle when they see that the odds of getting a conviction are much lower than they used to be.
OK, but your opponent is going to say that your conviction rate plummeted even though you spent three times as much as before on these cases–and she’s going to find out what other kinds of cases were cut back in order to allow that to happen.
Look, you’re making a prediction about what you think would happen if substantial additional resources were put into investigating and prosecuting assault cases. I just think that your prediction is too rosy, and that the actual results on the ground will be much less, and enough less that many people will question the allocation of resources. Whether your prediction or mine is correct can be tested by trying it someplace–assuming that it hasn’t already been tried.
I want to make it clear that I am very much in agreement with treating all complainants with respect, and also with encouraging victims to report crimes. Those are worth doing even if the ultimate number of convictions doesn’t increase much, or at all.
I don’t see anyway of separating the element of consent from the definition of rape. Yes, proving consent or the lack thereof is sometimes very difficult and standards most certainly vary from state to state. But there are difficulties in proving the elements of many crimes and state statutes are equally as diverse when defining them. What are we trying to say here about rape cases?
We have very similar problems with domestic violence cases. Same general scenario where victims are often the only witnesses, they are reluctant to report/testify against abusers and often when they do they are not believed or their testimony is discounted. These cases probably have a somewhat higher conviction rate because often there are physical signs of the abuse which linger for days or weeks which can be photographed. But I do not see the effort to change the language of domestic violence in the same way I observe that effort with rape.
You’re relying on damned selective attention, here. The conviction rate at the start of the experiment is 90% by hypothesis, but that is not impelling women to report rapes-- they aren’t paying attention to the conviction rate. Then the justice system pays more attention to reported rapes, and that (by hypothesis) makes more women report their rapes. But the newly reported rapes are less prosecutable than the other ones (why do we believe this?) and therefore the conviction rate goes down. Initially, women weren’t paying attention to the conviction rate, but now they are, and they stop reporting their rapes-- and they also stop paying attention to conviction rates, because they fail to notice that when only 50 rapes are reported, the conviction rate goes up to 95%.
Equilibria typically don’t work like that. Your scenario is not impossible, but I don’t find it convincing. You have women paying attention to the conviction rate just when that is convenient for your argument and not otherwise, and paying attention to the increased focus on rape investigation just when that is convenient for your argument and not otherwise.
The UK statistics I posted earlier suggest that stranger rape cases are much more likely to be reported than acquaintance and partner rape cases. Stranger rape cases are much easier to prosecute–if you can identify the defendant.
It’s also my opinion, based on my own perceptions and not on data, that reported cases tend to be more egregious than unreported cases. So it’s my opinion that the facts of reported cases will tend to be more compelling, on average, than unreported cases.
That was not my question. I asked why we assumed that when we double the reporting rate, we get worse cases. It is perfectly possible that doubling the reporting rate results in a new set of cases that are equally as prosecutable as the existing cases. There are a lot of unreported rapes, including unreported stranger rapes.
Or, it’s perfectly possible that the next 100% of cases are less prosecutable, but not very much less prosecutable.
We have to look at why rape victims don’t report their rapes. Usually, it is some reason other than that they don’t think their rapist will be convicted.
Let’s do the experiment and find out. Let’s have police and prosecutors take rape accusers seriously, and see what happens.
I just caught up on all 22 pages in 2 hours and here are my thoughts. I haven’t read the book but I intend to. I can already tell I will be outraged. I also are pretty sure that my opinions will not change much regarding my feelings about this discussion.
Here is my bottom line analysis: I think CF, DS, etc are correct re many of their points. I also think Hunt is correct with many of his.
Instead of referencing specific quotes or arguments I will try to distill my feelings into a summary of my thoughts.
I think far too many times the police start off with the premise that a woman is lying or that she somehow “brought it on herself”. That needs to change. I also think that some of those cases are simply women who interpret the police telling them that a case will be hard to prove as the police saying they don’t believe them.
I think that of ALL crimes in the world that rape is probably the hardest to prosecute. That is solely because of the “he said/she said” factor. Much earlier in the thread someone (I think DS) said that in many cases there is evidence of a rape: things like video of someone following a woman into a dorm, etc. In some cases that might be true (eg the Jesse Matthew case in C’ville). But the reason the evidence was crucial in that case was because he did not know her. That case is also a bit different because she ended up dead. In many cases, however, that kind of evidence says nothing definitive about the situation. So what if John Doe followed Jane Doe into a dorm. John’s story that they two met inside and really hit it off and then proceeded to have sex is in no way contradicted by that video. Nor is it necessarily refuted by the evidence of blood on the sheets. Was she a virgin? Did she end up bleeding during consensual sex because she was a “small” woman and he was a “large” man? In too many cases it will still end up being he said/she said.
I also doubt that if all 400k (or whatever it is) rape kits were suddenly processed that it would matter very much. My guess is that most of those are acquaintance cases. I would think that in the cases where it was suspected stranger rape that they would have been fast-tracked (but that is just a theory on my part).
The problem of alcohol is a big one but one that can’t be ignored. I am also unsure of how I feel about the ability to give consent while impaired. Someone once brought up on another thread about rape a statement that really stuck with me. They asked about a case where a woman wants to have sex with a particular guy but is a bit shy and purposely gets drunk to give her some “liquid courage”. Can they consent while drunk when they essentially consented while they were sober? On the other hand, how about that girl deciding in the middle of the act that she did not want to go through with it. Of course in that case it would be rape. But how about if she never articulated that? I personally think that the point where consent is no longer valid is on a continuum between sober and passed out. Where is that point? . My guess would be that it is above the legal limit for driving but well below passed out. But that is an argument that is not really relevant to the particular cases we have been discussing here.
There are so many problems with proving a rape case. In the case of the alleged gang rape of the woman at Montana for example. Is it plausible that a woman would want to have sex with multiple member of a sports team at once? Heck yes. People have written books about experiences like that with teams or bands, and that is but a minuscule fraction of the woman that have done something similar. So how do you discern the difference between a willing participant and a rape victim. A rape kit that shows the presence of 3 different DNA samples in a woman isn’t going to tell you anything. Absent the presence of a date rape drug or some other “smoking gun” I think most juries would have a hard time convicting in a “they said/she said” scenario like that. That is why I think many prosecutors shy away from a majority of the non slam-dunk cases that come before them.
I think I answered this, and I think the fact that stranger cases are reported at a much higher rate than acquaintance cases also suggests the answer.
I agree that there may be many reasons that cases are not reported. But can you think of any reason that stronger cases would be less likely to be reported than weaker cases?
Is it your view that this isn’t being done anywhere in the United States? It could be so, I guess.
I don’t recall if this has been posted before, but it has a lot of interesting information relating to many of the issues we’ve been discussing, and in particular various reasons for non-reporting: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221153.pdf
I agree that, currently, stronger cases are more likely to be reported than weaker cases. But this should not lead us to believe that doubling the number of reported cases would lead to significantly weaker cases.
We agree, I presume, that the students MIT accepts are on average stronger students than the students MIT rejects. But let’s say MIT decided to double the size of its freshman class. Would the accepted students be worse? Maybe, but certainly not very much worse, and maybe not worse at all. Similarly, doubling the number of reported rapes might well not result in much worse cases, and maybe not worse cases at all.
It’s my view that neither you nor I know where, if anywhere, this is being done, so we can’t draw any conclusions. More data would be better. I’m all about the big data.
That’s an interesting analogy. I think the cases that are most likely to be successfully prosecuted are more like the very best students MIT admits, and thus doubling the class wouldn’t be likely to get more students like them. I just tend to think that the strongest cases are likely to be among those most likely to be reported currently–you aren’t convinced of that, clearly. I’d like to see it tested.
Look at Exhibit 5-8 in that study I just posted, and in particular at the reasons given for not reporting. They surprised me. For example, among “impaired” cases, almost half of the people said that one reason they didn’t report was that they thought they were partly or fully responsible for what happened. What do you make of that?
If I’m reading it correctly, that survey found that just under 14% of undergraduates had experienced at least one completed sexual assault.
I looked back, and the 1 out of 5 is apparently attempted or completed assaults. That’s different from saying that one in five women are raped, and perhaps the controversy over that statistic is based on “creep” in rhetoric from what the stat actually says.
If you’re believing this study, @Hunt, have a look at 5-1. (And if you don’t believe it, you shouldn’t be citing it.) In this population of college women, 3.4% say they were raped at college when they were not incapacitated, and an additional 8.5% say they were raped when they were incapacitated (mostly because of alcohol they drank voluntarily). This does not include women who say they were persuaded or verbally coerced into cooperating in sex they didn’t want. If those are the numbers, then college rape is hugely underreported to the police, and there is plenty of opportunity for more strong cases to be reported.
Just under 12% of college women said they had been raped while at college, in that paper. I don’t find it comforting that “only” 12% of women are raped at college, not 20%.
Who says I don’t believe the study? Do you believe the part of it in which more than half of the respondents who didn’t report an assault said that they didn’t believe that it was serious enough to report? That was a much more common reason than fear that they’d be treated badly by the police.
To put a fine point on this, don’t the numbers suggest that many women recognize that they had sex while too drunk to consent, and thus technically were assaulted, but don’t believe that they were wronged? Is it better to encourage those women to decide that they were wronged? Maybe it is. But if a big part of the unreported cases are of this kind, I very much doubt if you are going to get a lot more prosecutions.
I also note that many, many victims don’t want to report because they don’t want anybody to know about what happened. The report seems to approve of the idea of anonymous reporting–but obviously anonymous reporting can’t result in criminal prosecutions. So how to solve that problem?
Yes, of course. Looks like a bit over a third of them did think it was serious enough to report. So now we’re down to something like 4% of college women saying they were raped and thinking it was serious enough to report. Are the police even seeing 10% of that number of reports?
I’m finding the numbers a bit confusing, because the number of women in the chart about whether the assault was reported doesn’t add up to the number who say they were raped, let alone the number who say they were assaulted in some way. But we can conclude that of all the women who say they were sexually assaulted in some way at college (1073 women, 19%), about 40% (419 women) say the attempted or completed assault was not serious enough to report. [I’m looking at the numbers on pages xiii and 5-24.]
It seems to me that those figures suggest that if we want to substantially increase reporting, we have to overcome some pretty difficult obstacles. Probably most importantly, we’d have to overcome the reluctance of victims for anybody to know about what happened. I was surprised at how big a factor this was, even among forcible rape cases. I also found it troubling that the incidence of regret for having reported was higher among those raped by force than among those who were incapacitated. Perhaps those raped by force are more justifiably afraid of retaliation by the perpetrator.
That’s funny, because I think the chart shows just the opposite.
Total sexual assaults in the chart: 657 (131 forced, 526 incapacitated)
Total reported to law enforcement: 27 (18 forced, 9 incapacitated)
Total who didn’t think the police would think it was serious: 80 (22 forced, 58 incapacitated)
Total who were afraid of being treated poorly by the justice system: 37 (13 forced, 24 incapacitated)
If we get reports from half of the people who didn’t report because they didn’t think the police would think it was serious, and half the people who were afraid of being treated badly, that triples the number of reports right there.