I guess I shouldn’t be surprised the Stanford rapist has become widely discussed and hated in recent days. Even though he was caught raping a woman and subsequently convicted, a judge decided that giving him more than a six-month sentence would be unfair. After all, the man was a good swimmer and jail would ruin his career and future. The rapist’s father then waded into the controversy with a cringe-worthy letter describing rape as “20 minutes of action” and apparently arguing that liking to cook steaks balances out raping an intoxicated woman.
The internet was outraged. A petition to recall the judge gained 1 million signatures. Even the vice president of the U.S. felt compelled to comment.
On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder why this drew the public’s attention. Most of the outrageous parts of the case happen all of the time to little fanfare. So if the Stanford rapist horrifies you — and he should — you might want to learn about some of America’s other shortfalls in dealing with rape.
To start with, rape is depressingly common. One group has estimated that one in six women are subjected to sexual violence in their lifetime. But getting reliable statistics is hard. Part of this is due to low reporting rates; the government estimates that only slightly more than one in three rapes or attempted rapes get reported. The most common motivations for not reporting are guilt, shame, humiliation, fear of either retaliation or being held legally responsible for a crime, and mistrust of the justice system.
The first four of those reasons hint at something deeply wrong in American culture as a whole. Victim blaming in particular is almost embedded into how we talk about sexual violence. From elementary school on, we teach girls that the way they dress can affect the behavior of men. Instead of punishing people who act irresponsibly, our schools believe that “boys will be boys” and place the burden on girls to change their behavior or be punished. Given that we ingrain this attitude in kids from a very early age, it’s not surprising that the dress of rape survivors is often used to shift some blame to them.
There isn’t a lot of definitive evidence for or against the idea that attire can affect assault rates. Setting up controls to run an experiment would be hard. But think about it this way: Whatever a person is wearing, there are people who can look at them, find the person attractive and not commit a felony. In America, you aren’t likely to get swarmed by dozens of hormonally controlled men the second you step into a public area in a miniskirt. So clothing can’t be said to cause assault. Rape is caused by rapists. They are definitely capable of controlling their actions because literally everyone else does it all the time. This isn’t difficult to figure out.
Yet the top reasons assaults aren’t reported include survivors blaming themselves for a crime committed against them or fearing others would blame them. Victim blaming definitely exists. That’s strange because when talking about every other violent crime, more focus is typically given to why the perpetrator was terrible than to how the victim could have stopped themselves from being targeted. We don’t usually talk about murder victims “asking for it.”
The full reasons and implications of this are beyond the scope of this column. But some of it starts in how we talk about sex and consent in schools. When rape gets discussed at all, it tends to be when telling women how to reduce the odds of being assaulted, rather than telling men not to be rapists. It seems odd that telling someone not to do bad things could work. Yet it might. For one thing, it would change the current dynamics where rape is talked about as something that only women can prevent. Just saying that men can prevent rape by not raping people shatters the idea that women are solely or partially at fault.
Teaching men not to be rapists could also help because a lot of men don’t really understand what rape is. That, too, makes sense in a depressing way. A majority of states require that sex education stress the importance of abstinence. When sex ed treats all premarital sex as bad, it doesn’t leave much room to clarify how to do it responsibly. And if sex ed assumes you’ll say no to sex, it can’t talk about how to say yes in a way that sets boundaries and keeps everything comfortable, ethical and legal.
Given that society’s views on victim blaming and what exactly rape is are problematic and often wrong, it’s no surprise that sometimes the justice system can be hostile to the people who do try to report a crime. To start with, police departments often underreport sexual violence to the public. Even if someone tries to report an incident and apparently convinces the police to take it seriously, the report could get swept under the rug before getting recorded. The chances of law enforcement following up on rape or sexual assault reports are also low; one reporter found that less than 20 percent of reports in New Orleans were investigated by detectives.
Even if the detectives follow up, there’s only a 40 percent chance that the case will actually be closed, either with an arrest or under other circumstances. Taking everything together — the low reporting rates, the low follow-up rates and the low conviction rates — only a tiny fraction of rapists ever face jail time.
If that wasn’t horrifying enough, there are still plenty of other terrible hurdles a survivor could face. North Carolina has reports of destroyed rape kits, can wait more than two years to test one if they do so at all and doesn’t even require local governments to keep track of them. That’s not even unusual for states, but it’s particularly ironic here given the state government’s rhetoric about women’s safety as of late.
To top it off, about 90 percent of the law enforcement officers a survivor can expect to deal with are male. Four out of five of the prosecutors who could press charges are male. Two-thirds of judges are men. So it’s not only possible but probable that a woman trying to press rape charges would be relying on men to advocate for her at every step in the process. Given that I’ve already established a lot of men hold inaccurate views on rape, you can see why this could be a problem. Furthermore, law enforcement officers are more likely to sexually assault someone than the average person. With all of that taken together, it’s a miracle that anyone bothers to report a sex crime at all.
Oh, and even after all of that work, you still could get things such as your state supreme court ruling that having oral sex with someone who is both drunk and unconscious isn’t actually rape. Because that’s a thing that actually happened in the last two months. At a state supreme court. In America. And there was little national outrage.
It’s easy to laugh at the argument that because Stanford rapist is an athlete and good person he should be exonerated. But we do that all of the time. Bill Cosby had been accused of rape for years before a male comedian led to the public taking his accusers seriously. Peyton Manning ended up a two-time Super Bowl winner rather than a convict in large part because he could throw a ball. And Manning is far from the only high-profile college athlete to get charges against them dropped.
For what it’s worth, both the Republican nominee for president and the spouse of the Democratic nominee have been accused of rape. While neither have been convicted, that doesn’t mean a lot. A rapist without the best attorneys money can buy still probably won’t be convicted. What matters is that the public largely ignores the accusers or unflinchingly accepts the revised accounts they give after meeting with the accused’s attorneys. If we really think it’s ridiculous that a rape sentence could be shortened because the rapist could swim well, then it’s equally absurd to think someone couldn’t be a rapist because they can entertain or inspire us.
The politicians accused of sex crimes aren’t the only ones who are problematic. Sometimes elected officials seem to really have no idea how rape works. Take Todd Akin, a man who was actually elected to Congress. He famously believed that a “legitimate rape” couldn’t result in pregnancy. You can also look to former Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, who remarked that pregnancies that result from rape are “something God intended.” That belief is unfortunately common in politics. The second- and third-place finishers in the Republican primary, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both agree that a woman has no right to end a pregnancy resulting from rape.
Rubio, Cruz and Akin either voted against the Violence Against Women Act or voted in favor of gutting it. Incidentally, Cruz and Rubio are also two of the loudest voices warning of trans people sexually assaulting women. Because they apparently care about rape when it’s convenient to.
It’s not just a handful of bad apples causing problems. The Senate voted down bills trying to hold rapists in the military accountable. In fairness to them, Congress was later willing to pass a watered down version. Some action was good, but they didn’t want to risk going too far in punishing sexual assault. Oh, and our legislature isn’t rushing to fix any of the other problems I’ve noted in this column.
Shockingly, the Stanford rapist’s six-month sentence is more than the vast majority of rapists will get. That’s not something that just happens. It’s the result of a long list of cultural and institutional problems spanning decades. So if we’re going to pretend to be serious about treating rape as the violent crime it is, we’ll have to do a bit more than shaming one rapist and calling for a judge to resign.