How come sexual assault is one of hardest crime to prosecute vs every other crime?
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The legal system puts the burden of proof on the accusing party for all crimes. This means that any crime without witnesses that cannot be proven strictly through evidence is difficult to get a conviction on.
This is compounded by a higher than average number of baseless accusations in this particular subject.
Making matters worse the entire definition is legally subjective and doesn’t mesh well with what many people would consider normal behavior as a legal criteria.
One of the more common definitions goes as follows:
sexual assault refers to sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim
Courts have also established that either party can revoke consent at any time.
This leaves a number of significant gaps where there is massive potential for the kind of reasonable doubt that results in an acquittal.
For nonviolent cases you have a judgement call if the action even happened, then if it was sexual in nature then if a reasonable person would have thought consent was given.
Going in order, and using extreme examples on purpose for clarity:
Did the event happen can be if it happened at all, but it can also be if it happened the way it was reported and if the accused intended the result. If you reach back behind you to hand something to a female coworker and end up smacking them in the chest HR or a jury gets to decide if that was accidental or on purpose. Barring an established pattern of behavior they are usually going to err on the side of accidental.
Next if it is sexual: this always comes down to intent. If you are standing at a crosswalk waiting for traffic to clear and someone starts to step past you most people are going to stick an arm out. The way most folks do that is diagonally with the palm towards who they are trying to stop. Unless they see your arm and stop you are going to touch something you probably shouldn’t under normal circumstances and they are the ones that walked into you so 99% of the time no issues & everybody goes on with their day, the problem arrises when either the person being stopped overreacts or someone who actually is a creep uses this pretext to grab a feel repeatedly. Both do happen.
Arguably the worst part to make a determination on is the consent.
Legally neither party can absolutely consent when drinking or otherwise intoxicated, but 80-90% of us do drink or get high at least once and 39-57% of those manage to have some sex afterwards.
Right out of the gate almost 1/3 or more of the population has possibly committed sexual assault at least technically.
The next issue is the duration of consent. It isn’t eternal, but there are practical limits to how short it can be considered to be valid as well. The least graphic example would be sleeping in a shared bed. 62% or more of us will do this during our lives and a significant portion of those people will at some point end up having contact that could be considered sexual in various ways without explicitly discussing it first. Does waking up as the little spoon in the morning mean you were sexually assaulted? The law leaves this to the jury as well.
Finally, what constitutes consent. Not all consent is verbal and some demographics strongly prefer it NOT be verbal for various reasons. ‘stop talking or go home’ levels of preference at times. I have never seen statistics on exactly how many, but it is not uncommon.
The vast majority of the population sees situations where all of these things are permissable if not desirable.
None of this is presented as an excuse to truly malevolent behavior. Deliberately doing such a thing knowing that consent is absent is bad, but less then 30% of the population even agrees on the ground rules so it is effectively impossible to have a legal framework here that has solid boundaries. It has to be looked at situation by situation and that makes ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ much harder to achieve.
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