How come sexual assault is one of hardest crime to prosecute vs every other crime?
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It actually isn’t. The idea that sexual assault is difficult to prosecute comes mostly from “victim advocates” and law enforcement. In reality, sex crimes have a fairly high [false conviction rate](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/sep/4/study-finds-wrongful-convictions-116-percent-sexual-assault-cases-pre-dna-testing-era/).
In fact, there are special rules for rape and sexual assault cases that prevent defendants from introducing useful evidence. In many jurisdictions, these are called “rape shield.” For instance, in my state, our rape shield rule prevents the defendant from introducing evidence of a prior allegation of a sex crime from the alleged victim, unless the alleged victim both admits making the allegation and that the allegation is false. If she denies making it, or says that it was true, you can’t introduce it without having a special hearing. And if you do win that hearing, the prosecutor gets an interlocutory (read: pretrial) appeal.
Sometimes, you’ll see claims that go like “less than 1% of rapes lead to a conviction of the perpetrator.” I’ve never been able to track down where this came from, but it is nonsense. For one, if it were true, that would mean that researchers had somehow found proof that a rape happened that the victim didn’t have, the police didn’t find, and the prosecutors didn’t know about. For two, many of the times this is claimed you can see that the researchers have essentially just asked women “did X ever happen to you” and “was there ever a conviction?” Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable, but also, many of the acts they classify as “rape” or “sexual assault” do not meet the legal definition of any of those terms. They often include things like “being talked into having sex.”
You’ll also often hear that the law used to be peculiarly hostile to alleged victims. This sometimes comes with the ridiculous claim that in the past, you had to have two witnesses to prosecute a rape. That is not true and as far as I know has never been true. The nature of rape cases before DNA meant that it was inherently a decision of which person to believe, and that may have led some to exaggerate the actual difficulty of prosecuting someone for rape.
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