How come sexual assault is one of hardest crime to prosecute vs every other crime?
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Speaking as someone who works in a county jail and works hand in hand with the courts……some jurisdictions are afraid to prosecute these crimes, and some will rush them. In the cases my county gets, I feel as if they are rushed and the victim doesn’t have enough time to process and overcome the situation, and is put in the spotlight when the trauma is still front and center in their mind. Victims aren’t given enough assistance to heal, which ends up making their testimony weaker. The taboo of sex in America also plays a big part, judges do not want to deal with it and seem to always take both sides before accepting charges.
In addition to many other great answers — destruction of evidence.
If you’re raped, you likely want to get rid of any possible scent or dna or whatever of the perpetrator because you’ve just been violated. You’ll probably want to take a shower.
Go to the police and do a rape kit first. That’ll go a long way to providing evidence needed to prove the perpetrator guilty.
Speaking from experience, no one wants to believe you. No one wants to think children are assaulted, repeatedly, for years. Family are ashamed and protective. Law system handles it overly-delicately. And worst of all, some folks in charge are protecting themselves by making it difficult to prosecute. Coming out is the easiest part, and that’s saying a lot.
So I have a perspective on this. I was recently on a jury for a child sexual abuse trial. Now this was different because it was children so the question of consent was out the window, but the defense was “no I didn’t” and the only witnesses were the two victims, now teenagers. These were crimes that, by design, happened in private.
Now, of 12 jurors, every single one of us thought that this abuse actually happened. But on our first vote 3 of the 12 were unsure or leaning toward reasonable doubt. Because, in their view, the only evidence was the testimony of two people who were children at the time. Could they be lying? Could they be being manipulated? Have misunderstood what happened?
In the end we did convict, because we didn’t think it was reasonable that those two girls would come up with the story and stick with it through a tortuous process of hearings and a trial if it wasn’t actually true. But it took 2 days of debate to get everyone to that conclusion. If there had been any way at all to cast doubt on their story, it would have been tough to convict.
If someone is shot or stabbed, we know that something illegal likely happened. However, with sexual assault, (say date rape) the same thing could have happened and been a perfectly legal act of two people wanting to have sex together. The difference is the intent of one of the parties. One can lie about a lack of consent to police after the fact, or not reasonably communicate consent to the other person….all defenses to sexual assault.
Jumping on this to mention,
If you are in the armed services and you have been sexually assaulted, the Catch a Serial Offender Program (CATCH) at https://www.sapr.mil allows you to anonymously (or otherwise if you prefer) report the crime as well as many details involving the suspect. Many people don’t like to report out of fear of persecution or retaliation. Since perpetrators of sexual assault are often committing this crime more than once against multiple people, it is beneficial to have data on them even if you don’t want your particular case out there.
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Cmon now….. this one is clearly obvious. Because most of the time it’s all he said she said. Need real evidence
How do you prove consent?
He says there was none.
She says there was.
Who is right?
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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