How come sexual assault is one of hardest crime to prosecute vs every other crime?
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There’s rarely any evidence. This is partially because the victim typically isn’t ready to press charges until a while after, sometimes years later. At that point, the biological evidence is gone. Your best bet is the perpetrator having bragged to people via text message or having taken photos, but even that could be gone.
Another aspect is the actual process of testifying as a victim of something traumatic. Your rapist is in the room, and you have this lawyer trying to discredit you in every way possible. Few victims can handle that, and even those who do it might not to a good job because of that.
Finally, in my experience, the police just don’t seem to care about it very much, perhaps because they know it will rarely result in prosecution. From what I’ve seen, they never took his phone or read his texts and never even talked to him. It just seems like they should have done more, but maybe an accusation isn’t enough evidence for a subpoena? Regardless, we didn’t see much of an investigation.
They’re hard to prove. Sure, you could prove that sex happened but then you’d have to prove that it was unwanted. Without any record of consent/non-consent (a text, voice recording, video) you have to prove that the perp had sex with the victim against their wishes.
There’s a reason why attackers often tell their victims that “no one will believe you” and that “everyone will hate them and think differently if you tell.” That’s why we have grown humans thinking an article of clothing can and/or is an invitation.
1. No witnesses, hard to prove. Perps know this as well
2. Because of culture, the victim often blames themselves or are super embarrassed to come forward, indeed it’s almost like a drug theft in that because of the social dynamics of a situation it’s usually not even in the victims interest to come forward. Imagine if your societal script demanded you kill yourself if you were raped. You’d probably e like no siree I wasn’t raped, at least if you didn’t want to die.
2a. That is an extreme example, I think in western culture in the USA we have bad cultural scripts that also make it not in the victims interest. Half the USA still has strong purity culture for women, (and toxic masculinity for men) but even in places where it doesn’t exist strongly there is still an assumption that rape always causes mental illness and then you have all these stigmas and assumptions about mental illness. So why would you want that? Just convince yourself it was not rape or give up on the 10 percent chance the rapist gets caught by not reporting.
2b that’s if your believed, if you have an unconventional rape or get unlucky, or get raped by a social superior you still won’t be believed. The MeToo movement has really made it so millionaire actresses with huge twitter followings are safe from billionaire CEO’s, but I’m not sure it’s done much otherwise. Probably helped middle class office environments in some ways and made them more sterile and boring in other ways.
3 American police kinda suck unless one of their own was criminalized so don’t hold your breath for a good investigation.
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