How come sexual assault is one of hardest crime to prosecute vs every other crime?
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Your assumption that sexual assault are harder to prosecute is hard to back with certainty. That’s what a lot of people think, but depending on how you look at the numbers you can get different answers.
If we take this [website](https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system) for example, we could say that out of 1000 sexual assault only 25 goes to jail, but only 20 out of 1000 robberies goes to jail and 33 out of assault and battery goes to jail. The rate are similar.
But on the same site they present that a lot less people are reporting sexual assault to the police than other crimes. Meaning that 5.2% of reported assault goes to jail, while 3.2% of robberies and 8% of sexual assault.
I’m sure we can find other data that would contradict these, meaning that making a conclusion is not an easy thing to do and that people will disagree no matter what. From what I can see, most crimes are very hard to prosecute.
That said, you can make the conversation even more complex. We can talk about severity of the crime, what percentage of sexual assault are a clap on the ass vs a rape, and how many robberies are a kid stealing a candy bar vs an armed robbery. What are the % of false report, is there more of those in sexual assault or robberies? It’s a very complicated subject.
One of the biggest factors in a case like that is whether or not the victim consented, and that can be incredibly hard to prove without any physical evidence of resistance.
Sexual Assaults don’t generally happen in a public area with lots of witnesses who can say for sure the victim wasn’t interested in the perpetrator. Usually they happen behind closed doors, or in an out of the way place where no one would catch them in the act. But the same can also be said about consensual sex acts. While many victims can, and do, fight back leaving physical marks on their attacker, these heal over time and unless the suspect is caught before that happens, you’ll never know they were fought against.
This means a sexual assault case ends up being one persons word against another. As a rule, courts tend to avoid throwing a potentially innocent person into jail even if that means a criminal goes free, so the case gets dismissed.
It all comes down to proof. You have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that So-and-so is the person that assaulted the other person and if there’s no DNA evidence from fingernails (defensive) or rape kit, or there’s no video evidence then you have no concrete proof and it devolves into a circumstantial case of “he said; she said”
Then you factor in the social and cultural stigmatisms that exist and you get victims not always willing to fight the fight.
There are also a not insignificant amount of sexual assault allegations that have been false so there’s little trust in the system.
1. Victim’s desire to come forward due to the trauma and perceived embarrassment
2. Collection and preservation of evidence (often due to number one and the delay it often causes)
3. He said/she said
4. Society kind of sucks at handling this appropriately and delicately (too hard on the victim, too soft on perpetrator)
5. Double standards regarding Men and Women
6. Honestly, the list goes on ad nauseum
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