I work in the legal field and I have heard many times that it’s difficult to prosecute these cases, but it’s a different story when it comes with defense attorneys. Defense attorneys always say that it’s nearly impossible to win these kinds of cases. Why is it like that?
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Sexual assault is one of the only crimes that people voluntarily engage in. Nobody is going to believe I gave a random stranger my wallet or asked him to shoot me, but every day millions of people have casual sex with both acquaintances and total strangers. Proving that the sex wasn’t consensual beyond a shadow of a doubt is incredibly difficult.
Let’s take another violent crime as an example;
Say I stab someone. Well there’s going to be pretty clear evidence that someone, was in fact, stabbed. So the questions comes down to “who stabbed them?”. Witnesses, motives, physical evidence (finger prints, DNA) etc can all narrow down who the stabber was.
Now let’s consider sexual assault. There’s not the same type of physical evidence. You need determine if what happened was sexual assault. Both parties can even agree that SOMETHING happened, but whether consent was made is extremely difficult to determine. Let’s say 2 people go into a room. Everyone sees them go into a room. We even have it on camera. Then they come out and the “victim” goes to the police, gets a rape kit, and the DNA comes back as the other person. So we can pretty definitely say that those two people went into the room and had a sexual encounter. The victim claims that they did not consent. The accused claims that they did have consent. Now it’s “he-said, she-said”.
Because more often it comes down to he said, she said, with very little to no evidence. Without evidence that it actually happened, except for one person’s word over they other, you can’t really be sure it actually happened. And that makes it very hard to prove that it did.
But when they do have that evidence, there’s really not much you can defend against.
I’m sorry but what? People are wrongly convicted all the time I don’t know why this keeps coming up
Rape Shield Laws make it more difficult to defend one’s self against sexual assault charges than to defend against other crimes. We spent a long time treating sexual assault the same as any other crimes where the defendant can enter evidence about the victims character and behavior that was suggestive of them having consented; basically the defendant could say she was wearing such and such clothes, saying/doing such and such promiscuous behavior, and generally try and portray the victim as a whore so that the jury would conclude that she’s the type of girl that fools around a lot and so she probably did this time too and the defense would win.
The added trauma of being made out to be slutty in court prevented women from coming forward in SA cases so perpetrators went free. Then many states passed laws making that kind of evidence inadmissible so now it’s very difficult to make a defense given very little evidence being allowed into court for the defense.
I’m not sure, but I’d guess the difficulty prosecuting has to do with the very long history of misogyny/patriarchy in the U.S. (globally really) which causes people not to trust women and not to take SA seriously enough generally (hence why we passed Rape Shield Laws to try and balance it out).
Adult sexual assault is so hard to prove because the overwhelming majority of sex is consensual. With other crimes, be it child sexual assault, theft, murder, etc. the action itself is illegal, so a prosecutor has to prove that the action occurred, and that the suspect did it. With adult sexual assault, it is insufficient to prove that sex happened, because sex is assumed to be consensual unless we know otherwise. The prosecutor has to prove intent. This is much harder, especially because sexual encounters do not generally happen in the presence of security cameras or witnesses. And this is the purely mechanical aspect of it. Sexual assault also carries significant stigma and shame along with it, so perpetrators are not necessarily willing to bring cases to law enforcement or to talk about it in general. There can also be significant power dynamics at play. For example, Harvey Weinstein had the power to make and break careers, and since the difference between the haves and have nots in acting is so large, some women looked at it as the cost of admission, and others went along because they knew the alternative was living five to a room and waiting tables to make rent.
It often has no witnesses.
Quality of evidence is often poor.
Sometimes these cases re brought to court long after the alleged events.
How do you decide between these two situations . . .
a. He says “We were dating, and it was a mutual agreed activity”
b. She says “We had broken up and I didn’t want him to do that”
evidence is better if the victim goes to the police and the doctor immediately following the attack, and if there is biological evidence (semen / dna) to identify the accused.
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