What Does “Believe Women” Actually Mean?

We start out by believing every other person who reports a crime; why not women reporting rape?

Sample Report: “Oh my gosh! I was walking home from the store and this guy who works out at my gym grabbed my purse and just took off.”

Sample Response: “Wow! Are you Okay? What did you lose? Do we need to cancel your credit cards? Let’s do that and then go right to the police. Do you know his name? I’ll go with you to report it.”

Sample Report: “Hello, 911? I need the fire department to get over here immediately. Some kids just set fire to my patio furniture and the blaze is getting dangerously close to my car. I need help now!” (I actually know someone who had this happen to her).

Sample Response: “We’re sending someone right away. Go into the back yard for now, until they can get the fire under control. We’ll ask for a description and more details once we make sure that you are safe and that the fire is truly put out.”

In both of these instances, the person reporting the crime was completely believed right at the outset both by friends and authority figures. There was an immediate presumption of truth in their report. There was an immediate concern with the well-being of the victim. No-one jumped right to, “I’ll bet you were tired of that old furniture and set it on fire yourself so you could get a new patio set, and maybe a new car to boot?”

No-one said, “How do you really know it was a guy from your gym? Maybe it was some other guy who just looks like him? We can’t question that guy until you show some further proof that’s who it was who grabbed your purse.” Do you see how asinine and absurd this sounds in any other context? And yet that kind of thing is common in cases related to reporting rape or sexual assault.

If you reported a purse snatching or some other crime where you saw the perpetrator with your own eyes, the police might have you look through a book of mug shots or work with a sketch artist. They would talk to people at the gym and then bring the guy you identified in for questioning on just your say-so alone. Why should rape be any different?

Of course, in the on-going questioning around the details in any case, if something sounds implausible or otherwise suspicious, the person charged with investigating the crime would make note of that and pursue it, as they should. But the original presumption is that the person doing the reporting is to be believed. This does not mean we grab the guy from the gym and throw him in jail with no due process or further investigation. It does mean that unless there is a specific reason not to, we start out by believing the crime victim.

This is not in fact, presuming the accused is guilty. It is simply presuming that the accuser has a legitimate reason for us to take her complaint seriously. It’s how we handle all reports of all other crime!

To be fair, there are many places where law enforcement takes these kinds of reports very seriously, but within the national consciousness, there is still a lag. There are also tens of thousands of rape kits that are sitting on shelves, unprocessed, sometimes for decades. Below is a quote from the recently published article in The Washington Post that detailed the sad miscarriage of justice in the Amber Wyatt case, which illustrates this lag in caring about rape as a crime worth taking seriously and punishing:

Former sergeant Cheryl Johnson of the Fort Worth Police Department started counting around 2007, the year that Wyatt’s father said her case went before a Tarrant County grand jury. As head of Fort Worth’s adult sex crimes unit, she was sending dozens of rape cases to the Tarrant County district attorney’s office to be presented to the county’s grand jury. But again and again, the grand jury had “no-billed” her cases, deciding not to indict — even when they seemed open and shut to Johnson.

“We had cases where there were photographs and confessions from the suspects that were no-billed,” Johnson told me in 2015 in the tidy living room of her Fort Worth home. One case in particular stuck with her: A man admitted to giving a woman drugs that would render her unconscious — and then raping her after she had passed out and photographing the act. The victim was sent the photographs of her own rape, which she turned over to police. Still, the grand jury decided not to indict.

Why should this be the case? Why are we so reluctant to prosecute a man who has sexually attacked women? Is it because there is some nagging old bit of our 10 thousand year experiment with patriarchy that prioritizes men over women, and that believes on some level that this is what women are for? Marital rape wasn’t a crime in all 50 US states until 1993, for heaven’s sake! The bodies of women were literally considered the property of their husbands until 25 years ago!

We probably aren’t going to stand for Mad Max-like raping in the streets, but if it goes on somewhere behind closed doors, it seems we wouldn’t want a man to have to actually be held accountable for that. People used to literally say that, “What goes on behind closed doors isn’t our business.” My husband told me that on Friday he’d been at an event where a 50-year-old woman claimed that we “shouldn’t talk about these things.” She must have invited it or wanted it in some way. He’s a good and important man. He wouldn’t do that. She must’ve made it up. The Bill Cosbys and the Harvey Weinsteins of the world used this to their advantage for decades, but the small-time rapists are shielded by the same dynamic.

Here are some statistics from RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization:

Every 98 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted.

And every 8 minutes, that victim is a child. Meanwhile, only 6 out of every 1,000 perpetrators will end up in prison.

• 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted).
• About 3% of American men — or 1 in 33 — have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.

9 out of every 10 victims of rape are female.

Most sexual violence is perpetrated by men, although only a comparatively few men are rapists. However, a large percentage of women (and men) have been victims of sexual violence. How does that take place?

It takes place in an atmosphere of shame, and silence; an atmosphere where “boys will be boys” and holding your hand over a woman’s mouth so she can’t scream is considered “high jinks.” It takes place in an atmosphere where we don’t believe women when they come forward to accuse someone of attacking them in the same way that we initially believe every other victim of crime who steps forward to make an accusation.

But what about false accusations? Women are much more likely to make false claims and try to ruin someone’s life than say a burglary victim. This is a complete and total myth. It is unsupported in any way, but it does serve to bolster the cultural narrative that women are vindictive and unreliable, and we need to take extra care around their claims lest we ruin some young man’s promising future. Some promising young man like Brock Turner, who raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and was witnessed by two men, but who only served 3 months in jail because the judge didn’t want to “ruin his life.” The ruined life of the woman is apparently not relevant.

What if a woman has consensual sex, and then regrets it the next day? What if a woman gets dumped by her boyfriend and decides to accuse him of rape as revenge? What if she’s just doing it for attention? Are false accusations reaching epidemic levels in today’s hard-drinking hookup culture, where the lines of consent have been blurred? Critics argue that reports of rape should be treated with more caution, since men’s lives are so often ruined by women’s malicious lies.

But my research — including academic studies, journalistic accounts, and cases recorded in the US National Registry of Exonerations — suggests that every part of this narrative is wrong. What’s more, it’s wrong in ways that help real rapists escape justice, while perversely making it more likely that we will miss the signs of false reports.

Innocent men rarely face rape charges

False accusations are exceedingly rare and are only made by those who fit a certain profile under a certain set of circumstances. Read the linked qz article for more about that.

Furthermore, in the most detailed study ever conducted of sexual assault reports to police, undertaken for the British Home Office in the early 2000s, out of 216 complaints that were classified as false, only 126 had even gotten to the stage where the accuser lodged a formal complaint. Only 39 complainants named a suspect. Only six cases led to an arrest, and only two led to charges being brought before they were ultimately deemed false. (Here, as elsewhere, it has to be assumed that some unknown percentage of the cases classified as false actually involved real rapes; what they don’t involve is countless innocent men’s lives being ruined.)

We need to do a better job of learning about how trauma affects victims and the way that they speak about what has happened to them. The neuroscience around this is well established, but it’s still not what’s in the national imagination.

We need to stop disseminating the myth of the prevalence or likelihood of random false accusations and we need to stop defending the gauntlet we run sexual violence victims through that uses “innocent until proven guilty” as some kind of an excuse to do that. Of course, all accused people are innocent until proven guilty. However, we need to afford victims of sexual violence the same respect and acceptance of the importance of any reports they make that we do those who report other kinds of crimes.

Believing women means taking their claims just as seriously as any other kinds of reported crime. It means processing rape kits in a timely manner. As of now, there are tens of thousands of rape kits that have never been evaluated. It means no longer punishing or stigmatizing women for coming forward and reporting sexual violence. It means indicting offenders when there is sufficient evidence to do so. It means no longer lamenting how the lives of boys and men might be negatively affected by having to take responsibility for their crimes. Believing women means that the life or reputation of the accused is not considered more valuable or more important than that of the accuser; just the same as it is with every other crime.

It means presuming that the accuser has a legitimate reason for us to take her complaint seriously just as we do with accusations around all other types of crime! That shouldn’t be so hard to understand!

• Edit — my husband, the attorney, adds that “innocent until proven guilty” is a widely misspoken about concept. It really only applies to who has the burden of persuasion in a trial situation. If someone has been arrested and arraigned and is now standing trial, the state has probable cause to believe that he deserves to be there.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.