De-stigmatizing assault

Sexual assault investigations have finally come under the scrutiny of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. Its interviews last week uncovered a deeply disturbing reality: our society occasionally has punished the victims rather than the perpetrators.

Sara Reedy, for example, was 19 years old in 2004 when she was sexually assaulted by a man robbing the gas station where she was working.

She reported the crime, yet the detective investigating the case became more interested in what he imagined to be her “guilt.”

He accused her of taking drugs, stealing cash from the gas station and inventing the story of the rape.

After the investigation, Reedy was put in jail and only released after her rapist was caught in another case and confessed to raping Reedy as well.

Plainly, the criminalization of sexual assault victims is an injustice of the first order. Stories like Reedy’s make the need for us to examine what constructs allowed the detective to jail her rather than the man who assaulted her.

If we historicize and contextualize the way humans have dealt with rape, we can identify some collective presuppositions that underlie the way human culture misunderstands sexual assault.

Across time and place, female victims of sexual assault have been stigmatized as adulterers.

The Islamist rebel militia al-Shabab administering parts of Somalia committed a horrifically brutal crime in 2008 when they stoned Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in a stadium with 1,000 witnesses.

Aisha was only 13. She had been raped by a group of three men.
None were arrested when her father reported the crime to the militia in power. Instead, the militia arrested Aisha, charging her with adultery.

Thankfully, the traditions of the Book of Deuteronomy are no longer applied with legal force.

However, its teachings also prioritize male control of female sexuality at the expense of preventing violence against women.

If a woman failed to cry out for help when raped in a city, she could be put to death alongside the man who raped her. Criminalizing victims of rape is, unfortunately, nothing new or limited in its extent.

If we fail to contextualize Reedy’s story of sexual assault in our species’ misogynistic history, we might be blinded to the shameful but widespread turning of the tables against rape victims that we should always resist.

Of course, a responsible investigation has a serious obligation to determine the validity of weighty allegations such as sexual assault.

But we should also be aware that making criminals out of victims might be a quick way for a neighborhood to appear to improve its crime statistics and brush painful realities under the carpet.

In reality, investigating victims rather than the perpetrators of sexual assaults subsidizes the crime.

If we send rapists the message that we believe they don’t exist and that we have serious doubts that victims tell the truth, we create the very conditions they need to commit their crimes with impunity.

The Senate subcommittee is to be commended for raising awareness of an important issue. The law should never be used as a tool to do a second injustice
to rape victims.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu