The Handmaid's Tale

No, this one doesn't have to do with abortion, but it's a symptom of what we are likely to see more of as women's bodies cease to be their own property and begin belonging to the state or to whatever man thinks he should control it at any given time.

Shakespeare's Sister has the story:

A 17-year-old girl went to police at the urging of her friends after she was allegedly gang-raped by three men, including her boyfriend. The men testified that the act was consensual. After reviewing all the information and statements, prosecutors decided they didn’t think they could prove a rape allegation, and so declined to prosecute the case.

Instead, they prosecuted the victim for filing a false police report. Yesterday, she was found guilty.

The victim has never recanted her story. Instead, the decision was based on the judge’s opinion that the three men were more credible, in part because a police detective and the victim’s friends testified she did not “act traumatized” in the days after the incident.

In cases like this, people tend to draw their own conclusions, based on what’s reported, filling in the blanks in a way that satisfies one’s judgment. What are you thinking right now? That maybe it really was a false rape charge? That maybe the victim was just vindictive? That there had to be some reason that the judge found her guilty?

Let me give you some more information—something that is only a possibility because The American Street’s Kevin Hayden has known the victim nearly her whole life. He attended the trial. He noticed that the prosecutor repeatedly referred to the attackers as “boys,” even though they were grown men and the victim was 17. He noticed that the judge acknowledged he had found inconsistencies in all of their stories, but, inexplicably, decided that the same reasonable doubt that kept prosecutors from pursuing charges against the attackers wasn’t enough to keep him from finding the victim guilty.

Now think about this: this judge decided that "reasonable doubt" about whether a rape took place prevented conviction of the men involved, but the victim wasn't granted the same "reasonable doubt" -- instead, preconceived notions about how she "should" have behaved warranted conviction. This wasn't a case of a recanted report, it's a case in which because a woman didn't respond to the incident in an appropriately traumatized way, it means she's a criminal.

Of course what we're likely to hear in the comments is that women do make false rape claims, and that's true. But such claims are few and far between, and most of them do not end in convictions. (See also: Kobe Bryant.) Making a claim of rape is hardly a pleasant thing for a woman to do, since her entire life is going to be held up to scrutiny...and that an assumption is going to be made that if she ever said "yes" to sex with any man, that means she was consenting to sex with any man, at any time, for any reason, in perpetuity.

Does anyone honestly believe that?

ShakesSis points out:

There is no such thing as a “typical” response to rape. Immediately following a rape, some women go into shock. Some are lucid. Some are angry. Some are ashamed. Some are practical. Some are irrational. Some want to report it. Some don’t. Most have a combination of emotions, but there is no standard response. Responses to rape are as varied as its victims. In the long term, some rape victims act out. Some crawl inside themselves. Some have healthy sex lives. Some never will again.

When I was in college, I was in a similar situation to the girl in this case, to the extent that I was in a guy's room. I was held down on a bed in a frat house room and told that if I didn't have sex with the guy holding me down, he'd tear my clothes off and throw them out the window. With that as my choice, I submitted. Was it rape? I suppose by today's standards, it was, though that wasn't how I thought of it at the time. Mostly what I thought was how stupid I was to go to the guy's room and sit on his bed, even though I had a passing acquaintance with him from an earlier encounter which passed without incident. I treated it as a learning experience, stopped going to frat parties, and went about my life without adverse effects. That same year, a friend passed out in a different frat house, awoke unable to find any of her clothes except a coat, and walked back to our campus through a bad neighborhood, barefoot, in November, wearing nothing but her coat. She never knew what happened to her, but do the math.

That was in the late 1970's, it was a pretty provincial college atmosphere, and feminism didn't exist. We chalked it up to being stupid and vowed not to make the same mistake again.

But that was then, and that was our experience. Someone else's might have been different, and of course if there had been more than one guy in the room, I might have fought. I don't know, and I'm glad I don't know. But 'm not going to sit in judgment on anyone who has a different one. And neither should the judicial system.

Maybe there wasn't enough proof to convict these men. But when giving the benefit of the doubt to alleged rapists also involves prosecuting an underage woman for giving a false report, something is very, very wrong. Being present in a guy's room is not tantamount to consent to sex, or to rape. And contrary to popular belief, women are not dying to have group sex with a bunch of men. Yes, perhaps a few do. But most don't. Are we going to start prosecuting women forced into sex against their will because we don't have a clear definition of what constitutes rape? And why was the same evidence good enough to convict the woman of making a false claim, but not good enough to convict the men?

It's a very short step from this case to making rape a nonexistent factor as a prosecutable offense -- codifying in the practice of justice the notion that any man who doesn't leave concrete evidence is not regarded as a rapist, and any woman who doesn't exhibit a certain amount of male-determined "appropriate" behavior is not regarded as having been raped.

All this said, I'm not the sort to say that every kind of coercive sex is by definition rape. I'm not convinced that I would have gained anything by regarding myself as a rape victim as a result of what happened to me in college. I was sexually active, I was in a guy's bedroom. I had said yes to other guys, didn't that mean I meant yes to everyone? I have no doubt, though, that the guy probably went on to do similar things to other girls before settling down and probably becoming a good right-wing Republican. I wouldn't know. I ran into him a few months later and smacked him across the face -- right in front of his friends -- hard enough to leave a welt. He was around six feet tall. I am 4'10". It was very gratifying. But I could have gotten slugged right back in a different situation.

I'm all for young women making smart decisions, like not getting drunk, like not getting into cars with young men they don't know, like not going off to the bedroom of a guy you don't know. But young women don't always make smart decisions. That doesn't mean they deserve to be raped. If a young man gets drunk and is wounded in a bar fight and can never walk again, do we say he "asked for it"? Do we say he "deserved it"? Then why do we say this about women? Why do men decide they know what an "appropriate" response is for a rape victim?

I'm not saying there aren't false rape claims. If there weren't any, we wouldn't even have to have this discussion, now, would we? But how many women have been raped and been afraid to report it, for fear of being put through just this kind of meatgrinder? My guess is that it's far more than the number of false rape claims.

It's a very slippery slope we're on here, folks: Because a very few women file false rape claims, ANY woman who files a rape claim risks being convicted of filing a false report if a judge chooses to believe her attackers. Because a very few women have repeated abortions or have elective third-trimester abortions, we're at risk of losing the right to control our own reproduction. Because a very few women deliberately become pregnant to entrap men, some say we should give men the final to say as to whether the pregnancy should continue.

Isn't it funny how when conservative white males feel threatened, they take out their frustrations on women? Right now their jobs are being outsourced, their health benefits are at risk, they are mortgaged to the hilt, and it's very likely that within the next five years, they'll be foreclosed out of their houses. So what do they do when faced with an increasing loss of control over their own economic destiny? Instead of looking at the Republican government and the mega-corporations who discard them as so much used toilet paper, they sustain their illusion of control the only way they can: by controlling the bodies of women and making sure WE are punished when we don't live by their ever-changing, ever-more-restrictive rules -- rules now being apparently set by Fundamentalist Christian men -- the kind who write novels in which ten-year-old girls are raped by bears -- but God forbid a real flesh-and-blood woman ever had sex for fun, because if she did, any man has a right to her.