Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
Susan Carbon of the Office of Violence Against Women (left) and Carol E. Tracy of the Women’s Law Project testify at Senate hearing. “sweeping failure” to investigate rape cases. When it did pursue them, the investigations were “seriously deficient.” When police departments get sufficient funding for handling rape cases, they can better train officers and su- pervisors to deal with sex crimes. Archambault, who for- merly supervised a sex-crimes unit in San Diego, Calif., says that many police detectives aren’t taught how to in- vestigate sex crimes until they’re already on the job. For rape victims, that means their first police contact may be with an officer who has handled few if any similar cases. That can make the survivor’s experience uncomfortable, at best, and harmful, at worst. Again, the prevailing definition of “forcible” rape can stand in the way of officers taking a victim’s story serious- ly. As Florida rape survivor Alphia Morin puts it, “You see it in the movies [where] the victim is usually beaten and bleeding, but that didn’t happen to me.” Because of that, she felt that the police didn’t take her seriously—and they eventually dismissed her case, citing lack of evidence. Archambault affirms that detectives will often close a case without doing a full investigation when a victim doesn’t present the way police believe a “real” rape victim should. ported and victims are ignored. There are fractures at many levels of the reporting and investigation process. For one thing, there has been a chronic failure in U.S. T cities to test rape-evidence kits, which contributes to low rates of arrest, indictment and conviction (see sidebar, p. 29). The lack of testing may play a key role in allowing se- rial rapists—who may commit 90 to 95 percent of all rapes—to walk free. If rape kits were tested more prompt- ly, unidentified perpetrators could be more quickly iden- tified and arrested, getting them off the streets and thus saving other women from being victimized. Even if rape kits are tested, there’s still the problem of “You see it in the movies [where] the victim is usually beaten and bleeding, BUT THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN TO ME.” 30 | SPRING 2011 police attitudes toward victims: If a rape survivor doesn’t feel safe reporting to police, she isn’t likely to do it. (In fact, more than 80 percent of rapes go unreported.) A huge factor contributing to that discomfort, says Philadel- phia reporter McCoy, is that most police see rape as a “he said, she said” crime and don’t know how to establish the victim’s non-consent. The survivor then is treated more like a suspect—being questioned many times over—and, faced with that pressure, may drop out of the investigation. Moreover, sex-discrimination lawsuits —ALPHIA MORIN against local police agencies reveal that po- lice culture can be hostile and demeaning to women. Studies have even attested that domestic violence is more prevalent in po- lice officers’ families than in the general public: 40 percent compared to 10 percent. Nonetheless, a better UCR definition would help police officers to understand and treat all rapes as serious crimes, thus www.feminist.org O BE SURE, THE UCR’S OUTMODED DEFINITION OF rape isn’t the only reason rape numbers are underre- LEFT: ROGER L. WOLLENBERG/UPI /LANDOV; RIGHT: JAY MALLIN