Sexual Assault: Understanding those who don’t Understand

Workplace sexual harassment, sexual assault at fraternity parties on college campuses, and men in power abusing their positions to take advantage of other people (usually women) sexually- it’s all over the news today, with many people decrying the lack of attention and support for the victims of the alleged assaults. This big wave of outrage also took place during the 1990’s, with workplace sexual harassment coming to the forefront of American attention after Anita Hill accused her supervisor at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, of sexual harassment. All of these waves of increased attention do prompt us to ask why these same issues keep coming up, and to question why they are not being solved. People often blame victims when they speak up with their stories, and that’s a large part of the issue that a lot of people agree on. However, there appears to be two sides to this issue: one side has the people who say that sexual assault needs to be taken a lot more seriously and that those who are accused of it need to be held more responsibly. The other side has a lot of men who are concerned with being alone with women for fear that they could accuse them of assaulting them, and people who blame victims, and are generally apathetic about holding those who are responsible for the reported assaults at hand.

It’s easy to say that sexual misconduct needs to be treated like any other crime and that it is not currently done as such, as evidenced by the patterns of a lack of punishment for perpetrators. However, I don’t believe that sexual misconduct is like any other crime- it is quite different for many reasons, and it is for these reasons that the lack of responsibility that the alleged perpetrators face makes a lot of sense, and makes it very difficult to affect a large degree of change in the area of apprehending the accused and making true progress in the issue. While I’m not saying that it is pointless to advocate for this kind of change, I am saying that there is a reason why this change is so difficult to come by, and that it’s important to understand those reasons before tackling the resulting problems associated with them.

What makes sex crimes and allegations different from other crimes such as burglary, murder, and fraud is that there is often no real evidence that a crime has even been committed. When it comes to burglary, there is stolen property. With murder, there is a dead body. Fraud involves stolen money. These are tangible losses that are easy to identify. However, with sex crimes, the loss is impossible for an outsider to see. You can’t tell that someone has been raped by looking at them. The victims’ only source of evidence, in most cases, is their story (unless a rape kit is done, but even then, that raises doubts). Can you imagine if we relied on stories to prosecute criminals and put them in jail for any other crime? Stories without any concrete evidence to back them up? You normally can’t even bring people to trial without adequate evidence because the case would be too weak to begin with, even in the case of something as simple as a DUI. Our legal system demands that you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty in order for them to get convicted, and when the only pieces of evidence are anecdotal, it’s quite difficult to do that.

Anecdotal evidence is also, to a degree, subjective. When it comes to sexual assault, or any story involving two or more people, there are bound to be multiple perspectives that boil down to individual perceptions and feelings about the events that transpired. Take for example, cases of girls who claim to have been assaulted at college campus fraternity parties. Often there is alcohol involved, and what may have appeared to be a case of consenting sex to one person may have not been for the other person. Or someone consented in the moment and realized after the fact how inebriated they were, and realized that they were taken advantage of. Alcohol clouds our judgement, and our perceptions of things, and it definitely skews stories in such a way that it is impossible to get down to the truth of the matter. Even without alcohol however, stories still boil down to perceptions. While feelings and perceptions are valid, the answer to the question of whether they hold up in court to prosecute criminals remains steadfast. Our legal system recognizes violation, not the feeling of it. Whether or not this is a problem, that is an issue for another time- however, it does serve to differentiate sex crimes from other ones in terms of how we determine guilt.

It’s also crucial to consider that sex has been a taboo topic in many cultures for a long time (obviously less so in American culture today compared to in other cultures, but it still is). That is because at the heart of it, it reminds us of who we are; animals. Sex is one of our most primal instincts, and it is uncomfortable to confront the fact that even as a supposedly sophisticated, intelligent species, we can be reduced to the most carnal of deeds. However, deep down, we understand that sex is a part of life and of the animalistic aspect of our humanity, which makes it inherently difficult to understand that sex can be unwanted, sex can be bad, and sex can be criminal. That is why we see so much victim blaming, so much perpetrator defending, and so little action being taken to right wrongs. As humans, many of us fail to draw an adequate line between cases of sexual assault, or unwanted sex, and cases of consensual sexual activities, largely because it is psychologically difficult for us to even grasp the the fact that something so primal could so dangerously violate the human spirit, and when we do grasp it, it terrifies us. Because that means that within all of us is the power to reduce someone else to a victim, and the last thing anybody wants to be is a perpetrator of something so destructive that it scars a person for life. As a result, a lot of people end up subconsciously identifying more with the perpetrator than with the victim, and then a lack of action in taking down that perpetrator ensues.

I’m not saying that this is the way things are meant to be with regards to this large issue. All I’m saying is that it makes sense why sex crimes are often not treated as crimes, and it is only by understanding these reasons why there hasn’t been more progress made that we can truly make the changes we want to see so that there are fewer victims and more people listening to their stories.