Rape Is Rape by Jody Raphael

Author:Jody Raphael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

[8]

Denial’s Effects

Dangerous Indifference

Rather than providing the same kind of ready sympathy, support, and services afforded other victims of violent crime, too many of our institutions—including police, church, educators, and media—often treat rape victims with indifference, disbelief, and punishment. Such treatment directly impacts the ways in which rape cases are viewed, processed, and charged. Tracy, for example, was met with indifference from law-enforcement officials, and the national statistics on the ratio of rape reporting to arrests tell a similar story.

There are grounds to believe that rape reporting has risen over time, which leads to speculation that the backlash against women who report rape is a result of this increase. From 1995 to 1996, researchers participating in the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAW) obtained information about rapes occurring throughout the surveyed women’s lives and asked whether they had been reported. After polling eight thousand females, they found that a rape occurring in the modern reform era (1990-1996) was significantly more likely to be reported than one that transpired before 1975, and the size of the difference was relatively significant.

The NVAW analysis, however, suggested that reporting rates have remained essentially unchanged since 1990. Data from the two Kilpatrick research studies confirmed this finding. His research in the 1990s found that 16 percent of all rapes were reported to law enforcement; in 2007, the rate remained merely identical. Likewise, the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) also found that half (49 percent) of all violent victimizations (rape, robbery, domestic violence, and aggravated assault) were reported to police in 2011 but that this percentage has remained relatively stable over the past ten years. According to the NCVS, rape reporting lags behind that of other violent crimes. In 2011, for example, 27 percent of the rapes were reported to law enforcement, although almost 52 percent of burglaries and 67 percent of aggravated assaults were reported.

However, the low number of rape cases uncovered by researchers in the NCVS makes this 27 percent reporting figure less than reliable. Respondents willing to disclose rape to Department of Justice surveyors may be disclosing only the most violent cases, which they would have been more likely to report to law enforcement. Other research studies find a range between 5 and 20 percent, as discussed in chapter 5.

Thus, although there has been a rise in rape reporting since 1974, no significant increases have occurred since the mid-1990s. This fact contradicts advocates of false rape claims who allege that more women are coming forward to report rape.

Despite increased rape reporting since the 1970s, the gap between the number of forcible rapes that are reported and the rate of those that result in arrest widened from 1971 to 2006. This trend differs markedly from other violent crimes. The ratio of reports to arrest for forcible rape was in the 50 percent range in the 1970s and has decreased steadily to 26.5 percent in 2006, the lowest rate of any recorded in the Uniform Crime Reports between 1971 and 2006. This pattern was not seen for other forms of violent crime during that time, where rates have held fairly steady.

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