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• Friday, April 6, 2007 03:15 PM

  Uh . . .

  I don't understand what's wrong with the statement that "Rape is an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder yet to be defended by the party accused."

  I'm a feminist, and an attorney, and I don't find the quote, or this attorney's particular use of it, objectionable.

  Sometimes there are contradictions and dilemmas that come with respecting women's rights and the rights of the accused. Although I've never been a victim of sexual abuse, I do feel a personal connection to this issue because of the experiences of somebody very close to me. On balance, though, few things terrify me more than the thought of an innocent person serving prison time. (It's politically incorrect, and unpopular, for instance, to require children to testify in court in molestation cases, but I strongly favor that requirement, even if it means that more crimes against children will go unpunished. The fact that a crime is especially heinous does not mean that the standards of proof should be relaxed; if anything, the opposite is true.)

  Is it the "easily to be made" part of this quotation that you object to? If so, you may be interpreting the quote too broadly. I don't think this attorney was necessarily suggesting that rape doesn't affect its victims powerfully, or that women who bravely choose to report rapes don't face a number of negative consequences (harassment, intimidation, etc.). The point, rather, is that there are very few criminal charges that can be proven solely on the word of a witness; in a rape case, a single person's false testimony is enough to destroy a life.

  Rape cases are also unique in that acquittal doesn't ever really result in exoneration. Knowing that someone was once accused, and acquitted (or even convicted!) of burglary, or cocaine possession, or insider trading, or drunk driving, wouldn't destroy a person's reputation in most people's eyes -- certainly not in the way that a past accusation of a sex crime would.

  I agree that false rape claims are probably rare (although that 5.5% figure, if correct, seems alarmingly high to me). On the other hand, there are plenty of crazy and dishonest women out there, just as there are plenty of crazy and dishonest men.

  I guess what I'm saying, to Ms. Clark Flory, is: you shouldn't be so quick to simply sniff at people who are advocating for strong protections for the criminal accused. If you're going to argue against a proposition like the one in this quotation, you have an obligation to be very explicit about your thesis.

  —My Man Godfrey Read My Man Godfrey's other letters
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