This is amazing. Even as Rolling Stone’s alleged gang-rape story falls apart, and The Washington Post published several articles on Saturday putting the facts out that collapse the allegations, the Post website still contains an article titled “No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims. Incredulity hurts victims more than it hurts wrongly-accused perps.”
Feminist and MSNBC analyst Zerlina Maxwell doesn’t care about the facts, only about the quote-unquote larger picture of a rape culture. This is the triumph of ideology over evidence, emotion over science. All these people who lectured about McCarthyism and Arthur Miller’s play on the Salem witch trials are chanting that the evidence is less important than the allegation.
In last month’s deep and damning Rolling Stone report about sexual assault at UVA, a reporter narrated the story of “Jackie,” who was gang raped at a party and then essentially ignored by the administration. It helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.
What if a man or a woman charged Zerlina Maxwell with sexual assault? Would she find it unnecessary for the accuser to place them in the same place at the same time? Would the accuser be able to hide behind an alias, as in the Rolling Stone stories? Maxwell argued false stories still “dramatize” the real rape culture.
Many people (not least UVA administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters, and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.
This is wrong. We should always believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist. Even if Jackie fabricated her account, UVA should have taken her word for it until they could have proved otherwise.
The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might de-friend him on Facebook. In the case of Bill Cosby, we might have to stop watching, consuming his books, or buying tickets to his traveling stand-up routine. These errors can be undone by an investigation that clears the accused, especially if it is done quickly.
The cost of disbelieving women, on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that women don’t matter and that they are disposable — not only to frat boys and Bill Cosby, but to us. And they face a special set of problems in having their say.
“Rape culture,” as it is often called, is real. Because rape it is such a poisonous charge, we are so careful not to level it until we can really prove it. But this is exceedingly hard: the evidence vanishes quickly, often as soon as the survivor takes a shower, so unless she immediately reports the assault, much of the physical evidence is destroyed by the time she can get to a rape kit.
Accusers might get the facts wrong, but blame the PTSD, not any malice or dishonesty that might be animating the charge: "The narration Jackie gave to Rolling Stone, her friends, and a Washington Post reporter do not all agree with each other. This is not surprising given the research on the aftermath a sexual assault and how PTSD affects the hippocampus portion of the brain that controls memory. (No wonder only 3 percent of rapists go to prison.)"
Maxwell concluded: "Disbelieving women, then, not only compounds their trauma (often by making them doubt their own stories), but it also lets a serial rapist go free....The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists."
