Word: raping
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...addition to worrying about rape whenever I get into my car alone, I have to fear being hauled into a police station where, for some minor traffic offense, I may undergo a publicly financed sexual assault...
Until a few years ago, Alice's habit of accepting rides from strangers would have been the rapists' strongest defense. Since rape trials often hinge on the victim's word against the defendant's, a standard defense tactic has long been to make the woman appear to have been seeking sex. Courts allowed this, generally following the admonitory dictum on rape laid down in the 17th century by the English jurist Sir Matthew Hale: "An accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never...
...laws are changing. Since the mid-'70s Congress and half the states have adopted "rape shield laws" that protect rape victims from being unfairly grilled about their past sexual activity. Michigan's comprehensive 1974 rape reform law has been the model. At a preliminary hearing for the man who offered Alice a ride, the defendant's lawyer started asking her questions about her penchant for hitchhiking with men. Citing Michigan's shield law, the prosecutor successfully objected to that line of questioning. Unable to discredit Alice's testimony, the defense lawyer quickly made a deal...
Without the reform rule, the crime against Alice might never have been prosecuted. And if it had come to trial, says Susan Rohr, an adviser at the three-year-old Detroit Rape Counseling Center, "the defense attorney would have done everything to keep the jury from thinking about the facts of the crime. Instead, he would have tried to make it seem that the victim was in the habit of making quick acquaintances with strange men in a bar late at night...
Changes in rape laws have been pressed by women's rights groups, who argue that rape victims have too often been "raped a second time" by the criminal justice system, and by law reformers, who want rape treated rationally, like any other violent crime. One step has been to drop the word rape. Many of the new statutes speak in terms of sexual assault, sexual battery or criminal sexual conduct and carefully define...