Ambiguities In Rape Cases

There are ambiguities in the definitions of everything common enough to be defined. The definition of ‘a scratch’ is used liberally by a teenager parking for the first time, as is the definition of ‘noticeable’ when their BFF has a pimple. The way we define a crime as serious as rape shouldn’t be nearly as dubious. As it is, organizations have been vocalizing that same sentiment for forty-two years of the eight decades it took the FBI to change it (Klein 183). The past definition categorizes rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” (UCR Handbook, 2004, p. 19), was flawed because of how many obvious rape cases that weren’t considered ‘real rape’. That definition - which formerly remained unchanged since 1927

As Korn states, you are more likely to see News Headlines that are biased. With a topic as controversial as rape, there are bound to be more biased views than not. The mainstream media has continuously turned conversations about high-profile rape cases into prime fodder for the joke, ‘denial isn’t just a river in Egypt’. The inaccuracy of statistics only worsens the fact that “doubt is the default when it comes to the way people hear stories of sexual violence”. If a person cannot use the technology of this new age to reflect accurate new age information, then they have been robbed of an ‘opportunity to learn’.

A clear obstacle of the goal of requiring States to implement the reformed definition is that there are many harmful misconceptions about victims and perpetrators of rape. Most myths fall in the line of victim blaming which has been known to “marginalize the victim/survivor and make it harder to come forward and report the

To be told that your experience ‘never happened’ is just adding salt to a wound. The phrase, ‘it technically wasn’t rape’ gets thrown around haphazardly. From Whoopi Goldberg’s “it wasn’t rape -rape” to the court’s ‘it wasn’t rape because the victim wasn’t married’ (California Pen. Code Section 261, Subdivision (a)(4)). The improved definition includes all possible victims, and no longer subscribes to the pervasive myth that “Men can’t be raped or sexually assaulted”. Rape should no longer lead to an argument of ‘semantics’ because vaginal penetration didn’t occur, and that’s “not considered rape”. In a perfect world, victims having their experiences invalidated would never occur, however, no matter how flawed a world is, reigning authorities on law should stand as the example. Inappropriate responses to a victim in the aftermath of a crime can lead to them suffering “secondary injuries”, which can range from the short-term insomnia all the way to the long-term PTSD. Avoiding these often callous assessments of a victim’s experience decreases the chances of those same long-term effects on the psyche of the aforementioned