yeah. sad and brutal truth: your number one responsibility here is to yourself. it's pretty clear going to the police is most likely to cause you more pain and lead to sweet f-all in terms of justice, given that you can have WITNESSES to rape and it's still not enough to secure a reasonable sentence. so, what can you do, except deal with it your own way? at least you know what to call what happened and that the man in question is a fucking rapist.
this comment from a thread on feministe nails the wtf-ery of commmon reactions to rape cases for me:
If I go to the police and claim to have been mugged, and they arrest someone and it goes to trial, it’s never assumed that I’m a liar. The person being charged is assumed innocent until proven guilty, and there may be the assumption that I made a mistaken [sic] when I picked that particular person out of the lineup, but if the trial makes it to court, people aren’t going to automatically assume that I’m a stupid liar who wasn’t really mugged. But when rape trials go to court, for some reason things are different. Suddenly nobody even believes that a crime was commited. It’s not a matter of worrying about whether you’ve got the right defendent- it’s “was a crime even really perpetrated?”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-05-24 03:16 pm (UTC)this comment from a thread on feministe nails the wtf-ery of commmon reactions to rape cases for me:
If I go to the police and claim to have been mugged, and they arrest someone and it goes to trial, it’s never assumed that I’m a liar. The person being charged is assumed innocent until proven guilty, and there may be the assumption that I made a mistaken [sic] when I picked that particular person out of the lineup, but if the trial makes it to court, people aren’t going to automatically assume that I’m a stupid liar who wasn’t really mugged. But when rape trials go to court, for some reason things are different. Suddenly nobody even believes that a crime was commited. It’s not a matter of worrying about whether you’ve got the right defendent- it’s “was a crime even really perpetrated?”