Here's an article that provides an overview of the extreme problems in the typically reported survey data in the United States.
That article focusses on a specific demographic (college students) on a different continent to the charity that I quoted, but let's take it at face value. Despite setting out it's stall quite early on, by citing extraordinary seeming cases including one of a child ending up on a sex offenders register, the article concludes by saying that an alternate survey (that the article says may have suppressed the number of positive respondents) said less than 1% of women at college were raped in a year. So let's call that .5% the article then says that the actual figure is likely between that low figure and the high figure it sets out to debunk. So let's go for right in the middle at about 10% and say 10% of college students in America get sexually assaulted or raped.
Are we ok with this? Do we want to see rapists prosecuted? I assume nobody is ok with this and nobody wants women to be raped.
As I mentioned in my previous posts, had the accusation by the first of Harvey Weinstein's victims not been made public then others wouldn't have come forward. His crimes went back decades. There was ample time for people to come forward. Why didn't they?
Likely because they thought there would be no positive outcome, either because of lack of evidence and the low conviction rates for rape, let alone or perhaps they were conscious that he's a millionaire who is a powerful figure in a relatively small industry who'd be able to defend himself with an elite set of lawyers.
When an allegation of this type is made, the right thing to do is to create opportunity for evidence to be gathered. That's not a witch-hunt.
The difficulty is that most people think that rapists and people who commit sexual assault are terrible people and don't want to be associated with them in any way, which is why I assume this player was dropped, based on the potential for it to reflect poorly on his team. I assume that having been found innocent then he will be able to return to his career. His Wikipedia said he signed to a Mexican team in February but that his agent disputes it. Nobody would be happy with their career being interrupted, if falsely accused of anything, and I absolutely sympathise with what must be a terrible situation to find oneself in, innocent but having to go through the process.
The question is, to boil things down to binary and absolutes, what is the greater crime in your mind, Harvey Weinstein, R Kelly, Bill Cosby all get to walk free and their victims are left to deal with the aftermath of a serious crime or that a football player misses a season before (I assume) returning to work?
It'll be possible to find people who have had worse experiences on either end of the argument, people who are accused who couldn't get their jobs back, victims who are so destroyed by their experience that they feel that their life is irrevocably ruined or that they kill themselves.
It's a terrible crime, and it's perpetrators benefit from being hidden from view. It's possible that you could find fault with the Bills for dropping Matt Araiza on the basis that he was innocent and has now been proven innocent, but the answer is not to protect rapists by preventing other victims from coming forward through hiding charges. It's also not appropriate to blame women who do not want to come forward and relive a terrible crime, be cross examined all while conscious that the crime has very low conviction rates.
It's of course difficult to not feel hard done by if you are accused of anything you didn't do, let alone a crime that society rightly despises, and fortunately false allegations are very rare, but they do happen. The UK's CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) published that of 5651 prosecutions of rape, 35 of them were found to be false, less than 1%.
rapecrisis.org.uk
deadspin.com
