In 2016 I listened to an episode of This American Life on NPR that stunned me. I had known for years that police often
failed to take allegations of sexual assault seriously, but it had never really
hit home that persons could also be charged for making a false report if the
investigating officer felt that the story did not add up and the person must be
lying.
The story that was told on This American Life was taken from an article authored by T.
Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong in ProPublica. Miller and Armstrong had been working on the
story separately and came together after finding that each had separate parts
of the narrative.
The story begins in Lynnwood, Washington with a young woman
being raped by an intruder shortly after she had moved into her new
apartment. She had spent years in the
foster care system and was now on her own.
She had decisive plans for her future.
The rape was brutal and she would have certainly have experienced some
long term trauma from the experience but the accusations by the police,
friends, and foster families that she had made up the story to get attention
laid the groundwork for years of
depression.
Along with Marie’s story we also learn the details of the
investigations into a string of rapes occurring in Colorado. Fortunately, the police departments in
Colorado used cooperation and the most-up-to-date forms of forensic
investigation to eventually find the man who had broken into a number of homes
and raped women. The writers of A False Report were able to
obtain interview materials to tell the story of Marc O’Leary and how he came to
live a life that even he described as “depraved.”
In weaving the three narratives together we learn how police
departments can either believe victims no matter how they present and move
forward an active investigation or disregard an allegation based on the
internal biases and stigmas officers may have regarding how victims should
behave. These responses can lead to
either validation and closure or ongoing pain and trauma for victims of sexual
assault.
Even though we know that most rapes are committed by someone
the victim knows, we can learn a lot from the rapist’s story. He was not a trauma survivor. He admitted to having a safe upbringing
without any abuse. He had a stellar
military record. However, he was also a
methodical predator who honed his skills and threatened his victims with the
possibility that he would post video and photos of them on his pornographic
websites.
As disturbing as all this was to read, and I knew the bones
of the story, I was appalled at the history behind the ingrained cultural
belief that allegations of sexual assault (particularly those made by women)
are more often than not false. In fact,
the Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671, Sir Matthew Hale, laid the
groundwork by denouncing women for their maliciousness and tendency to tell
false stories. Thomas Jefferson even
wrote in a letter to James Madison of his opposition to harsh punishment for
rape, “on account of the temptation women would be under to make it the
instrument of vengeance against an inconstant lover, and of disappointment to a
rival”. This insistence that women are prone to “contrive false charges” about “imaginary”
sexual assaults continued in to the 20th century by Harvard Law Review founder John Henry
Wigmore. As seen by the 2018 Kavanaugh
hearings, we know that there continues to be a deeply held cultural belief that
men are to be protected against the false allegations of unhinged women rather
than believing in the possibility that a woman could be telling the truth.
In their book, Armstrong and Miller walk us
through the damage that the ongoing belief in false reporting has on the
criminal justice system and on the many victims of assault who are left alone
and ostracized by friends and family.
Victims who are not believed are not only further traumatized but in
their failure to investigate and eventually prosecute the rapist, the criminal
justice system is leaving rapists
with the opportunity to rape again… and again.
This book should be required reading for all police departments and prosecutors.
