My problem with lowering the legal standard from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “believe victims”, isn’t that there are a lot of false reports.
Right now no one believes or prosecutes real reports because of rape culture, why would anyone bother with a fake report? However, if we decide all someone has to do is say “this person raped me” and that’s enough to put someone in jail then assholes are going to start filling false reports to hurt people they don’t like.
I believe that men and women are all people and that many people are assholes. So I think the same women who, as men, would commit violent crimes now have a shockingly easy way to hurt people. And even if you believe that women are better people than men and they would rarely do it no matter how easy it is, men can do it to.
All it would take is to meet up with someone, escape to a private space ideally with witnesses and now I can claim they raped me. I think that makes it dangerously easy for assholes of any genders to really hurt someone through the legal system.
I’d like to see what a functional legal system that cares more about protecting victims than it does about protecting “promising young men” looks like. One where we exterminate the rape culture that saturates our legal system. If we actually prosecuted and punished rape cases that currently ALREADY MEET the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would by itself fix a huge part of the problem.
Also, until we fix our general rape culture you would just have tons of jury nullification, tons of judges and prosecutors throwing cases because the “threshold is too low”. People talk about jury nullification as if was a good thing, but 90% of the time it was used was for protecting white racists in Jim Crowe and protecting usually drunk drivers in vehicular homicide cases. It will be used here if people think the threshold of “believe victims” is too low.
“Believe women” for me works when interacting with the victim. Why people have to start picking apart a traumatic story when they hear it is insane to me. It’s crazy that we need rhetoric to tell people “if someone trusts you with a traumatic story, don’t be a dick about it”.
![Realization [PizzaCake]](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/58eacea0-b255-4a2d-b579-35265a7cffee.png){kind=link}
My problem with lowering the legal standard from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “believe victims”, isn’t that there are a lot of false reports.
Right now no one believes or prosecutes real reports because of rape culture, why would anyone bother with a fake report? However, if we decide all someone has to do is say “this person raped me” and that’s enough to put someone in jail then assholes are going to start filling false reports to hurt people they don’t like.
I believe that men and women are all people and that many people are assholes. So I think the same women who, as men, would commit violent crimes now have a shockingly easy way to hurt people. And even if you believe that women are better people than men and they would rarely do it no matter how easy it is, men can do it to.
All it would take is to meet up with someone, escape to a private space ideally with witnesses and now I can claim they raped me. I think that makes it dangerously easy for assholes of any genders to really hurt someone through the legal system.
I’d like to see what a functional legal system that cares more about protecting victims than it does about protecting “promising young men” looks like. One where we exterminate the rape culture that saturates our legal system. If we actually prosecuted and punished rape cases that currently ALREADY MEET the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would by itself fix a huge part of the problem.
Also, until we fix our general rape culture you would just have tons of jury nullification, tons of judges and prosecutors throwing cases because the “threshold is too low”. People talk about jury nullification as if was a good thing, but 90% of the time it was used was for protecting white racists in Jim Crowe and protecting usually drunk drivers in vehicular homicide cases. It will be used here if people think the threshold of “believe victims” is too low.
“Believe women” for me works when interacting with the victim. Why people have to start picking apart a traumatic story when they hear it is insane to me. It’s crazy that we need rhetoric to tell people “if someone trusts you with a traumatic story, don’t be a dick about it”.