If you are an American woman, there is no good chance that you will lead a life without sexual violence.
One in five American women are raped or become victims of attempted rape for their lifetimes. One in three of these survivors will be between the ages of 11 and 17 when the attack occurs. So being a child is actually a risk factor for women.
And for every 1,000 sexual assaults, around 975 perpetrators face no legal consequences. This is for a variety of reasons, including ongoing bias, of what was intended to help survivors.
“It’s amazing how our society sees or ignores these horrifying crimes of sexual assault,” the former Alameda County County said. Atty. Nancy O’Malley.
If sexual assault is a disease like Covid-19, we would declare a public health emergency. Instead, even after decades of progressive improvement, the crisis of violence against women and girls continues to spread like a virus, and as a society, they refuse to wipe it out.
Jennifer Sebel Newsom, the first partner of California women, led by O’Malley, released a report Tuesday by a group of women’s supporters, legislators and health experts.
California is even more important now when you look at national photos.
We were surprised by the deprivation and the right turn of young American men, so much focus is on how they feel about life, as conservative changes often ignore misogyny and oppression of the rights of women that are fueled by fuelling a lot of focus on how they feel about life. In some states, rape and incest survivors are currently facing restrictive abortion bans, including places where exceptions are not permitted unless the assault is reported to police.
So it is essential to push back in other directions, to emphasize where we can do better in protecting women’s rights, preventing sexual crimes, and supporting survivors.
“In some areas, we’ve done very well. California is kind of leading the way in legislation,” O’Malley told me. California has passed a series of laws in recent years, giving survivors greater rights and more help, and taking a subtle approach to their trauma.
But elsewhere, we haven’t come a long way.
O’Malley, who worked at the rape crisis center before becoming a sex crime prosecutor in the 1970s, noted that women still face stigma and ignorance when it comes to sexual crimes, from law enforcement to courts.
“We have partners who need to step up and do a better job,” O’Malley said.
The findings in the report are very common sense and further frustrating that some of the recommendations have not yet been made. For example, not all counties have designated hospitals that can perform forensic examinations. It is difficult to obtain proper care and treatment for sexual assault survivors, especially in rural areas.
Also, if the trial is done, California doesn’t have a cohesive statewide system to track results and track results that “support serial perpetrator identification and prosecution.” Yes, at this day and age where DNA helps solve murders decades ago, we still don’t have a reliable system to track active serial rapists. O’Malley points out that almost 40% of people convicted of a sex crime have re-enacted.
Don’t start an untested rape kit sitting in storage.
The report suggests that the state will ensure that local crime labs submit their DNA to the California Department of Justice, ensuring a way for survivors to track that sample through the system.
One of the most basic issues discovered by Siebel Newsom and O’Malley was that the system still lacked trauma-based training, from responding officers to judges. Whether it’s a uniformed officer in response to a call for domestic violence or a legal scholar who promotes sentences for rape acquaintances, survivors often face the same type of bias they’ve injected with the system for decades.
Were they drinking? Why did they wait so long before they came forward? Did they fight?
Throughout our judicial system, all the stereotypes and victim blame have remained for women who have sought or stopped them from finding justice remaining. It’s really a hit or miss. Some within the criminal justice system have evolved, but some have not.
“We have a lot to do in terms of educating people,” O’Malley said. For example, they want to see the training they need from judges, so they want to ensure that victims’ rights are supported in court and that their testimony does not become their own trauma. The report also recommends teaching law enforcement better interview techniques to ensure that survivors do not give up on getting help or justice.
“It doesn’t have to be an abusive system,” O’Malley said. “It should be a compassionate system.”
Few people know that better than Siebel Newsom. In 2022, she bravely testified against former Mauper Mowgle Harvey Weinstein at the Los Angeles rape trial, detailing how he attacked her in a room at a LA hotel in 2005.
This week, Weinstein returned to New York courthouse where he received a new trial on his conviction. As a harsh reminder of where we are culturally at this particular moment, the retrial was being called for as a referendum for the #MeToo movement, bringing the sexual assault epidemic into the spotlight.
Right-wing commentators, including Joe Rogan, now claim that poor Weinstein, who has been determined to maintain his innocence, is “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“If this happened in the ’80s, they probably would have dumped it. But in the #MeToo move, it was a hot witch hunt,” Logan said.
That wasn’t the case.
It was a moment to calculate that some of the men who hold power in our country don’t want accountability when it comes to sex crimes, and now they’re facing backlash. But women in California, and I doubt the United States.
“As a survivor, the job of preventing sexual violence and supporting other survivors is very personal to me, too, for many others,” says Siebel Newsom.
The report “more than a set of recommendations, it’s a call to action for all systems designed to support and protect survivors. We have laid out a bold and viable advance that is rooted in healing, justice and accountability, as all survivors deserve to be treated with dignity.”
In short, it’s a California plan to embrace women’s happiness, and others trample on it.
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