The Survivors’ Bill of Rights is poised to receive unanimous support in the House in the coming days, just as it did in the Senate in June. It’s an uncontroversial bipartisan bill to straighten out one troublesome kink in the difficult process of treating sexual assault victims.
The bill ordains a list of protections that care providers and law enforcement must explain to rape survivors as early as possible in treating and processing their cases. One principal purpose is to ensure the preservation of physical evidence for at least as long as statutes of limitation allow a victim to file a criminal claim. Despite holding clinics and cops to a new uniform standard rule, the Survivors’ Bill of Rights will do nothing to clear up discrepancies among definitions of sexual assault.
Procedural hurdles to fair, evidence-based trials inspired renewed national concern in June, following Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s lenient sentence for sexually assaulting a classmate’s sister. The victim’s testimony also inspired Joe Biden to re-up his anti-rape-culture campaign in an open letter on BuzzFeed and a public shame campaign against colleges run afoul of Title IX.
Public perceptions of rape culture depend not just on celebrity-backed White House efforts but also on inaccurate and inconsistent data. According to a Government Accountability Office study requested by Missouri’s Democratic senator Claire McCaskill, public health professionals, providers within the military, schools bound by Title IX, and criminal law enforcement all operate under their different departmental understandings of what rape is and how to adjudicate to a case.
On Wednesday, Senator McCaskill told THE WEEKLY STANDARD a response to the GAO study was in the works. “Nobody is even characterizing assaults the same way, so we have a very difficult [time] tracking what is going on because of that—we’re working on it,” she said. But asked about whether definitional discrepancy will hinder the efficacy of the Survivor’s Bill of Rights, the senator changed the subject.
Senator McCaskill’s concern about inaccurate sexual violence data collection led the oversight agency to audit the Departments of Justice, Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services’ conflicting definitions and processes. The audit found that these agencies produce data that fit their agendas but mislead the public: “at least 10 efforts to collect data on sexual violence, which differ in target population, terminology, measurements, and methodology” and “23 different terms to describe sexual violence.” And depending whom you ask within the federal government, the number of American rape victims in 2011 ranged from 84,175 by the FBI’s accounting to 1,929,000 per a CDC survey.
Different definitions and procedures fracture a unified effort and continue to cloud public perception. And, of more practical consequence for this legislation, states and local law enforcement authorities align their response processes with definitions consistently narrower than what CDC surveys and Department of Ed guidances use. The bill stipulates no interference in definitions proscribed by federal, tribal, or state definitions and set processes, sets up a working group, and requires states to use existing funds for notifying victims of their rights. But, above all, in the words California representative Mimi Walters, who spoke in support of the bill on Tuesday, it “sets an example for states.”
And who will set an example for the federal agencies, with their executive tentacles unbound by effective congressional review? Like much of the uncontroversial legislation that quietly scuttles through Congress, the Survivor’s Bill of Rights won’t do much to correct its motivating problem. The federal confusion GAO uncovered—”an uneven patchwork of laws” in Walters’s words—will yet persist, entrenched in various complex federal practices.
