Victims’ advocacy groups are not investigators — nor should they be. If someone approaches them claiming to have been raped, group members should believe them and encourage them to be strong and report the incident to law enforcement if they choose and to support them if they don’t.
“An advocate is not supposed to be an investigator, a judge or an adjudicator,” Emily Renda, a victims’ advocate at the University of Virginia, told the Washington Post.
She’s right. But by the same token, investigators, judges and adjudicators are not advocates for the accuser.
Advocates play an important role in combating rape and sexual assault. It is unfortunate that 83 percent of sexual assault victims did not receive help from a victim service agency, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Some activists, like Zerlina Maxwell, argue that accusers should be believed “as a matter of default.” But Maxwell wasn’t writing that advocates trust accusers, but that everyone trust accusers. She decried the media for the crime of attempting to verify the Rolling Stone story of a woman gang raped at a fraternity.
“The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists,” Maxwell wrote.
Following that sentiment to its logical conclusion — that we must all accept an accuser’s word and act on that, without corroborating evidence — means that those accused of rape don’t need any due process. Maxwell said as much when she claimed that due to the crumbling of the Rolling Stone story, some may “be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases.”
Maxwell said that would be “wrong.”
As I wrote earlier this week, non-advocates like police should take an accuser at their word as a jumping off point for an investigation — just like they would any other crime. And just because people ask clarifying questions or seek to corroborate an accusation doesn’t mean they’re “victim-blaming” or being hostile.
Yes, sometimes police can appear hostile toward an accuser, and that’s something that absolutely needs to be fixed as part of an effort to combat rape and sexual assault, but that doesn’t mean police must forego an investigation in order to appear accommodating. Facts and evidence still matter.
And just as law enforcement needs to trust but verify an accuser’s claim, so should the media and university administrators.
We now live in a society where the search for the truth — things like facts and evidence and true investigation — is labeled as victim-blaming and an impediment to justice. A society where an accuser’s word — and sometimes, a university’s made-up version of the accuser’s word — becomes gospel, and evidence provided by the accused is ignored. A society where false statistics are repeated and those who disagree are disparaged as “rape apologists.”
The conversation has become so dishonest and hysterical that policies being crafted are rewarding punishment over truth. Until common sense takes over, we are going to see a lurch toward advocacy over facts, where police and the media need to condemn anyone accused of sexual assault without any evidence.
