Obsession (23 page)

As Fairstein says, “Nobody gets to lie and have us just gloss over it. All of that gets turned over to the defense, and she will have to explain it. Most of the time it is explicable: I lied because I thought I’d be punished by my mother.’ I thought the cops wouldn’t believe me.’ I thought if I admitted I was a prostitute, nobody would investigate the case or care.’”

The key here is that a good investigator or prosecutor has to make sure he or she is on top of the situation, getting the full story but not losing that vital link of trust with the victim. There are various methods of accomplishing this.

“How I convince them to tell me the truth can be gentle or not,” Fairstein explains. “Some people respond and get the point quickly. Some need to be pounded on that there’s one person in that courtroom who knows more about the situation than I do, and that—believe me—this is the last place they want me to find out about it, because then they’re out of there. The three factors [in why victims mislead] are generally
alcohol, drugs, or consensual foreplay. Minimize or lie about one of those things, and if the defendant tells a more credible story and I hear it for the first time in the courtroom, you can be sure that the jury will react accordingly. I will be my clients’ advocate if I know everything that went on and believe that a crime was committed. But if they hold anything back from me, they will not get what they’re looking for. Then I explain what perjury is and I explain what happens if they lie under oath. I will prosecute for that. Then something that they have been the victim of turns out to be more painful for them if they can’t deal with the whole truth.”

As we saw with Robert Chambers, a defendant can change his story as many times as he wants, but if we want to put guys like him away, the victim must be held to a higher standard of truth, regardless of the trauma she’s gone through. It’s a sad fact, but one we’ve got to deal with.

As a society, we have to get to the point where rape victims are unafraid to come forward with their stories—even if certain details make them seem less than the ideal of virtue. And we have to make sure they know that our aim is not to judge them for being raped, but to get at the truth so we can seek justice for them and protection for the rest of us. Because until we start to recognize that even imperfect citizens (which includes just about all of us) have the right to say no, we will never be sure how many dangerous, repeat sexual predators we’re keeping out on the street and on the hunt, whom we might have had a chance to put away for good.

There is a reason that conquering armies have used rape throughout history to vanquish their enemies. To borrow Linda Fairstein’s definition again and broaden it to suit a much larger scale: mass rape is a crime in
which sex is the tool used to exert dominance and control over defeated “victim” populations. Even with all the technological and scientific breakthroughs in chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, the systematic rape of women—wives, daughters, grandmothers—can be counted on to be tremendously destructive, demoralizing, and debilitating to one’s enemies in a way the others simply can’t. We saw this thousands of years ago and we see it today. And the process epitomizes how a soldier must dehumanize his enemies to be able to destroy them. As individual victims of a serial rapist often represent the true target the offender is unable to lash out at directly (his mother, perhaps, or wife), victims of war-time atrocities are mere symbols of the society under attack.

When we hear of these war crimes we are universally outraged: the horror, shame, and depravity of the act transcends cultural, religious, or political differences. All civilized people condemn the aggressors and feel for the victims, whether the crimes take place between ethnic factions in Bosnia, warring tribes in Zaire, or virtually anyplace in between. What has always been perplexing to me, then, is how this outrage is muted when it hits much closer to home and on a much more personal level. When a woman is raped in the United States today—maybe the soccer mom next door, or the teenager who baby-sits your kids, or a prostitute who works not far from your office (although it seems like worlds away)—reactions can be mixed. Although in this case, the sexual assault involves a similar motivation on the perpetrator’s side—the drive to dominate and conquer transcends any sexual pleasure he may seek—the context of the event seems more difficult for us to digest, and more difficult even for the victim to process.

This explains, in part, why far, far more frequent
than cases of either false reporting or false allegation is the outright lack of reporting of rape. There are many reasons for this disturbing phenomenon, occasionally having to do with the victim’s fear that the rapist will return to assault her again (as Ronnie Shelton threatened to do as part of his modus operandi), although we can assure rape victims that this happens very, very rarely with rapes by strangers.

But the primary reason is the victims’ perception of their community’s reaction. And by community, I include all of us—everyone from her spouse, lover, or boyfriend, to the police, health care workers, attorneys, judges, juries, media, and the public at large.

Consider the plight of a young woman in her early thirties. She has a decent job in a support position at a law firm that specializes in real estate transactions. One of the firm’s clients is an attractive doctor in his early forties, never married, who asks the woman out. On their third date, thrilled that this polite, handsome, charming, successful man is interested in her, she goes back to his place after dinner and a night of dancing. They share a bottle of wine and she feels as if there’s nothing they can’t talk and joke about. In fact, she may be falling in love with him. She’d like to spend the rest of the night talking, lying in his arms. It’s too early to have sex, though, she feels, both because she’d prefer to wait until they’ve known each other longer and because she doesn’t want him to think she’s too fast. Everything he’s done and said up to now makes her believe he cares for her, too, and that he’ll be sensitive to her feelings.

As it turns out, it doesn’t matter what she wants. Around three in the morning his kisses grow more insistent. She tells him to wait, but he holds her hands up over her head and won’t stop. She can’t move. She starts crying, begging him to get off her, listen to her,
let them talk about this. Is it suddenly a bad dream? But it’s too late.

He never threatened to kill her, never held a knife to her throat. He simply overpowered her physically. Afterward, he may be nice, telling her he enjoyed being with her, which is both confusing and alarming to her. Or he may be mean, warning her that nobody will believe her if she says anything. “It’s your word against mine. Look at the two of us—who do you think people will believe?” In either event, he’s obviously finished with her when he lets her pull her clothes together and go home.

On the surface—to us—it’s an easy call: report the bastard. But put yourself in the shoes of the victim. She feels incredibly betrayed, hurt, and ashamed about what happened. How could she have so misjudged him? Were there any subtle clues she could have missed somewhere along the line? What may frighten her further is the idea that if she had it all to do again, she can’t think of anything that would have set off warning buzzers in her mind; he was such a gentleman up to that point, and he seemed so trustworthy. She starts questioning her instincts.

She may be afraid that if she tells the police that she’d been drinking—not drunk, but drinking—they won’t believe the rest of her story. Aside from the presence of sperm, there may be no physical evidence to back her up. After all, it’s not as if he beat her. And this guy’s a successful professional. He could get any woman. Why would he need to rape her? Her self-confidence—never at a real high level before—has been shattered by this event, and she can imagine jurors thinking she was lucky to get him in the first place.

In this case, too, he’s a client of her boss’s. She could lose her job. In fact, she could lose everything, since even her family may not be supportive. Her
mother doesn’t understand why she isn’t married yet—to her, this guy is a perfect catch. In the end, after the humiliation she can imagine in dealings with everyone from her family members and friends to the police, to her coworkers, she’d still have to go through a trial where it would be, as he said, her word against his. He’s handsome, successful, not someone you’d imagine to be a rapist. Besides, she heard what people said about the woman who accused Mike Tyson before he was eventually convicted of her rape: What was she doing in his room late at night? As though it were her fault.

The issue becomes even grayer when no physical force is used, but threats and intimidation make the victim comply. If, for example, a rapist says he has a gun or a knife and isn’t afraid to use it, but the victim doesn’t see it, it may be harder for her to get others to understand the level of fear she felt facing her attacker. Again, until we’ve walked in her shoes, none of us can be sure how we’d react in such a situation. People reach different levels of intimidation at different points, and if you have reason to fear for your life, then simply living through a sexual assault is a successful outcome. Not seeing a weapon doesn’t guarantee there isn’t one, any more than it guarantees the offender won’t resort to physical violence to control his victim if he feels he needs to.

With so many elements subject to postassault interpretation (and second-guessing), it’s not hard to imagine why some perfectly nice, honest women still think twice about reporting a sexual assault. It’s not right She didn’t deserve what happened to her any more than he deserves to get away with it. Unfortunately, it happens. And if you move farther down the spectrum from the “ideal” rape victim—a virtuous virgin raped by a stranger on her way home from church one Sunday, whose assailant is witnessed and arrested
at the scene by a uniformed patrol cop—it’s even easier to see why rape is underreported. There are still a lot of people who believe it is impossible for a prostitute to be raped, or for a woman to be raped by a man she’s previously had consensual sex with—say, an ex-husband or former boyfriend. This may sound ridiculous to the enlightened readers I like to believe make up my audience, but consider this frightening statistic: more than half of six thousand adolescents, aged eleven to fourteen, in an American Medical Association survey voiced their opinion that there were some circumstances under which rape is acceptable, such as if the male and female had dated six months or longer or if he’d spent considerable money on her.

Where does this come from? Have we really raised our children to think this way? Is this what we want? Should our sons
and
daughters truly think that at times it is socially acceptable to ignore someone else’s feelings and will about her own mind, soul, and body?

Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, professor of psychiatric mental-health nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, has been my colleague and frequent partner in the study of crime ever since we collaborated on the serial-offender study in the late 1970s. She has always been extremely supportive of me and my work, encouraging me in publishing and broadening our research. Among her many fields of expertise, she’s one of the nation’s leading and most sensitive experts on sexual assaults and rape victimology. More than anyone else, she has shaped my views on the subject and influenced the direction I went in hunting sexual predators. In 1972 at Boston City Hospital, Ann founded one of the nation’s first hospital-based crisis-intervention programs for rape victims and served as chair of the first advisory council to the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape at the National Institute of Mental Health. Since then, she’s served in numerous official
capacities for the attorney general, the surgeon general, and Congress.

Ann makes the point that “society’s perception of rape is strongly influenced by a puzzling mixture of prejudice, credence, and voyeuristic curiosity.” Her research has led her to believe that whatever our past experience is, it tends to color the way we react. For example, if a rookie cop handling his first rape appears too sympathetic or sensitive to his fellow officers and they ridicule him for it, he’s likely to harden himself the next time around and not give the victim the sort of response she needs and deserves. By the same token, if his first case turns out to be a false allegation, he may be prone—either consciously or subconsciously—to discount or be dubious about subsequent claims.

As part of their recovery from the “rape trauma syndrome” some victims suffer postassault, Ann always stresses the need for both police officers and prosecutors to recognize how their behavior with the victim affects, in her words, “not only an immediate and long-term ability to deal with the event, but also her willingness to assist in a prosecution.” Just as people who’ve lived through other types of traumatic events can develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), there is a similar syndrome particular to rape victims that should be understood by those who come in contact with them postassault. The effects can be short-term and/or long-term and can range from sleep and eating disturbances to the development of phobias—e.g., a new obsession with security and/or a fear of being alone. Recognizing this, the first people to come in contact with a victim postassault have an opportunity to set the stage, through their behavior and reactions, for an easier or harder recovery for that victim—and for a willing or hesitant witness.

While investigators can usually recognize false elements
in a report fairly quickly, the extent to which an honest victim will be traumatized by her assault (and the way this will manifest itself) is much harder to assess. And there’s no single, standard, or “appropriate” victim response to rape, which is why many police officers and investigators are uncomfortable with it. Ann Burgess describes two general types of immediate reactions we see from women who’ve just been sexually assaulted: expressive and guarded. Some victims may exhibit both responses during an niterview, depending on how long it goes on, who is conducting it, and whether it is broken up into more than one session. For example, a victim might be expressive with a police officer immediately after the rape, but then guarded the next day talking to a detective at the precinct.