Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

The story of what happened to a woman in Butler County Pennsylvania after she was raped at gunpoint and called the police for help illustrates one reason why rape is an underreported crime. Cara of the Curvature writes:

 

they didn’t just laugh at her, as many other victims report happening to them.  They didn’t ask her if she really deserved it for X reason, or if she had sex with the gunman consensually and then just regretted it later.  They didn’t ask her if she really wanted to press charges, because hey, this could ruin this man’s life, you know!  All of these are outcomes far more than bad enough, and which still happen far too often, but didn’t happen here.

Instead, they accused her of a false report and put her in jail.

Believe it or not, it gets worse: this story is in the news now because her lawsuit against the police department has been dismissed.

Cranberry Manager Jerry Andree said the “whole situation was horrible and unfortunate but hindsight is 20-20. The police deals with hard circumstances all the time and it’s easy to second-guess. [This decision] shows that what happened didn’t rise to the level of the police being legally liable.”

Hindsight may be 20-20, but I was pretty sure that you’re supposed to have more than rape denialism to go on when you throw someone in jail. What the dismissal of this case shows once again is that the police have become a class of people with special rights and privileges who are protected against any consequences for abusing those rights and privileges. It’s the same trend that allows cops to get away with physically assaulting people (or to be charged with nothing more than a misdemeanor).

Of course, were the woman in Butler County unable to bring a lawsuit, we might never have heard about the case at all.

For more on this story, see Karmic Reverberations.

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