Judge Bans the Word 'Rape'...During a Rape Case.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 4:03 PM on June 21, 2007.

This post, written by Jessica Valenti, originally appeared on Feministing

It's not enough that rape survivors are re-victimized in the courtroom by having their sexual histories brought up or are accused of "wanting it." Now they can't even call their assaults, well...assaults.

From Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

...a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi--accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.

The first trial resulted in a hung jury last year, and in the retrial the words will once again be banned. The only word left to use by both the defense and the prosecution to describe what happened? Sex. Uh huh, that's lovely.

Bowen testified for 13 hours at Safi's first trial last October, all without using the words rape or sexual assault. She claims, not unreasonably, that describing what happened to her as sex is almost an assault in itself. "This makes women sick, especially the women who have gone through this," Bowen told the Omaha World-Herald. "They know the difference between sex and rape."

The article points out that judges have been known to keep certain words out of the courtroom, like 'victim', because it implies that crimes was committed. Safi's lawyer, Clarence Mock, argues that the word rape is similar: "It's a legal conclusion for a witness to say, 'I was raped' or 'sexually assaulted.' ... That's for a jury to decide."

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Tagged as: rape, judicial system

Jessica Valenti is the Executive Editor of Feministing and the author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters.