Judge Bans Use of the Word "Rape" in Rape Trial

Posted by Melissa McEwan, Shakesville at 12:24 PM on June 9, 2008.

This is just getting absurd. Judge's ban on the use of the word 'rape' at trial reflects trend:

It's the only way Tory Bowen knows to honestly describe what happened to her.

She was raped.

But a judge prohibited her from uttering the word "rape" in front of a jury. The term "sexual assault" also was taboo, and Bowen could not refer to herself as a victim or use the word "assailant" to describe the man who allegedly raped her.

The defendant's presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial trumps Bowen's right of free speech, said the Lincoln, Neb., judge who issued the order.

"It's a topic that's coming up more and more," said Joshua Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. "You're moving away from what a criminal trial is really about."

In Jackson County, Senior Judge Gene Martin recently issued a similar order for the trial of a Kansas City man charged with raping a teenager in 2000.

…But in cases where the defendant's version of events is pitted against that of the alleged victim, "words are really important," Marquis said.

"To force a victim to say, 'when the defendant and I had sexual intercourse' is just absurd," he said.

Uh huh. Of course, "sexual intercourse" is loaded too—loaded with implied consent!

The argument is that disallowing victims to use the word "rape" constitutes balance—but it's no more balanced than if the defense was required to use the word rape.

This is all about the idiotic conventional wisdom that women go around wantonly filing false rape reports willy-nilly (no—false reports of rape are more infrequent than false reports of car theft, which itself is rare) and that any time a woman reports a rape, it ends up at trial (which is so made of no fucking way that it's not even funny, and the difficulty of bringing any rape case to trial is well-covered ground at Shakesville, so I won't go into it again). And the day I see a judge issuing an order that a dude can't say he was mugged on the stand lest it prejudice a jury in a robbery trial, when he's forced to say he handed his wallet to the defendant,* then I might believe that this is really about some principle of protecting defendants full-stop, and not just more horseshit designed to make prosecuting rapists even more mind-fuckingly difficult than it already is because everyone knows there's no such thing as real rape victims—just scorned women with axes to grind.

[H/T to Shaker Angelos.]

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* Forgive the tacit conflation of rape with property theft, which I singularly do not support. I couldn't figure out how else to use a courtroom example without that inadvertent ugliness.

Tagged as: women, rape, first amendment