Traditional feminists often argue that law enforcement agencies still don’t take rape accusations seriously, but I’d argue the pendulum has swung too far the other way today — law enforcement agencies tend to be not skeptical enough these days because they fear appearing politically incorrect. Such was certainly the case in King County where prosecutors were recently forced to drop rape and assault charges against a ferry captain.
A woman, whose name newspapers still won’t publish even though she clearly lied about her alleged rape, claimed the ferry captain attacked her with a knife and sure enough she had requisite wounds on her shoulders. Police should have been a bit more suspicious, though, when the alleged victim told them that she bled profusely for more than 30 minutes in the suspect’s truck, but they found not traces of her blood in the truck.
How could that happen? That’s simple — the “knife wounds” were the result of any stabbing, but rather of a surgical process. The woman went to a medical center and had incisions on her shoulders to relieve abscesses which left the “knife wounds.” The prosecutors should have been able to tell the difference between surgical incisions and a stabbing wound from a knife, but apparently were in such a rush to convict the ferry captain that they didn’t bother to pay close attention (and moreover, refused to promptly release anything but Polaroid shots of the alleged victims wounds to the defense).
It goes without saying that the automatic suspicion and derision that many rape victims used to endure was wrong, but so is the current tendency to assume, as the feminist extremists tell us, that women never lie about rape and that every rape accusation should be practically treated as proof enough of a man’s guilt. Let the evidence speak rather than ideological pre-suppositions about men and women.
Source:
Rape case falls apart: skipper may be released. Tracy Johnson, Seattle Post-Intelligence Reporter, June 7, 2000.