"Just Another Lying Woman"
The title is derived from a comment posted to my Wall of Solidarity post. I think it's fair to say the commenter is an anti-feminist. Quite often feminists get a hard time from the anti-feminists for lending credence to women who claim they were raped. Somehow this becomes proof that we hate men or that we think that all men are rapists. For a long time I unconsciously bought into this bullshit. I would question my tendency to believe women who claim they were raped. Then I read this post from Ilyka, and had one of those total moments of "Duh!"
In the middle of a crime, one does not attack the victim, one goes after the criminal.
"Well, damn," I thought to myself. "Of course. I generally believe ANYONE who claims to be the victim of a crime." Yes, folks, it's true. I bet most of you do too. If you hear of a man whose house was broken into, you don't think "Gosh, maybe he was committing insurance fraud." I sure don't. Might it be possible? Of course. But most people tend to believe others who say they were the victims of crime. And we tend to disbelieve those accused who claim to be innocent. Prisons are filled with those who proclaim their innocence. You know what? Most of them are lying. Certainly not all of them are. People are wrongfully convicted of crimes. Not just rape, but burglary, murder, you name it. All those are tragedies. Of course, sometimes guilty people go free. So what do we do about it? I don't know, but we surely don't stop prosecuting crimes. Continue to strive for improved investigative techniques, I guess. I'm all in favor of that. I'd like to see the rate of wrongful convictions decrease to the point of being non-existent. Who wouldn't? I'd also like to see the rate of guilty people going free decrease to zero.
Personal anecdote. I once served on the jury in a murder trial. The defendant, unsurprisingly, claimed he was innocent. There were no eyewitnesses who saw him shoot the victim. There were no eyewitnesses who actually saw him with a gun. In fact, the gun used to shoot her was never recovered. However, there was still some ballistics evidence that convinced us that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm not going to go into the details of the case, but suffice it to say that the evidence existed. Could we have been wrong? Sure. I have to live with the knowledge that I may have helped send an innocent man to jail. But there was no doubt a crime had been committed. The victim was dead. She had been shot through the heart. There was no way she could have done it herself. A murder had obviously occurred. The only question that remained was whether the defendant had committed the murder. So yes. 11 other people and I convicted the defendant of murder. In the absence of eyewitness testimony. Is this proof that we hate men? That we think all men are murderers? Of course not, and no one would suggest it.
Why should I treat women who say they were raped differently than I treat other people who say they were victims of crime? Why should I treat alleged rapists differently than I treat the alleged perpetrators of other crimes? And just like with other crimes, the lack of a conviction is not proof that the alleged victim was lying. So unless someone can provide me with a real reason, other than insults like "just another lying woman", I'm going to continue to give the benefit of the doubt to the alleged rape victim, not the alleged perpetrator. I'll just no longer feel slightly uneasy about that.
One last thing. I didn't believe either Susan Smith or Andrea Yates when they claimed they were innocent. Does this mean I hate women? Mothers? Think all women are murderers? Please.