6/21/2006

Stigmatized for life?

There is nothing uglier than rape. We can all agree on that. But being falsely charged of rape is just as ugly. Sadly, it happens all too often.

 The difference is that the convicted rapist properly goes to jail, but the district attorney who prosecutes an innocent person goes on with his life even if the jury does the right thing and sends the innocent suspect away Scot free.

 Those are the important factors to keep in mind as press coverage of the alleged Duke lacrosse team gang rape case receives wide, and unusual, attention. Could the attraction be the cast of characters?  Three white male students accused of raping a black stripper, at a stag party? 

 Could it be there is some distorted appeal in having three pampered jocks from well-to-do families being charged, while the alleged victim is a poor, down-trodden single mother who is trying to work her way through college by taking on sordid jobs?  Is that why this case seems to attract more attention than all the other 680,000 plus rapes in the U.S. annually?

According to the Coalition Educating About Sexual Endangerment (CEASE) there are 78 rapes in this country every hour, one out of three American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and the U.S. has the highest rape rate among countries that keep these statistics. The rate is four times that of Germany, 13 times England’s level and 30 times that of Japan.

 Further, CEASE reports that one out of four college women are victims of rape or attempted rape and that only 16 percent of all rapes are ever reported to police.

 Now don’t misunderstand me. I am not arguing that because of the frequency of rape, by definition, it is not news and should not be reported in the press. I am saying, rather, out of all these incidents, why is the Duke case such a stand out? I, for one, have a feeling about it.

 Could it be that for some odd intuition the Duke case has the trappings of the 1987 Tawana Brawley case in upstate New York?  Miss Brawley, a 15 year-old black girl living in Wappingers Falls, NY, claimed she had been abducted and raped during four days by a gang of white men. Making the story more bizarre was her accusation that some of her attackers were law enforcement officers, who afterward dumped her in a garbage bag.

 Ms. Brawley specifically accused Steven A. Pagones, the Duchess County assistant district attorney, of being one of her assailants. The case made headlines for years. But an extensive grand jury investigation found that the teenager had not been raped at all, nor attacked, and that she smeared herself with the excrement, making up the story as a cover for running away from home. 

 Al Sharpton and other black leaders attained early prominence by coming to the support of the girl. In the end many of Ms. Brawley’s defenders were ordered by the court to pay Mr. Pagones settlements for slander and defamation of character.

 Now, you might ask, why does the current case in North Carolina bring that 19-year-old New York case to mind?  A number of factors.

 Rape at a stag party with about 50 potential witnesses attending yet no one corroborated the stripper’s charges.  No DNA evidence from any of the accused found on the victim. No proof that all of the accused were even in the house at the time of the alleged rape. Medical evidence indicating that although the victim had sex that night, her physical condition showed none of the signs that could be expected in a case of violence as described by her to police.

 Evidence, or lack of it, made no difference to the Durham, NC, community, which, as expected, split along racial lines. Fellow Duke students and most whites in the area backed the players while the substantial black community among the district attorney’s constituents sided with the accuser. Facing an election, could it be that the DA, in a close race, may have believed an indictment of the white jocks would benefit him in black neighborhoods? He eventually won a majority of the black vote.

 This case is bound to drag on for some time and the biggest fear is that it not turn out to be another Tawana Brawley debacle because there is one unwritten law that can never be revoked. It is: Once accused of rape, even if exonerated, a person remains stigmatized for life.

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