#MeToo: Addressing the Nuance in the Sexual Assault Discussion

Last week, I noticed a social media campaign that was taking place: #MeToo. It was in response to a man named Harvey Weinstein. Before the #MeToo campaign, I had no idea who Harvey Weinstein was. Apparently, he is a Hollywood film producer and executive. But it goes beyond that. Earlier this month, multiple women made allegations of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape against Weinstein. In response to these allegations, people were tweeting and posting on Facebook the hashtag of #MeToo. I noticed that a number of my female friends, and even some male friends, were posting this hashtag. Essentially, those who had been sexually assaulted or harassed hash-tagged #MeToo, and some even shared their story. The idea behind this social media campaign was to bring awareness about the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In the short-run, I think that the campaign succeeded, as it should. Rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment have no place in civil society.

However, looking at these postings got me thinking about the TV series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). Law and Order: SVU is the Law and Order series that covers sexually-based crimes. Sexual assault and harassment often come up as themes. I know that the show is fictionalized. Nevertheless, I have been watching it since it first aired, and what I can say is that it does a good job capturing the complexity behind sexual assault. There is the act of sexual assault itself: often, it is "he said, she said," "he said, he said," or "she said, they said".....you get the idea. Even if you can prove that sex or the given act took place, then there's the matter of proving malicious intent. None of this gets into statute of limitations, false reporting, underreporting, or stigmas and misconceived notions about men and women. It is with that appreciation for the complexity and nuance that I would like to proceed.

Sexual Assault Rates
I think it's important that if we are to identify a problem, we need to determine how prevalent it is. That is where rates come in: so we can determine the frequency with which something happens. I know the #MeToo hashtag covers sexual assault and sexual harassment, but I want to cover rape rates here because at least in part because it's easier to measure. The chart below shows the rape rate from 1972 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the rate of forcible rape in the United States has dropped by nearly half. To be fair, rates had increased slightly since then from 25.9 to 28.6 per 100,000 from 2013 to 2016 (see FBI historic crime statistics here). This does not consider that the FBI changed its definition of rape in 2013, at least in part to include the rape of a male.

Source: AEI

The Bureau of Justice Statistics also has statistics of rape and sexual assault of women (Planty et al., 2013). Although the the most recent numbers in their reporting go back to 2010, there is at least an overall decrease in completed, threatened, and attempted sexual assault.

False Allegations
This is the least politically correct part of today's blog entry: talking about false allegations. Part of the issue is that many would feel more inclined to believe the victim over the suspect, at least in part because the victim would have less reason to lie than the suspect. Yet there have been instances in which false allegations have been made. While I don't want to minimize the trauma of an individual who has been sexually assaulted, I also want to make sure that we establish the facts and corroborate the evidence before condemning an individual in a court of law. Last time I checked, we are shooting for a legal system in which someone is "innocent until proven guilty." If a victim makes a false allegation against a suspect and it comes to light that said allegation is false, the life of the falsely accused individual is forever ruined. Do false allegations happen often enough where we need to be worried?

The definition of false allegation can be disputed. Are we talking about allegations that are formally filed with the police or does this also include informal, word-of-mouth allegations? Even getting past this definitional quandary, there has been difficulty finding an answer to that question. One meta-analysis from 2006 [see below] puts the range between 1.5 and 90 percent (Rumney, 2006). The wide range suggests inconclusiveness. Nevertheless, there is one oft-cited study (Lisak et al., 2010) that has the rate of false accusations at a range of 2 to 10 percent, although that study is disputed. In his textbook on false allegations, forensic scientist Brent Turvey estimates that the figure could be 8 to 41 percent.

While we cannot ascertain the truth about prevalence of false reporting through the statistical ambiguity, we do know it still happens with frequent enough occurrence where we should be mindful of it. In our attempt to get justice for sexual assault victims, we should become more sensitive, not less, to unfairly accused individuals because we do not want to create additional victims in the process.

Underreporting
Just because a crime is not reported does not mean it did not happen. The advantage here is that the statistics on underreporting are more reliable than those for false reporting. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) in 2013 found that sexual assault was greatly underreported. Based on that study, Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network (RAINN) estimated that 40 percent of sexual assaults are reported, which is close to the general criminal victimization reporting rate of 35 percent. Although sexual assault is underreported, the silver lining is that it is not underreported more than other violent crimes. What we can say, though, is that underreporting occurs more frequently than false accusations.

Underreporting is not an issue with just sexual assault, but also sexual harassment. In a 2016 report from the Department of Labor's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on workplace harassment. Not only did the EEOC find that 25 to 85 percent of women are harassed in the workplace, but 75 percent found that they experienced retaliation when reporting. The EEOC also admitted that sexual harassment seminars at work are ineffective.

Some Thoughts Specifically on the #MeToo Hashtag
There are some benefits to the #MeToo hashtag, particularly for the victim. It provides the opportunity for the victim to tell the story, as well as letting the victim know that they are not the only one. There is empowerment for those who have been victimized, but I did find a few issues with it:

1. The hashtag lumped sexual harassment and sexual assault together. Neither are acceptable, but they are not the same thing. What this hashtag did was blur the line between acts with very different magnitudes of unacceptability. 
2. I wonder if this social media campaign will go beyond a temporary trend. Paralleling the experiences of protests and of boycotts, it is not easy to actualize change. You need a targeted, massive enough of a collective that lasts long enough to make change. If a short-lived social media campaign is a substitute for actual political change, we'll revert back to status quo in a matter of days.
3. The #MeToo hashtag assumed that women are always the victims of sexual assault and men are always the perpetrators. This is simply not true. As this Slate article brings up, men are sexually assaulted almost as frequently as women (Stemple and Meyer, 2014). It is difficult for women to discuss sexual assault. Given the hypermasculinity in the United States, imagine how much more difficult it is for men to disclose. This is why I applaud the FBI for revising its definition to omit mentions of physical force or that rape can only happen to a woman. 

Conclusion
What I was hoping to accomplish here is to not reduce the discussion to "women are victims" and "men are predators." This ill-conceived notion not only causes a divide between the sexes, but it also contradicts reality, which interestingly enough, also plays out in the area of domestic violence. The vast majority of men are not rapists or predators. The vast majority of victims that are reporting rape or sexual assault are not lying. Much like with other crimes, there is an issue of underreporting. These are some of the nuances that we should keep in mind moving forward.

I also don't want us to get sucked into an argument about "rape culture" simply because it sounds trendy or "cut and dry." I looked at the topic of sexual assault on college campuses about three years ago, and the "one in five women is sexually assaulted on campus" statistic is exaggerated by a factor of 33! Granted, colleges are a demographic subset, but at the same time, a good point was brought up by the RAINN, the largest national organization dedicated to fighting sexual assault, on the issue of "rape culture":

"Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community to commit a violent crime...[Blaming it on 'rape culture'] has the paradoxical effect of making it harder to stop sexual violence, since it removes the focus from the individual at fault, and seemingly mitigates personal responsibility for his or her own actions." 

I see the temptation about blaming it on "rape culture," but the truth is that male sexual aggressiveness has existed in every society. Dare I say that there is definitely a biological component to sex drives. In [Orthodox] Judaism, the recognition of this fact is why there are safeguards that separate men from women. I'm not to say that the Orthodox views on sexuality are perfect (because they're not!), but what I am saying is that there might be a point with regards to the power of sexual urges.

Without getting into a debate about how men and women are different, what I can say is that because people are not equal, there will be imbalances in power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is why, as a libertarian, I am for smaller government. This is also why I believe in checks and balances: so that dominating personalities don't abuse power. The same goes for our cultural institutions. When men like Weinstein gain and abuse power, we should use our freedom of speech to call him out on it. We should have free of an economy as possible so individuals do not feel that being sexually exploited is the only way to get ahead or retain a certain position or station in life.

A freer society is an indirect way of solving the issue, but there are also more direct ways of approaching the issue. How about when there is some "locker room talk" or someone does some catcalling, how about call out the person for their bad behavior? Can workplaces create a way to anonymously report sexual abuse and create a better environment for workers? What about simply treating people decently because they are human beings? We can get into preventative measures that could be taken to render a sexual assault less likely to happen (e.g., self-defense course, carry a gun or taser). However, the blame ultimately goes to the assaulter or rapist, not the victim, because the criminal is the one expressing a blatant disregard for others. Perhaps laws that make it easier to prosecute sexual assault or modified police training to better navigate sexual crimes would be apropos. What it would take to get sexual assault crime rates down will continue to be a debate. What this does remind me of is that real-life problems, especially on such a large scale, cannot be summarized in a soundbite, hashtag, or Facebook status.