Kavanaugh confirmation signals scary time for reporting sexual assault

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court over the weekend refutes the president’s claims last week that this is “a very scary and difficult time for young men in America” and that young women, on the other hand “are doing great.” From the perspective of survivors of rape and sexual assault and harassment, the majority of whom are women, the process leading to the confirmation demonstrated that the exact opposite is actually true: it has historically been, and continues to be, a scary and difficult time for young women, and young men are doing comparatively great.

Why? Because the word of men is more likely to be believed, and the lives of men are more likely to be valued, than those of women in the public sphere. {mosads}

For all the specter raising about the damning and undue damage of false accusations, the evidence strongly suggests that in most cases of rape, assault and harassment, no accusations are made at all – no charges brought or punishments meted out; these crimes and indignities are most often met by silence. 

So the president’s confident declaration, in a September 21^st tweet, that if the attack had been “as bad” as Christine Blasey Ford had said, “charges would have been immediately filed with local law enforcement,” is not borne out by facts. And as Ford’s testimony and the ensuing brouhaha bear out yet again, the costs to accusers of reporting can be astronomically high.

The administration’s apparent position that women are likely to be lying about rape, sexual assault or harassment, would appear also to be the basis for their roll back of Title IX guidelines on college campuses from a “preponderance of evidence” to a “clear and convincing evidence” standard in September 2017, basically discounting the credence given to the word of accusers, and erring on the side of disbelieving them for fear of false reporting.

Yet, if the problem of false accusations were as widespread as those decrying a crisis for innocent young men would have us believe, we would expect to see more than a mere 150 lawsuits by young men complaining of having been treated unfairly in the course of Title IX investigations of sexual assault allegations since 2011. Clearly, no number of false accusations is acceptable, but this number is extraordinarily low given that victims of sexual assualt among the country’s 17 million undergraduates is estimated to be between 3  and 4 million annually – The American Association of Universities and the National Institute of Justice have estimated that between one fifth and one quarter of undergraduate students experience rape or sexual assault – even though the majority of them – as many as 80 percent – are unlikely to report the crime at all. 

“Men are above the law,” famed philosopher Martha Nussbaum asserted after it had taken years and dozens of accusations for Bill Cosby to be charged with sexual assault back in 2016. Nussbaum, an architect of the Capabilities Theory of Justice and erudite author of Sex and Social Justice – a volume advocating for the redress of grievous inequities in the treatment of women globally – discouragingly offered this advice for would be victims of sexual assault: “Do not let your life get hijacked by an almost certainly futile effort at justice. Focus on your own welfare, and in this case that means: forget the law.”

The rushed elevation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, after a cursory FBI investigation and public pillorying of his accuser from the bully pulpit of no less than the president of the United States, amplifies and further institutionalizes a message known to women throughout history: in cases of “he said, she said,” “she” will – more likely than not – be assumed to be the one who has lied, and “he” may find himself holding the reins of power from among the highest offices in the land.

Bonnie Stabile is the director of the Master of Public Policy Program and of the Gender and Policy Initiative at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Follow her on Twitter @bstabile1