The Womens movement was saved from these Illiberals and their Believe the Victim movement. They can thank Susan Collins.
The fight over Justice Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation exposed fatal flaws in the “Believe the Victim” approach to sexual assault.
That approach is spreading rapidly through the country and is being actively promoted as the basis for deciding campus misconduct complaints as well as criminal cases. As interpreted by too many political advocates, the command to “Believe the Victim” tramples the principles of fairness, justice, and due process which have long inspired the feminist effort to reform rape law and have carried that effort to important victories over more than half a century.
This week, we all saw it in action. Demands to “Believe the Victim” thrust the U.S. Senate, charged with offering advice and consent on a Supreme Court nominee, into the impossible position of deciding fiercely disputed 36-year-old allegations of violent sexual crimes. Simultaneously, senators were told that it would be “woman-hating” to question, or even seriously consider, the obvious gaps of memory, completeness, and logic raised by those making the allegations.
As painfully demonstrated by the chaos it produced during the Kavanaugh confirmation process, the “Believe the Victim” mantra flatly contradicts the most fundamental principles of justice, in any public setting whether criminal, civil, or political. It does this in at least three ways, all of them flawed as matters of history, law, and basic fairness.
First, “Believe the Victim” advocates have argued not only that allegations of sexual assault need no corroboration, but that to seek such corroboration is to restore the rape laws of the bad old days, before the nationwide reforms of the 1970s and 1980s. As a matter both of history and practice, their argument is dead wrong.....snip~
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...ovement-and-its-progress-on-rape-prosecutions
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
