ONLY one in five police officers believe a woman should report being raped by her husband, according to a study showing the crime is often trivialised.
Nuns, ministers, doctors and police often knew a woman had been raped by her partner but did nothing, the Victorian study found. Each of the 21 victims interviewed for the study said her partner would not consider it rape, despite some suffering drugging and near-suffocation. Only six of the 30 police interviewed said they would recommend a woman report partner rape, despite 28 calling it a serious crime.
Good news for misogynist thugs, bad news for battered women.
Obviously domestic assaults like partner rape are difficult crimes to prove beyond reasonable doubt - his word against hers, basically, unless there's strong medical or other corroborating evidence. But police should at the very least take the woman's complaint seriously and be making sure that she - and he - knows that the alleged behaviour is just not acceptable. Trivialising it encourages the perpetrator to do it again. We shouldn't be reinforcing the views of the dickhead in the following quote -
The husband of one victim shook their marriage certificate in her face and said, "I own you with this".
I would've enjoyed the look on his face when she got an intervention order, divorced him and took at least half his stuff. I hope the police made sure she understood that she could.
The point is that although the police may well have a cynical view regarding the difficulties of obtaining a conviction in a particular case, it is still their duty to take complaints seriously. No-one in authority should ever be telling a victim of assault that it's just one of those things, get over it, it doesn't matter, etc. Certainly, police members do inevitably become jaded by domestic disputes - many battered women go back to their abusers, much to the disgust of police who let themselves care about their welfare - but basic professionalism requires that they take statements and make sure the victim knows that what she says she has suffered is indeed a serious crime.
If the police won't, who will?
