Dear Huffington Post: Cherry Picked Rape Myths Do Not Equal Innocence
by Matt Atkinson
David Protess, writing for the Huffington Post on Did Oklahoma Wrongfully Convict a Chicago Hoops Standout?
"Oh my Jesus God," Darrell Williams cried out as he heard the verdicts. Turning to the jury, Williams exclaimed: "I didn't do it!"
The jury had just found Williams, a basketball player at Oklahoma State University, guilty of two counts of rape by instrumentation. Two women had testified that Williams had groped them at an off-campus party by reaching inside their pants. And the Stillwater, Oklahoma jury had believed them.
For 15 years I've been a specialist in sexual assault prevention, education, and treatment, have written a curriculum for sexual assault victim response that's used nationwide, won a national award for excellence from the National Sexual Violence Resource Council, and have been a staff director for a state Sexual Assault Coalition. I only say this so people won't think I'm just "Joe public" with a pile of opinions.
Williams became a suspect when the two complaining witnesses picked out his photo for police, according to news reports. But the women weren't shown the usual photo spread of mug shots. That wasn't possible — because Williams had no criminal record.
Instead, since the alleged offender was wearing an OSU Cowboys warm-up suit, the cops showed the women a photo of the basketball team. Williams was the perp, they declared.
When Williams was brought in for questioning, however, he immediately professed his innocence. "I don't know what happened [to the women]," Williams said in an audio-recorded interview. "I was probably misidentified." To prove his innocence, he agreed to take a lie detector test — and passed. No doubt thinking the first test was a fluke, the authorities asked him to take another one. Passed it, too.
I'm sorry, but this article is replete with rape myths. Starting with the notion that because the accused proclaims his innocence (and the penalty for sex offenses is severe), we ought to heed that. Well, don't ALL accused rapists proclaim their innocence? The old chestnut that "these alleged victims could ruin his life with their accusations" is one of the most pathetic (and predictable) reactions to rape. The author is calling for sympathy for the convicted rapist as the real victim here because those women "ruined his life." That is the worst swill of anti-victim rhetoric I can imagine in a rape case, and I can't believe HuffPo would publish such a classic example of it. How many rape victims have to put up with that same venom–"Why would you accuse him? You'll ruin HIS life!"
Witnesses at the party told police they had not heard anyone scream or seen any inappropriate behavior. Neither of the women suffered cuts or scratches, and their clothing was not torn. Both had been drinking before they arrived at the dimly lit party. Most important, several party-goers were OSU players wearing warm-up suits just like the kind donned by Williams.
Next, we have the myth that if the victims aren't physically brutalized, there's grounds for skepticism about the crime itself. Such a comment does nothing to exonerate Williams, and instead is a typical tactic of questioning the veracity of the victims' allegations entirely: their rape claims are phony. It's the classic belief that "she might not have actually been raped, because she's not obviously injured and her clothing isn't torn." Again, this is a pathetic response that MANY rape victims face by people who don't have the slightest education about sexual assault dynamics (yet decide to mouth off about it anyway), and it's unfortunate when these biases make in into the media like this. For the record, a majority of sexual assaults do not result in obvious external wounding, and the nature of the assaults being alleged in this case wouldn't. So to call out the victims on this basis reveals nothing about the case, and everything about the author's maintenance of trite, longstanding rape myths. In an article titled "Sexual Assault: What Juries Don't Know" (dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/articles/freydjury2008.pdf) this very myth is exposed as a classic prejudice by the misinformed and ignorant.
A check with OSU officials revealed that Williams was an honors student with a 4.0 grade point average. He left Chicago, where he graduated from Dunbar High School, to escape urban violence after his older brother Derrick was murdered while visiting their grandmother. As a junior at OSU, Williams earned a basketball scholarship and became the Cowboys' starting forward. His coach and fellow players were convinced he was innocent.
Third, the "he's such a good boy" defense is another failure. So what if the accused has a perfect GPA? So what if he doesn't have a prior record? Neither of those has anything to do with the case. Sadly, many rape victims have to face this kind of nonsense all the time–"Oh, he would never do what you're claiming! He's been such a nice boy! He goes to church and gets good grades! why would you say such a thing?" Again, the author is promoting the classic arguments used to disparage victims claims: "They ruined his life." This is coupled with the snide remark that "the victims had been drinking." The reference to a victim's consumption of alcohol is a typical method of invoking latent prejudices against women who are raped. It's meant to bring up the skepticism that a woman who has been drinking is at fault herself, that she forfeits the right to allege rape (indeed, forfeits the right to withhold consent or complain about the violation of that consent in any case), and is the classic "she put herself in that position" chestnut. A writer who had bothered to become educated about sexual assault would know that victim intoxication fortifies a legal case against a perpetrator, it doesn't erode it. But nevermind, it's much easier for a writer to fall back on the age-old anti-victim myths about alcohol making it her fault (or at least, not his fault).
Witnesses at the party told police they had not heard anyone scream or seen any inappropriate behavior. Neither of the women suffered cuts or scratches, and their clothing was not torn. Both had been drinking before they arrived at the dimly lit party. Most important, several party-goers were OSU players wearing warm-up suits just like the kind donned by Williams.
Next, there's the "nobody heard any screaming" thing. This is based on the myth that sexual assaults are raucous, loud, chaotic crimes, because that's how people imagine them to be. In reality, a majority of sexual assaults last less than three minutes, and the most common response by victims is "tonic immobility"–becoming rigid and silent. To fall back on the belief that someone has to be screaming, fighting, beaten, and have her clothes torn up in order to be a "legitimate rape victim" shows no better understanding of sexual assault than the bizarre claims of the man whose phrase I'm invoking to make this point.
A landmark study of wrongful convictions in which prisoners were officially exonerated found that 80 percent of the errors in sexual assault cases were due to false witness identifications. In other words, eight out of 10 complaining witnesses were mistaken — the highest error rate of any type of wrongful conviction.
Lastly, the article's link to support the claim of 80% misidentification in rape cases actually supports no such claim whatsoever. That link presents 945 cases of exoneration. That's 945 cases SINCE 1989. Given the 125,000+ incidents of rape every year (BJS, Crime Victimization Report), there's not a shred of a basis for the author to make the claim he ascribes to his source. What he CAN say (and I'll correct the record here since the author did just an awful job of understanding his own source), is that 80% of those exonerations were on the basis of misidentification. That's 80% of all 945 exonerations since 1996, or a tiny fraction of a percent of ALL rape convictions in 16 years. What a careless mistake by a lousy, lousy article.
And, yes, race matters profoundly in assessing Darrell Williams claim of innocence. Williams is black. The two women are white. Other black Cowboys basketball players were at the party. At least two black men on the team closely resembled Williams in height, build and skin tone.
But instead of showing the complaining duo a photo of each potential suspect and asking if they could identify it, the authorities made a fatal mistake. They used the team picture — forcing the witnesses to compare one black player to another. This must have been confusing. In picking Williams, it would have been natural to choose the black player who looked most like the person who groped them, even if he was not necessarily the actual assailant.
I won't even get into the author's nasty point that having two women pick out the same suspect from a group picture is invalid because all black players look too alike for this to be meaningful.
Seriously?
Matt Atkinson is a domestic and sexual violence response professional with a background in work with trauma survivors. He has directed programs to prevent domestic and sexual violence, where he developed and implemented programs with schools, colleges, women's prisons, university sports teams, churches, and Indian tribes. He is the author of the survivor handbook Resurrection After Rape and his 2011 book "Letters To Survivors: Words of Comfort for Women Recovering from Rape" received two prestigious publishing awards. Matt is an accomplished artist, and he is married and has two sons.