Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Sullivan Bere
The Violence Against Women Act was passed in the early 1990s IIRC. You were too young to remember it, but at that time people were finally starting to break away from some pretty hard previously existing bias against women on the subject of sex insofar as the old chastity expectations for women in conjunction with undue sexual licence given to men. Those laws were the end result of putting some pretty unfair treatment to rest. The rape kit thing was only one aspect. The rape shield laws to prevent abusing women and unfairly prejudicing a case by smearing women on the stand about their collateral sex histories was another aspect.
Beforehand, too many people still viewed women filing rape claims with scepticism or browbeating along the lines of things like 1) she's being an evil bitch making it up to get even with the guy for something, 2) she's a golddigging shrew doing it to blackmail someone, 3) she's a slut and/or careless fool who 'asked for it' due to her dress and/or conduct, 4) she's partially at fault and therefore to blame because didn't resist the assault as she should have, etc, and these kinds of biases found their way into forms of official conduct.
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Well as bad as it may have been then you don't think harm has come to the entire proccess because of the at times, over-protective nature of the laws? Or maybe their intrepetations there of?
I think its gone too far the other way now, i didn't remember it back in the 90's and was indeed too young but surely what we have now isn't what the law's drafters intended be the outcome of their passage?
Also, a lot of the time, even to this day a lot of the past sex life info and "she's a gold-digger" are still used by the defense aren't they anyway? All the shield laws do it make the lawyers work harder to do their own research i presume and not have the local paper just brandish the girl a slut and kill the case on arrival? Or have i mis-interpreted what you meant?
Just to edit in, i absolutely agree that this idiot in this case deserves a stiff jail term for sure like you said. I just think that half the way these laws are writte and or interpreted allows for folks like her (and the Duke stripper) to think they can get away with this sort of thing.