['Rape' utilized in both headline and article - perhaps because of the age of the victim?]

I don’t know how to embed, unfortunately, but the link is to an article about a rape case in which the judge forbade the victim to use the words “rape,” “sexual assault,” “victim,” “assailant,” “sexual assault kit,” etc., etc., in giving her courtroom testimony.

Prejudicial, he said.

Grad Student, I’ve never heard of a successful libel claim by an individual against a newspaper or other media defendant for using the word “rape” to describe the charges against him. Nor did I find one while taking a quick look online. Like a lot of other talk about the supposed lawsuit culture of the USA, this worry gets applied to the task of rationalizing bad behavior.

But I still think that state legislatures were right to take the word “rape” out of their penal codes and substitute variations on “sexual assault.” Federal law uses “sexual abuse” and “abusive sexual contact,” which I think are good terms, though wordy.

What I’m trying to write about is different though, its about a culture-wide attitude about the appropriate uses of words. It’s perfectly okay to make rape jokes and to talk about any and every usurpation of personal liberty as rape. What doesn’t seem to be okay is to use the word to mean a sexual assault. The point I wanted to make is that the failure to call rape what it is ripples out across the ocean of abuses women suffer in our culture.

It all boils down to social stigma and future perceptions of the accused. If a paper erroneously reports that a person committed rape, that is worse than erroneously reporting they committed burglary because of how we “value” sex offenses. Similarly, it is worse for a paper to report that a person committed rape if the person ends up being convicted of a lesser sexual assault instead.

The easy way to think of this in regards to those huge, crayon-bright lines is: what would you rather have your employer erroneously believe, that you are a rapist or a thief?