If you’re a woman in America, your chances of leading a life free of sexual violence aren’t good.
One in 5 American women will be raped or be the victim of an attempted rape in their lifetime. One in 3 of those survivors will be between the ages of 11 and 17 when the attack occurs, so being a child is actually a risk factor for females.
And for every 1,000 sexual assaults, about 975 of the perpetrators will face no legal consequences — for a variety of reasons that include the ongoing biases of those meant to help survivors.
“How our society looks at or ignores these horrific crimes of sexual assault is staggering,” said former Alameda County Dist. Atty. Nancy O’Malley.
If sexual assault were a disease like COVID-19, we would be declaring a public health emergency. Instead, even after decades of incremental improvement, this crisis of violence against women and girls continues to spread like a virus and even thrive because as a society we refuse to wipe it out.
A group of California women led by O’Malley and First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom released a report Tuesday by a group of female advocates, legislators and health experts with a blueprint of how the Golden State can lead when it comes to protecting women.
California stepping up now is even more critical when you look at the national picture.
Alarmed by the disenfranchisement and rightward turn of young American men, much focus has been placed on how we can make them feel better about life, too often ignoring the misogyny and repression of women’s rights that their conservative shift is fueling. In some states, survivors of rape and incest now face restrictive abortion bans, including places that won’t allow an exception unless the assault is reported to police.
So pushing back in the other direction, protecting women’s rights and highlighting where we can do better in preventing sex crimes and supporting survivors, is essential.
“In some areas we’ve done very well. Legislatively, California kind of leads the way,” O’Malley told me. California has passed a string of laws in recent years that give survivors greater rights and more help and take a nuanced approach to their trauma.
But in other places, we haven’t come a long way.
O’Malley, who worked in a rape crisis center in the 1970s before becoming a sex crimes prosecutor and then D.A., pointed out that from law enforcement to courts, women still face stigma and ignorance when it comes to sex crimes.
“We have partners who need to step up and do a better job,” O’Malley said.
The findings of the report are remarkably common sense, making it all the more frustrating that some of the recommendations have not been done already. For example, not every county has a designated hospital where forensic exams can be done. Especially in rural areas, getting proper care and treatment for sexual assault survivors is challenging.
And if an exam is done, California lacks a cohesive statewide system to track results to “support the identification and prosecution of serial perpetrators,” according to the report. Yes, in this day and age when DNA is helping to solve decades-old murders, we still don’t have a reliable system to track active serial rapists. O’Malley points out that almost 40% of those convicted of sex crimes re-offend.
Don’t get me started on untested rape kits sitting in storage.
The report suggests that the state ensures that local crime labs submit DNA to the California Department of Justice, and that we also make sure that survivors have a way to track that sample through the system.
One of the most basic problems that Siebel Newsom and O’Malley found was that the system, from responding officers to judges, still lacks trauma-informed training. Whether it’s the uniformed officers responding to a domestic violence call or the jurist passing a sentence on an acquaintance rape, survivors still too often find themselves facing the same kinds of bias that has infused the system for decades.
Were they drinking? Why did they wait so long before coming forward? Did they fight?
Throughout our justice system, all the stereotypes and victim-blaming that have stopped women from seeking or finding justice remain. It’s really hit-or-miss. Some within the criminal justice system have evolved, some haven’t.
“We have a lot to do in terms of educating people,” O’Malley said. She would like to see required training for judges, for example, so that victims’ rights are upheld in the courtroom and testifying doesn’t become its own trauma. And the report recommends teaching better interviewing techniques to law enforcement, so that survivors don’t give up on getting help or justice.
“It doesn’t have to be an abusive system,” O’Malley said. “It should be a compassionate system.”
Few know that better than Siebel Newsom. In 2022, she courageously testified against once-super-mogul Harvey Weinstein in his Los Angeles rape trial, detailing how he had assaulted her in an L.A. hotel room in 2005. Before she even entered the courtroom, Weinstein’s lawyer labeled her a “bimbo.”
This week, Weinstein headed back to court in New York for a new trial on his conviction there. In a harsh reminder of where we are culturally at this particular moment, that retrial is being billed as a referendum on the #MeToo movement, which hoisted the epidemic of sexual assault into the spotlight.
Now, right-wing commentators including Joe Rogan are claiming that poor Mr. Weinstein, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“If this happened in the ’80s, they probably would have thrown it out. But in the #MeToo movement, it was a hot witch hunt,” Rogan said.
It was not.
It was a moment of reckoning now facing a backlash because some of the men who hold power in our country do not want accountability when it comes to sex crimes. But the women of California, and I suspect the U.S., do.
“As a survivor, the work of preventing sexual violence and supporting other survivors is deeply personal to me, as it is to so many others,” Siebel Newsom said.
This report “is more than a set of recommendations, it’s a call to action for every system designed to support and protect survivors. We’ve laid out a bold, actionable path forward that is rooted in healing, justice and accountability because every survivor deserves to be treated with dignity.”
In short, a plan for California that embraces women’s well-being, while others trample on it.