LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Here's a problem judges face when dealing with rape allegations: it's really hard to to determine if the allegations are true when collaborating witnesses or medical evidence saying "yup, she was raped and he did it" isn't available and it usually isn't available.
A (sadly deceased) cousin of mine had a story about a gal getting dumped on her doorstep in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a t-shirt and pair of shoes. The gal had absolutely no memory of how she wound up at my cousin's home.
It's part of why the '#metoo' movement has been so toxic. An accusation of rape either means that someone has been brutally violated and traumatized, or that someone is trying to brutally violate and traumatize someone through the accusation.
It's incredibly sensitive and dangerous stuff, from which simple platitudes of 'believe all women' or 'this is just a bunch of women regretting they had one-night stands or used their body to get ahead in their career' are not going to solve things. Each individual case needs to be treated on its own merits.
My brother in law worked for... I think it was campus security? Some position where he saw directly into a bunch of cases where women were getting raped, and it particularly drove him nuts because there were multiple instances caused by one or two specific guys, who just kept getting away with it.
Why? Because the woman either wouldn't push things at all, wouldn't even say she'd been raped, or wouldn't get tested by a rape kit. And one of the really big things about rape, is that it's one of those crimes where a huge proportion of offenses, come from serial offenders.
If people really want to try to drive the rape rate down, the two big cultural messages that should be going out are:
1. Women, travel armed.
2. If you do get raped, then you need to immediately go to the police and get the proper forensic work done. If you get a rape kit done, show bruises and other evidence that it was forced, the odds of getting a conviction go up massively, and both you and other potential victims will be safer with the perpetrator behind bars.
One of the things that drives me nuts is the feminist assertion that 'we need to teach men not to rape.' We already teach that. In every form of media except for twisted fringe bits of erotica, sexual assault in general and rape in particular is depicted as the most heinous of crimes one can commit, with only murder being on the same level.