Canadian feminist Wendy McElroy explores a proposal that will presume black men accused of rape are found guilty even when there's no evidence against them:
Victim-centered justice is a “believe the victim/woman” approach by which an accused is presumed guilty based on an accusation, even without evidence. The purpose is to protect the accuser—who is presumed innocent—from being further victimized by traditional police procedures that focus on hard evidence, contradictions in testimony, and other objective indications of whether a case is valid. In his article “The Pandora’s Box of ‘Trauma Informed’ Investigations,” James Baresel described what victim-centered justice suggests instead. “Detectives base their investigation on the assumption that the women’s status as a victim is not to be questioned, even insisting that contradictions or apparent inaccuracies in her account must be evidence of a traumatic experience whose very existence confirmed her truthfulness.” The police almost act as social workers to elicit testimony from an accuser without upsetting her.
Okay, so far she's talking exclusively about "men", which of course is systematic anti-male sexism...but that's old hat in the western world ever since we (foolishly) let women vote without also taking away their traditional role as protected flower to be insulated from the big bad world of making real decisions. Where do the negroes come in?
For reasons explored here, this burden falls disproportionately upon black men. This is a bitter irony. If systemic racism does exist in law enforcement, as social justice zealots insist, then black men desperately need to be treated as individuals whose due process is being egregiously violated. They need precisely what victim-centered justice denies to them: protection of legal rights.
Okay...I'm not 100% convinced. After all, the reason the legal system "falls disproportionately upon black men" is because they are intrinsically thuggish: it's different than "rape" which almost by definition has to be primarily a male crime: it's extremely difficult for a woman to force an unwilling man to have sex with her. Women can commit sexual assaults on a man, but seeing as how penetrative sex is universally considered a different offense (and is helpfully easier to detect by forensics if reported immediately) I can see how a policy of "believe the victim even when the easily collectable physical evidence doesn't collaborate her claim" can harm men† on the whole, but not black men specifically. I'm going to need a little more convincing.
† I personally know a girl who got "caught" in this web: she accused a guy (I actually met him) of date rape and at first refused the rape kit...eventually later that same day she changed her mind and allowed the test. She claimed penetrative vaginal and anal sex without a condom and ejaculate should have been found but curiously wasn't...despite a lot of bluster she ultimately wasn't charged with filing a false report. Last I heard she was trying to get attention with the tried and true "cutting the forearms" method.
Why would victim-centered justice disproportionately punish black men? Because the bias of any system tends to impact the most vulnerable within it. Do statistics confirm that black men will be disproportionately impacted? No general data exist on issues such as how many black men have been falsely imprisoned due to bias. Even if statistics existed on false imprisonment, they would not necessarily indicate whether imprisonment was due to racial bias or other factors, such as the prevalence of poverty that precludes good legal representation.
This is one of those claims often made with minimal evidence to support it. Wendy does her best, I suppose:
In other words, blacks account for 47 percent of all known exonerations, or 1,158 out of 2,400; 52 percent of murder exonerations, or 468 out of 908; and 63 percent of drug crime exonerations, or 200 out of 317. Blacks constitute an even higher proportion of group exonerations based on drug crime frame-ups. The report concludes, “There is no doubt that race plays a role in the conviction of innocent defendants in America.” Again, it is not known whether the discrepancies result from racism or other factors.
There are obviously a few holes with this theory, which she helpfully acknowledges (and later dismisses): for one thing, it doesn't make any comparisons to wealth: anybody who remembers the O.J. trial will recall the power of a more expensive set of lawyers. Do poor whites and poor blacks get exonerated to the same degree? More critically, there's certainly a strong political bias in favour of trying to overturn black convictions. The NAAN has a program called "The Innocence Project" that uses pro bono lawyers as well as law professors and students at the Cardozo School of Law to help convicted niggers get a second chance at proving their innocence. Does the National Association for the Advancement of White People have a similar program? Whoops, nope!
Regardless, McElroy does eventually get back to her stronger thesis:
Victim-centered justice is en route to become the norm in police investigations into sexual abuse. From there, it will gradually become the norm in police investigations in general. One thing that might give social justice warriors pause is the possibility their approach will increase the false imprisonment of blacks. Pauses are welcomed; they offer space for discussion and reflection. But the unintended consequence for black men is not likely to deter victim-centered zealots. Their final analysis will be victim versus accused, women versus men. The race of those accused will take second place to a politically weightier consideration; they are male. And so the collateral damage of “always believe the women” will be institutionalized into the systemic racism and gender bias which victim-centered justice ostensibly opposes.
