Like many people in America, I’ve been following the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. We all bring our experience to the table when analyzing the news, and I’ve been looking at the issues raised by these hearings as both a feminist and a former trial attorney.
Sometimes, anger motivates me to write. I want to figure out why I’m angry, what I can do about it, and whether my anger is valid. I mean “valid” in the logical sense.
This article, published last week by the Washington Post, concerns something I’ve been angry about since I was in law school: special terminology that sets alleged sexual assault victims apart from alleged victims of other crimes. As I note in the article, you never hear alleged robbery victims referred to as “the accuser,” and yet, this is the norm for the media in cases of sexual assault.
Michele Sharpe 
Oh, I think that your anger is perfectly valid. It’s like the victim of sexual abuse are somehow separate from all other crime victims. It aggravates me that , during a trial, more emphasis is placed on their actions, rather than the perpetrators. I live in Ireland, where a recent trial in Belfast shone the spotlight on this. It involved well known rugby players and the victim was subjected to days more questioning than any of the accused. In the end, they received a non-guilty verdict, but at least some of them had the guts to apologise for what happened.
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This drives me crazy too. If a man has a few drinks in a bar and punches someone, it is clear cut assault. How is this different from a man having a few beers and forcing himself on another?
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Exactly. The only difference is the cultural conditioning that makes some of us disbelieve women.
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