Georgia State legislator Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) has introduced a bill that would change the term victim to accuser in certain cases, including rape and stalking, when a conviction has not yet been obtained. Naturally, feminists are angry about this, as they often insist on having the moral upper hand, and calling someone a “victim” – even when they could well be false accusers – gives prosecutors and accusers leverage by creating an assumption that an accuser was victimized through linguistic sleight-of-hand. Because people brought up on charges in the United States are considered innocent until proven guilty, there is something inherently at odds with our criminal justice system in assuming that a crime has taken place without a conviction.
Trotting out the usual lies, Amanda Terkel of Huffington Post writes:
Rape and sexual assault are chronically underreported crimes. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, “60% of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to the police, according to a statistical average of the past 5 years. Those rapists, of course, never spend a day in prison. Factoring in unreported rapes, only about 6% of rapists ever serve a day in jail.” Under Franklin’s definition, all of these people who didn’t report their crimes aren’t actually victims — because there is never a conviction.
Terkel skips around the fact that the language is for legal purposes, so she is free to call people victims all she wants, but without a conviction victimhood cannot be legally established. It may be a technicality, but it’s an important one in terms of due process. Additionally, in many rape accusations there is no physical evidence of a crime (sex is not a crime — yet), so victimhood cannot be established except upon the accuser’s word, and that is legally insufficient.
Given that stories of men being released after decades behind bars for false rape convictions are coming out in the news on a very frequent basis, it is astonishing to see the intransigence of these feminists, who refuse in the face of all the evidence to cop to the serious problem of false accusations and unjust prosecutions.
Justice, however, has never been a feminist goal. No, the goal is power, at the expense of anyone and everything else.
