True Non-Consent Case Study

violence and placed more of an emphasis in the victim’s testimony regarding consent. Today, there is no national rape law in the United States instead, each state has its own laws concerning sexual assault. Many states have redefined lack of consent. Some states still require a showing of forcible compulsion or a victim’s incapacity to consent for a conviction, others have loosened the rigid resistance requirement and a handful have shifted towards removing force entirely as an element of the crime, concentrating solely on the consensual nature of the act (Lyon, 2004, p. 287). John Decker and Peter Baroni (2011) analyze all fifty states and the stance they take on consent in rape law. Their article splits states into “true non-consent states,” “contradictory non-consent states,” and “force states”. In true non-consent states, the state can convict a defendant of at least one sex offense by showing that the victim did not consent to the sexual act regardless of the use or threat of force against the victim (Decker, 2011, p. 1084). Only twenty-eight states are true non-consent states. Nine states are contradictory states meaning that although it appears the victim has a
A national telephone sample study done by Cohn et al. (2013) looked at eight different reasons why women chose to not report rape. Of the “526 rape victims who had experienced a most recent or only rape incident, 441 (84%) did not report the incident to the police and therefore constituted the study sample” (Cohn et al, 2013, p. 459). They found that non-acknowledgment and criminal justice concerns were two of the strongest weighing factors when considering reporting rape. Non-acknowledgment meaning there was a worry the incident would not be viewed as a rape or a crime and criminal justice concerns over the fear of a lack of proof or fear of being treated