Why Society Goes Easy on Rapists

I started compiling a list of sexual assailants who got no prison time almost by accident. CNN’s review of one police department in Springfield, Missouri, found that in dozens of cases “detectives did not attempt to contact witnesses and known suspects, didn’t have rape kits tested or stopped working cases within days or weeks of being assigned to investigate.” If rape kits aren’t tested, suspects aren’t interviewed, investigators aren’t assigned, victims are labeled uncooperative, and law enforcement frequently mislabels reports from the small percentage of victims who do come forward, then the numbers aren’t giving us anything like a true description of the problem. It’s a pattern that might be explained by outdated ideas of sexual assault, like the notion that “stranger rape” is serious and worth punishing whereas other kinds might not really be rape at all. Last year, a Texas judge allowed a Baylor University student charged with sexual assault—his accuser said he’d repeatedly raped her until she’d lost consciousness—to plead no contest to “unlawful restraint” and avoid jail time altogether; Jacob Walter Anderson got a $400 fine, counseling, and probation. Top herself told the Star Tribune she felt differently: “I felt like for what he had done, he basically got a slap on the wrist.” In the time since I started writing this, Michael Wysolovski, a Georgia man who groomed and abducted an anorexic teenage girl and kept her in a dog cage for over a year, pleaded guilty to “interstate interference with custody” and child cruelty, defined as “excessive physical pain during sexual intercourse.” He was sentenced to “ten years with eight months to serve.” He’d been in a detention center for eight months and he’ll be on probation for the rest.