Few sympathise with rape victims

Washington: As more women come forward under their names, either from years of silence or from the group of 13 Jane Does who had been prepared to testify for Andrea Constand’s settled civil suit against Cosby, specific details of the alleged assaults will continue to enter the public conversation, Salon said. On Friday, the New York Daily News ran an interview with Angela Leslie, who says Cosby brought her to Las Vegas in 1992 with suggestions that he would help her in her acting career and then attempted to drug her, and forced her to fondle him in a hotel room.

On one hand, the situation is as bad as drugging women into unconsciousness and raping them. On the other, it is also as bad as this headline, both titillating and banal: “Former Actress Claims Bill Cosby ‘Masturbated With My Hand’,” which is to say, not bad enough for many to take this recent accusation as seriously as some of the others, given the sheer number of “this is getting out of hand” jokes cropping up on Twitter at the lightning speed of the half-clever.

The vast majority of us are not prosecutors, but there is still a tendency to want to assign a degree of severity to assault allegations based on idiosyncratic and highly individual internal barometers that are calibrated not to the severity of victims’ trauma but to each individual’s own sliding scale. The flaw in this human reaction is that only the victim is authentically able to assess just how bad it was.

There is strength in numbers that can deflate the “bad date” revenge defense, which some cling to in the early stages of these public stories. How many “jilted ex-girlfriends” nursing decades-old grudges can we plausibly expect one guy to rack up while he was married and running a highly demanding career, people wonder? There are still some people who think a victim of sexual assault only has a right to tell his or her story if the victim is forcibly, violently raped while actively fighting off the assailant, and if he or she is not willing to risk her own life to fight off the attacker, the victim is somehow, one of those tricky sliding scales, complicit in the assault.