Men now avoid women at work - another sign we're being punished for #MeToo

[JonLP24]

50. Most people get away with it

But when it comes to sexual assault, ditching emotion and sticking to facts isn’t as easy as it sounds, for the simple reason that feelings have already clouded what we can know. Sympathy and suspicion—for suspects and victims, respectively—factor powerfully into every aspect of how law enforcement deals with sexual crimes, fogging up the numbers or erasing them altogether. When you look for facts, what you find is that the few we have are woefully insufficient. Sexual assault is massively underreported, and even when victims come forward, convictions are rare. According to RAINN, only 5 out of every 1,000 rapes committed—that’s 0.5 percent—ends in a felony conviction. The Washington Post puts the figure at 7 out of 1,000, but pretty much everyone agrees it’s under 1 percent. We usually try to make sense of this painfully low number by noting that many rapes aren’t reported, which is true, but the crime is also notoriously under-investigated.

And when it is investigated, it’s pretty tough to prove—not because of the crime’s high proof threshold, but because of how little evidence about it we bother to collect. There is, for example, a national backlog of hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits. And behind that big number are stories that don’t get told: Rather than heal or wash or even change after being attacked, these women went straight to the hospital, where they had to undress, subject themselves to intrusive physical exams, and get interrogated. And then nothing happened. No one did anything with the evidence they offered at great personal cost. (Actually, that’s not true: According to a CNN investigation, 25 law enforcement agencies in 14 states were found to be destroying rape kits in cases that could still be prosecuted. “This was a routine process, they said, done to make space in evidence rooms.”)

But it’s not just rape kits; this lack of investigative vigor seems to permeate every aspect of the system. The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s review of more than a thousand cases in Minnesota found that:

Even the rape statistics we actually have are likely much too low, because—given a major incentive to lower caseloads and no reporting standard—law enforcement has a history of improperly clearing sexual assaults. For decades, police departments abused the “unfounded” classification reserved for false or baseless rape claims (a practice that helped to undergird the myth of prevalent false-rape claims). A scandal in late-1990s Philadelphia provoked real reform there, but a recent investigation by ProPublica, Newsy, and Reveal found that many police departments still have unusually high rates of cases they designate “unfounded.” As an oft-cited 2010 meta-analysis put it, “[M]isclassification of cases by law enforcement agencies is routine. Cases in which the victim is unable or unwilling to cooperate, in which evidence is lacking, in which the victim makes inconsistent statements, or in which the victim was heavily intoxicated frequently get classified as ‘unfounded’ or ‘no-crimed.’ ” Law enforcement also has a history of destroying the evidence with investigations designated “incomplete” not because they had no merit but because officers failed to follow through. 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.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/sexual-assault-rape-sympathy-no-prison.amp

There are more people getting away with sexual abuse than there are false allegations. I worry more about those victims than men too afraid to hire women. Also men can be victims and they are even less likely to report.