Tara Reade is a person who exists

[laughing dog]

That's good, because people can't believe what they want.

Clearly you are completely clueless about human beings, because many do believe what they want.

 

[Toni]

When they were small, my son and his friend once swore that they saw a tiger behind our apartment building--on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area in the US. They believed it with their entire being. We parents believed that their imaginations had run away with them--and we still went to look to see what they saw.

Why are you arguing with me when you seem to be in 100% agreement?

You did not believe your son. You did not believe there was a tiger there.

I believed that they had seen something. Other parents and I were joking (mostly---but only mostly) that of course it was just imagination gone out of control.

If we had absolute 100 percent confidence that my son had not seen a tiger, we wouldn't have gone looking. MY parents wouldn't have gone looking when I was a kid. And in my case, it wasn't a tiger I saw but a horse and my parents refused to believe me--would not even look out the window--- until my siblings asked why there was a horse in the garden.

This is a situation far too many women find themselves in: they report a rape or sexual assault. They may or may not be believed. Even when they present evidence, such as video tape of them being raped and beaten---until someone else, and sometimes several someone elses are discovered--and dead. Sometimes, they are so disbelieved that they are charged with false reporting--and only exonerated when it is discovered that there indeed is a serial rapist and they took souvenirs, one of which identifies the first victim who was falsely accused of making a false report. Unfortunately, these are actual cases that have been discussed at length on this board.

That's fine. It would be strange to believe him, since it would be vanishingly unlikely for a tiger to be there. In any case, you couldn't make yourself believe it, could you? Your sons word wasn't enough for you to believe it, but even if it had been, it cannot be said that you chose to believe him.

Then why did I go looking for the tiger?

Part of me considered that it was extremely unlikely that they saw a tiger or that two small children would have escaped if there had been a tiger--but enough of me believed that there *might* have been a tiger that I, along with other parents, actually looked.

We did not look to reassure two small children that they were safe. They were not afraid of the tiger at all!--they were delighted. We looked to reassure ourselves because we believed that there was a possibility of a tiger, even if it were a very small --vanishingly small---possibility.

Truthfully? Sometimes we still wonder about that tiger.

 

[Emily Lake]

No. If I don't believe them, I don't believe them. There's nothing I can do about that. My internal cognitions aren't the important thing though.

I sure do have a reason: my job.

Lots of the examples used to try to illustrate this dynamic have been far-fetched. They've all been scenarios where it's most reasonable to be skeptical of the claim made - the scary guy on the ceiling, a tiger in a major metro area, a squirrel the size of a dog. Those are all scenarios that are extraordinarily improbably and where reason dictates that they NOT be accepted as true, even provisionally.

In each of those cases, and actions taken are being done to coddle the person reporting the event, and to help them see that they were mistaken, that what they thought happened didn't actually happen. Your parents walking to the garage with you wasn't done to investigate your claim - it was done as appeasement for your irrational belief, and in order to show you that you were wrong.

Are you suggesting that, in general, women making claims of rape hold irrational beliefs that they are victims, and that they should merely be appeased by investigation in order to show them that they're wrong? That cops should just go through the motions of investigation in order to convince those women that their claims are baseless?

You say your internal cognitions aren't important, and the only thing that matters is that you do your job. I say those internal cognitions are very important to how you do your job - whether you go through the motions in order to appease an irrational claim, or whether you honestly and genuinely investigate the claim made.

So let's try a less far-fetched scenario. Let's say your child comes to you and tells you that a stranger tried to get them to get in their car. Are you going to believe your child, in the sense of provisionally accepting their statement as true, and taking their report seriously? Or are you merely going to go through the motions of doing your job as a parent?

What if the kid says that a stranger was peeking in their window?
What if the kid says that a stranger was in their room?
What if the kid says that a stranger was hiding under their bed?
What if the kid says that a stranger was floating on the ceiling above them?

At what point in that progression does your action change from genuinely investigating the situation and taking their claim seriously, to going through the motions in order to appease your kid's fears and show them that what they thought they saw wasn't real?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

If somebody can't even conceive of rape as a concept I'd say they don't belong on a police force.

NOW you’re getting it. Or are you under the impression that every single police officer is pure as the driven snow?

 

[Metaphor]

Of course you can. That isn't the same thing as believing the events happened. I once had a friend who hired a truck, and believed someone had broken into it during the night and damaged parts of it. His version of events did not make sense. The truck was locked when we got into it. The minor scuff marks he was talking about had already been circled on line drawings of the truck that I found in the glove box, by previous people who had hired it. He was absolutely paranoid and I did not believe anyone had broken into the truck and damaged parts of it.

But I could see he believed it. There was no question he believed it. The evidence of my own senses told me he believed it.

But telling him I believed he believed it would not be satisfactory, would it? Imagine I were a cop and I told an alleged rape victim:

"I believe you", or,

"I believe you believe it".

Feminists would scream blue murder at the second utterance.

You don't seem to understand why that second sentence makes women angry - not just feminists (who you seem to think are evil), but women in general, as well as a lot of men. Your own anecdote provides the reason for their anger: It's equivalent to saying "Clearly you believe it but you're wrong". It is implicitly suggesting that the woman reporting the rape was not raped. That's the initial stance - that they were not raped and no crime has been committed.

Come on now, it can't possibly hurt you to concede this small point. If you were to go to the cops and report that you had been robbed, and they responded with "I believe you believe you were robbed"... wouldn't you be a bit angry at that response?

The point of my illustration is that you can't control whether you believe something or not. It's stupid to tell people to do that. So, I would not ask a cop if he believed me. I'd expect him to take my report seriously.

 

[Metaphor]

If somebody can't even conceive of rape as a concept I'd say they don't belong on a police force.

NOW you’re getting it. Or are you under the impression that every single police officer is pure as the driven snow?

Hardly.

 

[Metaphor]

Are you suggesting that, in general, women making claims of rape hold irrational beliefs that they are victims, and that they should merely be appeased by investigation in order to show them that they're wrong? That cops should just go through the motions of investigation in order to convince those women that their claims are baseless?

No. I quite clearly said they should take the allegation seriously and act accordingly, regardless of what they believed to have happened. I've said it about a dozen times.

You say your internal cognitions aren't important, and the only thing that matters is that you do your job. I say those internal cognitions are very important to how you do your job - whether you go through the motions in order to appease an irrational claim, or whether you honestly and genuinely investigate the claim made.

Well that's a worry, because you can't control what you believe.

So let's try a less far-fetched scenario. Let's say your child comes to you and tells you that a stranger tried to get them to get in their car. Are you going to believe your child, in the sense of provisionally accepting their statement as true, and taking their report seriously? Or are you merely going to go through the motions of doing your job as a parent?

What if the kid says that a stranger was peeking in their window?
What if the kid says that a stranger was in their room?
What if the kid says that a stranger was hiding under their bed?
What if the kid says that a stranger was floating on the ceiling above them?

At what point in that progression does your action change from genuinely investigating the situation and taking their claim seriously, to going through the motions in order to appease your kid's fears and show them that what they thought they saw wasn't real?

Let's say it's true that if you don't believe an alleged victim, that you can't investigate properly. (I reject that--I think the entire justice system would collapse if it required certain belief states from every person involved in an investigation and prosecution). But let's say it does depend on it. You can't change what you believe by a sheer force of will. You just can't.

Do you believe you are reading these words right now? Could you will yourself to believe something else?

 

[laughing dog]

Of course you can. That isn't the same thing as believing the events happened. I once had a friend who hired a truck, and believed someone had broken into it during the night and damaged parts of it. His version of events did not make sense. The truck was locked when we got into it. The minor scuff marks he was talking about had already been circled on line drawings of the truck that I found in the glove box, by previous people who had hired it. He was absolutely paranoid and I did not believe anyone had broken into the truck and damaged parts of it.

But I could see he believed it. There was no question he believed it. The evidence of my own senses told me he believed it.

But telling him I believed he believed it would not be satisfactory, would it? Imagine I were a cop and I told an alleged rape victim:

"I believe you", or,

"I believe you believe it".

Feminists would scream blue murder at the second utterance.

You don't seem to understand why that second sentence makes women angry - not just feminists (who you seem to think are evil), but women in general, as well as a lot of men. Your own anecdote provides the reason for their anger: It's equivalent to saying "Clearly you believe it but you're wrong". It is implicitly suggesting that the woman reporting the rape was not raped. That's the initial stance - that they were not raped and no crime has been committed.

Come on now, it can't possibly hurt you to concede this small point. If you were to go to the cops and report that you had been robbed, and they responded with "I believe you believe you were robbed"... wouldn't you be a bit angry at that response?

The point of my illustration is that you can't control whether you believe something or not. It's stupid to tell people to do that.

People control whether they believe something or not all of the time. Your claim is counterfactual.

 

[Metaphor]

I believed that they had seen something. Other parents and I were joking (mostly---but only mostly) that of course it was just imagination gone out of control.

If we had absolute 100 percent confidence that my son had not seen a tiger, we wouldn't have gone looking.

Really? I would have gone merely to show him that there was no tiger. Or perhaps he had seen something else that he mistook for a tiger, and that would be worth seeing and explaining why he was mistaken.

MY parents wouldn't have gone looking when I was a kid. And in my case, it wasn't a tiger I saw but a horse and my parents refused to believe me--would not even look out the window--- until my siblings asked why there was a horse in the garden.

This is a situation far too many women find themselves in: they report a rape or sexual assault. They may or may not be believed. Even when they present evidence, such as video tape of them being raped and beaten---until someone else, and sometimes several someone elses are discovered--and dead. Sometimes, they are so disbelieved that they are charged with false reporting--and only exonerated when it is discovered that there indeed is a serial rapist and they took souvenirs, one of which identifies the first victim who was falsely accused of making a false report. Unfortunately, these are actual cases that have been discussed at length on this board.

Whether a police officer acts according to standard investigation procedure should not depend on whether the police officer believes the complainant. And if it does, you are shit out of luck, because people can't will themselves to believe something they don't believe.

Then why did I go looking for the tiger?

Part of me considered that it was extremely unlikely that they saw a tiger or that two small children would have escaped if there had been a tiger--but enough of me believed that there *might* have been a tiger that I, along with other parents, actually looked.

We did not look to reassure two small children that they were safe. They were not afraid of the tiger at all!--they were delighted. We looked to reassure ourselves because we believed that there was a possibility of a tiger, even if it were a very small --vanishingly small---possibility.

Truthfully? Sometimes we still wonder about that tiger.

So you believed there could have been a tiger. You didn't control how much 'enough' of you believed there to be a tiger or not. Someone else might have been 100% convinced there was no tiger. A third person might be "fifty fifty chance of a tiger". The point is that none of those people chose what to believe.

 

[Metaphor]

The point of my illustration is that you can't control whether you believe something or not. It's stupid to tell people to do that.

People control whether they believe something or not all of the time. Your claim is counterfactual.

Do you believe you are reading these words right now? If so, what amount of money could I give you for you to believe you were not reading them?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Whether a police officer acts according to standard investigation procedure should not depend on whether the police officer believes the complainant.

And yet, it happens all the time. Which is the point.

 

[laughing dog]

The point of my illustration is that you can't control whether you believe something or not. It's stupid to tell people to do that.

People control whether they believe something or not all of the time. Your claim is counterfactual.

Do you believe you are reading these words right now? If so, what amount of money could I give you for you to believe you were not reading them?

You have asked an analogous question before. It is irrelevant. The fact that one may not control what one believes some of the time does not mean they cannot control what they believe all of the time.

To answer your question, I literally did not believe I was reading your question since it is idiotic.

 

[Emily Lake]

No. I quite clearly said they should take the allegation seriously and act accordingly, regardless of what they believed to have happened. I've said it about a dozen times.

Okay, I will accept that you have a semantic quibble about the word "believe". That's fine. Can we take a step back and talk about ramifications, setting the word aside for a moment?

Is it your understanding that people making claims of rape are generally telling the truth? Or is it your understanding that a material portion of them are making false allegations?

What is your understanding of how women have historically been treated with respect to rape accusations? What are your views on the fairness of that treatment?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

No. I quite clearly said they should take the allegation seriously and act accordingly, regardless of what they believed to have happened. I've said it about a dozen times.

Okay, I will accept that you have a semantic quibble about the word "believe". That's fine. Can we take a step back and talk about ramifications, setting the word aside for a moment?

Is it your understanding that people making claims of rape are generally telling the truth? Or is it your understanding that a material portion of them are making false allegations?

What is your understanding of how women have historically been treated with respect to rape accusations? What are your views on the fairness of that treatment?

These are topics that are done to death. Must every thread devolve into one of these kinds of things?

This is a news story of a specific concrete event.

There's now an update. I posted about the concrete update.

The updated news story is lost in the shuffle of an entirely useless semantic quibble about the word believe. How Metaphor is involved in this is interesting because he is well known for being too literal...even though he goes by the name Metaphor and this has been pointed out before. When people say "you should believe women" they mean you should not disbelieve them unless you have good reason and to act as though you do in practice. There. Done. No need to discuss it further. OMG!

If one wants to take a step back to talk about a broader picture of comparing this to, say, Kavanaugh's accuser and whether the principles used are the same or not, one still has to at least comment now on the additional concrete update.

 

[Toni]

Really? I would have gone merely to show him that there was no tiger. Or perhaps he had seen something else that he mistook for a tiger, and that would be worth seeing and explaining why he was mistaken.

Why would I have done that--tried to show him that he was wrong? He wasn't worried or frightened. He was delighted with the idea. Why would I do something to squash his imagination.

Other parents and I did walk back there a few times, more to reassure ourselves that there was no tiger (none was reported missing from the zoo, there were no circuses in town but still, sometimes people are weird and avoid the law..) or something else that could potentially cause harm.

Whether a police officer acts according to standard investigation procedure should not depend on whether the police officer believes the complainant. And if it does, you are shit out of luck, because people can't will themselves to believe something they don't believe.

People are people, including police officers. It takes an exceptional person to be able to follow all leads if they believe (again--they are acting on THEIR belief) that they are following up on something that didn't happen. They dismiss evidence, do not pursue leads, don't do follow ups with quite the same intensity as if they believe that the alleged crime actually happened. This is particularly true if time and other resources are short, as they always are in police work.

Then why did I go looking for the tiger?

Part of me considered that it was extremely unlikely that they saw a tiger or that two small children would have escaped if there had been a tiger--but enough of me believed that there *might* have been a tiger that I, along with other parents, actually looked.

We did not look to reassure two small children that they were safe. They were not afraid of the tiger at all!--they were delighted. We looked to reassure ourselves because we believed that there was a possibility of a tiger, even if it were a very small --vanishingly small---possibility.

Truthfully? Sometimes we still wonder about that tiger.

So you believed there could have been a tiger. You didn't control how much 'enough' of you believed there to be a tiger or not. Someone else might have been 100% convinced there was no tiger. A third person might be "fifty fifty chance of a tiger". The point is that none of those people chose what to believe.

Oh, not true at all. Of course I could have easily convinced myself that there was no tiger and no reason to even glance around a corner, much less take several walks in the area of the 'tiger' sighting. It was, of course, the most logical conclusion. I could have easily convinced the other parents as well. Heck, that's what MY parents would have done--did do, even when there was a horse in the garden.

But here's the other thing: I quit telling my parents stuff after that. And that's what happens with rape victims all the time: they don't report. They don't report because of stigma, yes, but mostly, they don't report because they won't be believed. Most women know that police take rape allegations less seriously than they take a home break in and that less of an investigation will be conducted. Men, even more so. Heck, if you live in a bad neighborhood and your place is broken into, a lot of times, police just write it off as tough breaks, live somewhere better or: probably nothing was taken, they just want sympathy or victim's funds. So, people don't report because why bother? It's just humiliating and exhausting and stigmatizing and crazy making and utterly useless.

You can believe and have doubts. You can recognize that the person making a report or statement is traumatized and likely emotion is clouding memory as to specifics, that memory will almost certainly be fragmented and may be recovered over time. The attacker may have only been wearing a distinctive red jacket and single glove and have no other resemblance to Michael Jackson---but if you don't believe the person that something did happen, then you don't get more information from them, and you investigate half heartedly believing that it was a lie or mostly a lie.

 

[Emily Lake]

Other parents and I did walk back there a few times, more to reassure ourselves that there was no tiger (none was reported missing from the zoo, there were no circuses in town but still, sometimes people are weird and avoid the law..) or something else that could potentially cause harm.

Slightly off topic... If I were to speculate, I'd guess he saw a brindled dog. It's relatively common in Mastiffs, Great Danes, and Boxers (along with a few other breeds I can't remember). I could certainly see a kid mistaking a brindle-coated Great Dane for a tiger from a distance with just teensy bit of imagination.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

From a Department of Justice study specifically in regard to police investigators and their attitudes effecting investigations:

[T]here has been less scholarly work on police investigators themselves. Police investigators have not been studied to see what they see as the obstacles, roadblocks, frustrations and hindrances to the successful completion of a rape investigation. Nor has there been any investigation into what police investigators see as the best way to overcome these problems. This study asked police officers about these issues not only in relation to stranger rape, but also intimate sexual assault, same-sex rape, false reports, false confessions, drug-facilitated rape, rape of prostitutes, and the emotional labor problems of people who work with rape victims.
...
The investigation of rape by the state or state-sponsored authorities is not a new phenomenon. For better or worse, rape investigations (at least of certain victims) have been going on as far back as we have written authority. However, starting about 40 years ago, groups across the country began to “speak out” on forcible rape (Jordan, 2001). It was no secret that rape was a good rallying issue for organizing feminist groups because women from all races, classes, occupations, and religions were to some degree or another worried about being raped. It was an issue that touched a large percentage of the population.

The key hurdle was identified then as police attitudes toward women. The argument was that police automatically presume that most women who filed rape reports were lying (Estrich, 1988). Women who behaved in a manner which the police did not approve (sex outside marriage, drinking in a bar without an escort, use of bad language, wearing immodest clothing) were not allowed to file rape complaints at all, or had their complaints listed as false reports or “unfounded.” Fairstein (1993) even claims that several localities stamped certain rape complaints where the police had no respect for the victim as NHI, for “no human involved.” Current studies continue to claim that the further women are from the approved mainstream, the harder it has been to get police to take rape complaints. For example, Miller and Schwartz (1995) interviewed prostitutes who said that they could not go to the police. Jane, to choose one woman, said she was gang-raped, but the police “don’t have no pity for no prostitutes. They figure if you out there whoring you s’posed to take what’s coming to you…”
...
Feminist literature has made it clear that most police investigations may have been half-hearted or outright disbelieving, but certainly there is more interest now in conducting a proper investigation. Today, there are many guides to the police investigation of rape, including the classic Hazelwood and Burgess (2008) reader, now in its fourth edition, and the government sponsored Epstein and Langenbahn (1994) set of recommendations.1 The popularity of these guides is rooted in the belief that the police are the most important criminal justice officials in a rape case (Lord & Rassel, 2002).

Whatever people believe, there is no question that police behavior has been the most scrutinized of the various criminal justice officials. No matter how important prosecution or judicial authorities are in advancing or retarding conviction rates, the literature on the influence of courts on rape convictions is relatively thin. At the same time, the literature is replete with complaints about the way in which police investigators have traditionally handled rape cases. To deal with these complaints about the police, officials generally agree that it is essential for police operations to be studied by researchers (McDonald & Paromchik, 1996), not necessarily to uncover flaws in technique, but to point out methods of improving service.
...
Police attitudes toward the victims of rape have often been studied (Coombs, 1986; LeDoux & Hazelwood, 1985; Madigan & Gamble, 1991; LaFree, 1989; Adler, 1987) and too often the results of such investigations show that, in fact, the police are distrustful of women. They believe that women who are not of perfect virtue (whatever that might be) may be lying (DuMont, Miller & Myhr, 2003; Jordan, 2001; Temkin, 1997). In fact, from the victim’s standpoint, the extreme pressure and harassment of a police investigator working from this ideological position has been called “the second rape,” (Madigan & Gamble, 1991) with some discussion of whether in fact the first or the second rape is worse (McMullen, 1990). The issue or problem (researchers believe) is that in these cases police investigators suppose that large numbers of rape reports are false (Burgess & Hazelwood, 2001).

In addition to the difficulty discussed above that women of whom the police do not approve may not be allowed to make reports at all, in some cases police investigators are suspicious of all women, most women, or a great many women (Temkin, 2002). Susan Estrich (1988), for example, reports that although she was raped outdoors, essentially on a snow bank in some bushes, investigating officers had questions as to whether she may have been a willing participant in the sex act. Luckily for her, she reports, the rapist also stole her car, and the investigators decided that it was impossible that she would willingly give away her car to a stranger. That a Harvard University law student might decide to have sex in a snow bank along a public path with a stranger seemed perhaps believable to them, she reports. Certainly to this day, rape complainants in many departments are routinely given polygraph tests as a first order of business (Lord & Rassel, 2002; Temkin, 2002), an investigative technique rarely used with victims in any other criminal complaint.

Yet, even though it has been widely reported that a tremendous number of people in the criminal justice system believe that many or most rape victimization reports are false, it is a major problem in the literature that there have been few studies of false reports of rape. The studies that have been done have been spectacularly divergent in their results. McDowell (1990) and Kanin (2001) believe that there are a substantial number of malicious and false reports, while Lees (2002) reports on her analysis of the extant research and her study of the police that the rate is very low. Fairstein (1993) similarly argues that her 10 years as a Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor has proven to her that there are very few false reports. Of course, even less studied are false confessions to rape by men (Leo, 2001; Johnson, 1997, White 1997), which are similarly an important problem for police.
...
It is common for observers today to report that the average police officer now knows that he or she is supposed to be supportive and sympathetic toward women reporting rape victimization, and some observers feel that the police are getting better all of the time (Lord & Rassel, 2002). This view, however, is not unanimous. Lonsway, Welch and Fitzgerald (2001), some of the more important rape researchers in the field of Psychology, report that sensitivity training and education about rape may improve officer behavior. Unfortunately, they did not discover any evidence that such training changes the officers’ attitudes toward and opinions of rape victims. Presumably such attitudinal change would improve the quality of rape investigations, but a lack of attitudinal change would impede any change in rape investigation quality.

Moving from attitude into practice, some researchers have found no improvement at all in police practice (DuMont, Miller & Myhr, 2003; Jordan, 2001; Temkin, 1997). Other investigators find that police culture is still sexist and homophobic (Lees, 2002), and that police have not, in fact, done very much in many locations to improve things (Lord & Rassel, 2002; Gregory & Lees, 2003). The strongest statement is from Hodgson (2002), who argues that the changes that people may be seeing in police attitudes toward rape victims are superficial. Changes in police procedures, he charges, amount to little more than “impression management,” where “internal operations, for the most part, go unchanged and unchallenged” (p. 173).

Much much more at the link that I'm sure none of the people that should read this study will actually read, but this from the conclusion:

Using the rape scale here shows that despite many years of training, a large number of police officers still maintain attitudes and opinions that get strongly in the way of treating rape victims well. Detectives conduct examinations in a way that makes conviction very unlikely, especially for confused young women trying to protect their reputations, and were almost unanimously hostile to changing to a system that would protect victims.

Police practice in general is detrimental to investigations, as few to no departments engage in any experimental or innovative practices. An early goal of this study was to discover the “best practices,” and to publicize them. Unfortunately, there are no “best practices.” Most departments are doing exactly the same thing, some better than others. The idea of talking to others either within or outside the department to attempt to gain fresh ideas to break cases was greeted with universal derision.

In terms of recommendations, one obvious one is that training seems to be related to a lesser allegiance to rape myths. It seems evident, then, that more training is needed. More particularly, these officers need training that is specific to sexual assault. Much of the training they have had deals with interviewing offenders, forensic examinations, searching for evidence, and interviewing witnesses. Much of what they called training was in fact training to interview offenders, which was adapted to interviewing victims. In other words, victims are presumed to be lying and are examined closely for evidence of this.

When training is provided on sexual assault, it seems that virtually all of it is provided on stranger assault, even though virtually all of the detectives reported that 80% of their caseload was acquaintance rape. Training on acquaintance rape seems to be rare and an obvious area for improvement.

It is a common complaint of detectives that patrol officers need to be trained more on procedure in a sexual assault case. Their point of view is to make sure that a good case is not compromised by the actions of the patrol officer, which they seem to believe, is a common occurrence.

Most problematic for me--and of particular relevance to the discussion--was this recommendation from the researchers:

Given the way that police act, it may be even more important to train college women and high school girls in what to do when raped. Of course, if a female does not wish to report a rape, then all that can be done is to urge them to talk to counselors in the nearest rape crisis center. Other studies have shown that often young women do not understand that they have been raped, or have been convinced by people in their lives that they rather than the man is at fault (Pitts & Schwartz, 1997). If she does report to the police, however, it seems essential to find a way to convince them that they must tell the truth right off. The presumption here is that if a female is reporting the crime to the police, she has some interest in seeing the case move forward. However, if her story is embellished, or key parts are left out in an attempt at impression management, then the police have major problems in trusting her credibility. Typically, this happens when people are raped at a time when they are in a place where they are not supposed to be (a dark alley they were warned about), or doing something they were not supposed to be doing (going with strangers to a party to do drugs). Without in any way suggesting that police should not be trained to take reports and treat rape victims equally, the fact remains that rape myths and misogyny are so embedded in the police (including many female police) that this will remain a problem.

Iow, the DOJ researchers found that the problems with the police are SO entrenched that the onus is placed on the victim to take additional steps to not trigger police negligence! Like they don't have enough on their plates it's up to them to tip-toe around Police misogyny.

Fucking hell.

 

[Toni]

Other parents and I did walk back there a few times, more to reassure ourselves that there was no tiger (none was reported missing from the zoo, there were no circuses in town but still, sometimes people are weird and avoid the law..) or something else that could potentially cause harm.

Slightly off topic... If I were to speculate, I'd guess he saw a brindled dog. It's relatively common in Mastiffs, Great Danes, and Boxers (along with a few other breeds I can't remember). I could certainly see a kid mistaking a brindle-coated Great Dane for a tiger from a distance with just teensy bit of imagination.


View attachment 27407

That's entirely possible. I hadn't thought of a dog. He'd seen tigers at the zoo but I'm relatively certain he had never seen a mastiff, much less a brindle mastiff or other large dog. Now, I'm not sure whether to mention that as a possibility and ruin a childhood memory.

 

[laughing dog]

Getting back to Tara Reade. Suppose she is telling the truth and Biden did sexually harass/molest her? Apparently in a national election in the US, that is not a significant negative, otherwise the human shitpost that is our President would not have been elected.

 

[Arctish]

Getting back to Tara Reade. Suppose she is telling the truth and Biden did sexually harass/molest her? Apparently in a national election in the US, that is not a significant negative, otherwise the human shitpost that is our President would not have been elected.

I can believe Biden went beyond his usual hands-on hair sniffing approach more than a few times. "Grab 'em by the privates" is a significant escalation, but it could happen. Digital penetration is pretty extreme though, and apparently out-of-character. Still, I think there's substance to Reade's story.

I'd rather Biden step aside and the Democrats choose a candidate from those who survived the first few rounds of the debates. And I'd rather there be a genuine investigation into the allegation, not a dog-and-pony show with the Democrat version of Lindsey Graham wringing his hands over how unfair it is that men seeking high office have to endure having their past behavior scrutinized.