21/09/2021
We agree with many of the interviewees in this article: Questions about a sexual assault victim-survivor’s sexual history and clothing are not relevant to the establishment of whether or not a sexual activity was carried out with consent.
Such questions typically serve to humiliate and discredit women who come forward about assault, with wide-ranging consequences such as under-reporting and cultural acceptance of r**e myths. Information about a survivor’s sexual history has traditionally been used by defendants to paint the survivor as sexually “promiscuous” and therefore having “invited” sexual violence upon herself (despite the fact that one’s sexual history has no bearing on one’s likelihood of being assaulted in the future). Similarly, information about a survivor’s clothes or appearance has traditionally been used to argue that they “brought the assault upon themselves” by looking “too sexy”. Again, this displaces the responsibility for the assault from the perpetrator to the survivor.
Nevertheless, the article calls to mind several areas for improvement regarding the survivor-centricity of the process of investigating sexual violence.
First, one helpful principle is that wherever possible, survivors should be allowed to choose how to share their experiences with investigation officers. Sexual assault is a traumatising experience that deprives victims of their agency; thus, a survivor-centric process should enable them to feel as safe and in control as possible. After all, the article rightly acknowledges that there are different ways to communicate the details of an incident besides speaking - such as drawing or writing.
Further: Seeing that the police, according to this article, “calibrate how we ask questions [based on a survivor’s sexual history] because some people may not understand the words we use", perhaps a standardised vocabulary could be established for IOs, with terms that can be used regardless of the person's sexual history and experience levels.
A "Trauma-Informed Victim Interviewing" brief by the International Association of Chiefs of Police suggests that such questions on dress could be phrased like this: “Sometimes we can get valuable evidence from the clothes you were wearing, even if you’ve put them through the laundry. We would like to collect the clothes you were wearing at the time of the assault as evidence. Can we pick up those items at a time and place that is convenient for you?” This foregrounds important context - i.e. that there are legitimate fact-finding reasons for examining the survivor’s clothes - and affords the survivor necessary agency and control.
Certainly, nobody is arguing that asking about a survivor’s previous sexual encounters or clothing is unilaterally harmful or ill-intentioned. That said, considering the history of investigation officers, defence lawyers and even judges misusing this information to fault survivors for their own assaults, it’s understandable why both survivors and advocates would receive those questions with dismay. So even if there are a limited number of instances where these questions are useful for investigative purposes, we need to categorically reject them in all other instances.
Read the article: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/why-knowing-sexual-history-and-what-victim-wore-help-police-in-r**e
