The Sisyphean Challenges of Skepticism or, Start By Disbelieving

BY CAROL TAVRIS

I RECENTLY RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM a colleague asking me to sign a petition at change.org, protesting a grant of $400,000 awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice to the “Start by Believing” campaign. I hadn’t known about the grant, or for that matter about the campaign Start by Believing, which was launched by a group called “End Violence Against Women International” as a “global campaign transforming the way we respond to sexual assault.” And how should we respond to sexual assault? We must “Start By Believing” the victims—who, right off the bat, are to be called “victims” and not “complainants” or “accusers.”

In America, the End Violence Against Women campaign is part of an effort, on colleges and in courtrooms, to promote “victim-centered investigations.”

The guidelines admonish investigators, among other things, to begin with an “initial presumption” of the accused’s guilt, to seek any information that will “corroborate the victim’s account,” and to make sure that the victim’s story does “not look like a consensual sexual experience.” 1 Last year, a group of dozens of eminent law professors, including many who have been involved in Innocence Project exonerations, wrote an Open Letter protesting the dangerous bias introduced by the very idea of investigations that start out manipulating evidence to support the accuser.2 This may seem the best way to counteract the long legacy of investigations that have started out with a bias supporting prosecutors—especially in cases involving black men and women who have been raped—but it is doomed to backfire because it creates its own forms of injustice. The Open Letter cited District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor, who wrote that we cannot automatically assume that someone is a “victim” in a legal matter because “[w]hether someone is a ‘victim’ is a conclusion to be reached at the end of a fair process, not an assumption to be made at the beginning.”