After a three-month-long rape investigation in Buffalo, N.Y., revealed Thursday there was “a lack of credible evidence… against Chicago Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane and he would avoid criminal charges in the matter, a predictable and sad torrent of messages - almost, if not outright gleeful in tone – flooded social media. If you didn't know any better, you'd think someone had “won… and someone else had “lost….
“Golddigger culture and rape culture are the same thing…, said one alleged person. “I hate when girls lie about sexual assault like Patrick Kane’s accuser,… said another.
Let’s address these separate, baseless points. Firstly, arguing that gold-digger culture – where, bafflingly, women are accused of being willing to publicly degrade themselves and be subject to a gruelling judicial process in a calculated gamble to squeeze millions of dollars out of unwitting professional athletes – is “the same… as rape culture is like arguing residents of the United States’ Tornado Alley are as likely to be killed by avalanches as they are by vicious rotating air columns.
In reality, there is no comparing the two. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, there are nearly 300,000 sexual assaults every year in America. Nobody anywhere has proof there are 300,000 women willing to say falsely and under the threat of criminal prosecution they’ve been assaulted in the hope there’s a pot of gold at the end of the lie. Indeed, only 2-8% of rape allegations are made untruthfully. To believe gold-digger culture and rape culture are equally problematic is to gain full and permanent residency status in the Land of False Equivalence.
Secondly, remember that a lack of credible evidence in no way is proof that young woman in Buffalo lied. Indeed, the irony of the same people who had been screaming “innocent until proven guilty!… in regard to Kane turning around in the court of public opinion and convicting a young woman of criminal activity without any proof whatsoever is rich. If there is evidence Kane's accuser wasn't truthful, let her be charged. Otherwise, your decision to not afford her the same respect you did to Kane is an indictment of you, not her.
To be very clear, this is not to say Kane has committed a crime here and “gotten away… with anything. Just like the rest of us, he is entitled to the full protections and standards of the law. And now that the investigation into his actions led to the conclusion it did, we accept it and neither ostracize nor vilify him. (He still should’ve sat on the sidelines until the investigation was completed, but that’s another debate for another day.)
But ultimately, all this case has demonstrated is how murky and imperfect and difficult investigations of sexual assault can be. There are a myriad of forces at work – lawyers, employers, the public, law enforcement, and the individuals at the core of the allegations – and there rarely are easy answers and clear paths to justice and resolution. The whole process is an emotional quicksand from the get-go, and no reasonable person involved comes away with a sense of joy when it is over.
However, you cannot use the outcome of the Kane case to extrapolate that this somehow makes it harder to trust all women who come forward to accuse someone of harming them. The facts simply do not bear out that Olympic-caliber triple-jump in logic. Women do not lie about rape as often as men rape. It's insulting even to compare the two. You don’t get to be dismissive of that reality because you’re aching to believe one horrendous event takes place as often as another.
The small, silent crime is to let this case’s result allow the growth and prevalence of rape culture to recede into the back alleys of your mind, never to be considered again until the next public case forces you, A Clockwork Orange style, to look on it with fully-opened eyelids. What you ought to be doing is acknowledging the problem, listening to women – who, like it or not, are the only true authority on this issue – and attempting to be part of the solution.
Nobody won or lost a damn thing at that press conference in Western New York today. Rape culture is real and awful, and it is not going away simply because you choose to view it through bros-colored glasses.
Credible evidence of this societal monster is all around us, if only we are honest, mature and brave enough to see it and call it by its name.