A 'Good' Victim's Claim: The Impact of Degree of Intimacy on Non-Stranger Sexual Assault Prosecutions

The crime of sexual assault rarely involves a stranger attacking from the darkness, but rather an assailant who could be someone as intimately familiar with the victim as her husband, or as loosely acquainted as a student at the same school. The reality of the circumstances in which sexual assaults most often occur calls for the differentiation of the definitions for both the act of sexual assault and the nature of the victim-offender relationship prior to the attack. A sexual assault that involves an assailant barely known to the victim will be assessed differently from an assault involving a work colleague or family member. The settings and circumstances for both types of sexual assault will undoubtedly vary and will carry great weight in the prosecutor's disposition of the claim.;This study examines how degree of intimacy between victim and offender impacts non-stranger sexual assault prosecutions. An analysis of 361 alleged cases of adult sexual assault brought before a U.S. County Attorney's Office between 1994 and 2008, as well as interviews with parties involved in the legal system's response to sexual assault claims, helped to determine the impact of the victim-offender relationship on the prosecution of a crime whose definition is historically malleable and which is, in part, dependent on social stereotypes and commonly held notions of gender appropriate behavior.;Analysis revealed that 98% of the cases were of the non-stranger type. Of the 355 non-stanger cases, the prosecution accepted only 27%. A further break down of the nonstranger victim--offender relationship revealed that degree of intimacy mattered to case disposition, with acceptance occurring less frequently as the familiarity between the victim and offender prior to the assault increased. The exception to this pattern was found with non-stranger cases involving long-term, victim-offender relationships (i.e. live-in boyfriend, intra-familial). The prosecution accepted 50% of the cases involving intimate, long-term relationships and 41.2% of cases involving an intra-familial victim-offender relationship, as compared to 23.7% of all other non-stranger relationships combined.