Word: estrich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Susan Estrich, author of Real Rape, considers herself a lucky victim. This is not just because she survived an attack 17 years ago by a stranger with an ice pick, one day before her graduation from Wellesley. It's because police, and her friends, believed her. "The first thing the Boston police asked was whether it was a black guy," recalls Estrich, now a University of Southern California law professor. When she said yes and gave the details of the attack, their reaction was, "So, you were really raped." It was an instructive lesson, she says, in understanding how racism...
...crucial distinction between the two cases might be that the Central Park incident was a random, violent attack by strangers and the other could fall into the murkier category of date rape, in which the victim and her alleged assailant know each other. Susan Estrich, who teaches law at the University of Southern California, contends that reporting the name in the Palm Beach case and not in the Central Park jogger case proves "how much acquaintance rape is still not considered to be a real rape." Date-rape cases can be messy: Was it an unambivalent lack of consent...
Ultimately, naming victims may turn less on its legality than on whether secrecy is viewed as a misguided form of protection that perpetuates the victim's sense of shame. Estrich, who was raped in 1974, wrote a book about her ordeal in 1987 in the hope of persuading other victims to come forward. But like most feminists, she vehemently opposes the "outing" of rape victims without their consent. "It serves no purpose," she says. "Has the public gotten any more information it needed? The answer is no. Has a woman been branded and humiliated, her ability to go on with...
...Estrich's view is powerful because it recognizes an unpleasant reality: though the public's perceptions are rapidly changing, rape is still regarded as different from other crimes. The worst that is said about someone whose home is burglarized after the door was left unlocked is that the victim was careless. With rape the all-too-common impulse remains to impugn the victim's moral character. Courts have come to outlaw testimony about a rape victim's sexual history unless it can be shown that the evidence has a direct bearing on the assault in question, but there...
...Susan Estrich, professor of law at the University of Southern California, said involuntary disclosure would keep rape victims from coming forward. She was a rape victim and wrote about her experience in the book Real Rape...