"These assaults were not date rapes, they were not acquaintance rapes," Commander McEachern said.
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Advocates said it was time for prosecutors to take a different approach to victims of acquaintance rapes and sexual harassment.
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"This underscores the need to thoroughly investigate acquaintance rapes, because of the possibility those offenders have or will engage in assaults against strangers, too," the report states.
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In a series of mock jury trials in England in 2013, many jurors said that acquaintance rapes were "less clear cut" and "more difficult to prove" than rapes by strangers.
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The police said they plan to implement some of the report's recommendations, like ensuring that acquaintance rapes and domestic sexual assaults are investigated by adult sex crimes detectives, rather than at local precincts.
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"According to DNAinfo, in a community meeting days later Rose continued to imply that certain kinds of rape are more severe than others, saying acquaintance rapes are "not total-abomination rapes where strangers are being dragged off the streets.
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These stories arrive in the midst of a public reckoning with rape, and even as many of them retrace old, sensationalistic tales of violent retribution, they offer new insights into the dynamics of sexual violence — they take acquaintance rapes seriously, explore rape's psychological fallout, and raise questions about what exactly draws audiences to rape-revenge stories onscreen.
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In reports released in 2012 and 2016, researchers analyzing the data gathered from two of these cities, Los Angeles and Detroit respectively, came to divergent conclusions: the Detroit researchers recommended testing all kits in the backlog, while the Los Angeles researchers recommended only testing kits associated with a stranger assault (one in which the victim does not know the offender) and not testing kits from non-stranger assaults (also known as acquaintance rapes).
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In the news, powerful accounts from victims of the trauma of rape — from the woman whose courtroom statement against the Stanford student Brock Turner went viral last spring to those who took to social media to speak of their own experiences with sexual assault this fall — compete with dismissive statements from authority figures, like the judge who sentenced Mr. Turner to just six months in jail or the police captain who said recently that he's "not too worried" about a recent spate of acquaintance rapes in New York City.
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However, only 27% of American women whose sexual assault met the legal definition of rape think of themselves as rape victims, and only about 5% report their rape. One study of rape on American college campuses found that 13% of acquaintance rapes, and 35% of attempted acquaintance rapes, took place during a date, and another found that 22% of female rape victims had been raped by a current or former date, boyfriend or girlfriend, and another 20% by a spouse or former spouse. A 2007 American study found black non-Hispanic students were likeliest to be victims of dating violence, followed by Hispanic students and then white non-Hispanic students. Rates of date rape are relatively low in Europe compared with the United States.
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