What are some of the circumstances that led states and the federal government to pass rape shield laws?
Rape law has been a site for the moral condemnation of women who have not led sexually chaste lives. Historically, the law insisted that the sexual history of a woman who alleged that she was raped was relevant to the truth of her allegation. [ A chaste woman was considered more likely to have resisted the defendant’s sexual advances and to have lodged a legitimate claim of rape. An unchaste woman was considered more likely to have consented to the defendant’s advances and to have lied about it later. Embedded within rape law, therefore, was an informal, though powerful, normative command
that women maintain an ideal of sexual abstinence in order to obtain legal protection.
Beginning in 1974, rape shield laws began to emerge on the legal landscape, circumscribing defendants’ abilities to cross-examine rape complainants about their sexual histories. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, almost all jurisdictions in the United States adopted some form of rape shield statute. Legislators concluded that it was illogical to assume that the complainant consented to sexual intercourse with the defendant, or was more likely to lie under oath, simply because she had previously consented to sexual intercourse with someone else.
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Asked 9/23/2011 10:08:06 PM
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