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The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN, says that 7 out of every 1,000 rapes committed (0.7%) that are reported and end in a “felony conviction”. Why is this?

Rape cases are hard to prove when investigated because the police don’t really bother to collect enough evidence. An investigation found that 25 law enforcement agencies in 14 different states were destroying rape kits in cases “that could still be prosecuted.” They called it “a routine process” to “make space in evidence rooms”. If rape kits don't get tested, suspects aren’t found and interviewed, and investigators aren’t assigned. A Minneapolis Star Tribune-Review found that out of 1,000+ cases,

¼ of them was never assigned an investigator
⅓ of the assigned investigators never interviewed the victim
In about ½ the police didn’t interview potential witnesses
75% of them “were never forwarded to prosecutors for criminal charges”
Less than 1 in 10 produced a conviction
And judges were “twice as likely to reduce a sentence when the attacker knew the victim”

RAINN also found that:

993 out of every 1,000 rapes will go unpunished
⅓ (344) are reported to the police
63 of those lead to arrest
13 of those are “referred to prosecutors”,
7 of those lead to a felony conviction (six of those will be incarcerated)

Race also plays into this problem. Sexual assault was "more quickly believed and more severely punished" when black men were being "routinely accused" of raping white women. The crime usually isn't treated the same when white men are accused. The presumption of innocence lets certain kinds of men—white, cis, straight (whom society doesn’t think to be "inherently suspicious")—get spared for punishment. In a system that "otherwise tends to over punish", why are sexual assailants getting off the hook? The main reason is that people don’t think they actually happened. The effect of that is that we’re more likely to believe that women will make fake accusations than we are to believe that men really did it. We end up “protecting sexual predators in advance”. People tend to forget that sexual assault is the "infliction of humiliation and trauma and pain on another human being for pleasure" and that it is not affectionate or a human need.

It is torture.