In this episode of The Idealists. (formerly Grit & Grace), host and entrepreneur Melissa Kiguwa interviews the second man on the show, John E.B. Myers, an authority on child abuse and domestic violence. He has written fifteen books and more than 100 articles and chapters on child maltreatment, domestic violence, evidence, criminal law, and family law. Professor Myers’ writing has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court, the California Supreme Court, and nearly 200 other courts. He has given more than 400 presentations on maltreatment across America and abroad.
In this episode, John breaks down the history of the United States court system's skepticism of women in regards to rape and sexual assault allegations and the ways in which the legacy continues.
“I think there is a long tradition in Western culture generally, and in the legal system which is simply part of that culture, of skepticism of women who allege rape or sexual assault... Indeed women were at an earlier time often put in the same category as children and idiots, and I don’t mean any disrespect when I use the term idiot. It is an actual legal term from the Middle Ages in England. The term idiot was a term that was used to describe someone with what we would today call a developmental disability. Women were loaded into the same group with idiots, lunatics, and children as not being particularly believable… so we have a long tradition of not believing women and that was particularly the case when it came to allegations of rape and sexual assault.”
episode highlights.
John begins the show by describing what legal literature from 1880 to 1975 says about rape of adult women. He breaks down the four themes the court believed as to why women were not credible victims.
These themes were: the fear of fabricated allegations, the fear of crazy women, a preoccupation with consent where no really means yes, and that if a woman testifies in court about being sexually assaulted she should not be believed without corroborating evidence because a woman's testimony by itself is unreliable.
He then describes how the theories of female instability by prominent psychologists influenced legal practitioners even if later these theories were debunked.
He then shares how at one point Sigmund Freud believed the mental illness he saw in his female patients could be explained through their experience of sexual assault and rape, especially by fathers. John then explains how Freud controversially abandoned this theory and replaced it with the Oedipus complex.
John ends the episode explaining where he thinks the court system still needs to expunge these archaic ideas about women and rape.