While VAWA has not yet faced a full Senate vote, all Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted in February against reauthorization. Democrats are clearly trying to use this to capitalize on the recent interest in Republican misogyny, which, legislatively speaking, has become mainstreamed in the party. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asserted on the Senate floor last week that “This is one more step in the removal of rights for women.” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shot back Thursday, citing a Politico article to suggest Sen. Chuck Schumer “is sitting up at night trying to figure out a way to create an issue where there isn’t one … to help Democrats get reelected.”

The Democrats’ latest land mine, according to McConnell and his caucus, is to have quietly made VAWA a vehicle for radical causes. Sen. Jeff Sessions complained, “You think they might have put things in there we couldn’t support that maybe then they could accuse you of not being supportive of fighting violence against women?” Sen. Chuck Grassley has accused Democrats of adding specialized provisions about same-sex partner violence, immigration and Native American jurisdictional issues that are “not consensus items,” to make Republicans look pro-domestic violence.

See if you can make sense of the following Grassley condemnation: “The substitute creates so many new programs for underserved populations that it risks losing focus on helping victims, period … If every group is a priority, no group is a priority.” Apparently, victims can’t come from underserved populations – or be particularly vulnerable because of it.

Then there is the faction of the Republican base that has always opposed VAWA, well before the recent measures. It made its opinions known in a Feb. 2 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee signed by groups including the Family Research Council, claiming VAWA “destroys the family by obscuring real violence in order to promote the feminist agenda.” One of the signatories to the letter, Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, recently elaborated, saying VAWA “offers women both a ‘tactical advantage’ and a ‘powerful weapon’ when they want to ‘get back’ at a man, have regrets the next morning, or want out of a marriage for any reason at all.” (It’s not clear where any of these scare quotes come from.)

Notably, they didn’t mention the LGBT, immigration or Native American-specific provisions, though the letter did warn darkly that the reauthorization would “add expensive new programs, such as one that would serve to ‘re-educate’ school children into domestic violence ideology.”

It helps then, amid the uproar, to remember what it is, exactly, that VAWA does, and understand how its supporters have proposed to modify it. Before its passage in 1994, not all states had stalking laws, and many had weaker laws on sex crimes, both of which got an indirect push from the federal law. So did funding to help training and collaboration between law enforcement, shelters, and medical professionals. “Before, it felt like each person, each department was [dealing with victims] in a vacuum and not talking to one another,” says Sue Else, president of the U.S. National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Since its passage, the Network reports a 51 percent increase in reporting by women and 37 percent increase in reporting by men, who, despite the act’s title, are also covered under it. At the same time, the number of individuals killed by intimate partners has decreased, by 34 percent for women and by 57 percent for men. (The more dramatic figure for men may be due to a smaller overall figure being more sensitive to percentage shifts; Else also suggested in an interview that women now have more recourse before reaching a desperate situation.) An increase in protection orders, says Else, has lowered the number of instances of domestic violence, in the process reducing law enforcement and hospital costs.

The new VAWA is not as radically different from earlier versions as Republicans suggest. Longtime advocates of the law argue that the expansions for these groups are incremental. “It’s not so much novel as it is an evolution,” says Lisalyn R. Jacobs, the vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum, who has worked on VAWA since just after President Clinton signed it in 1994. “Over the course of 18 years, obviously we’ve learned a lot.” Previous versions of VAWA already included some separate provisions for Native women. Groups that work with LGBT populations already get VAWA funds in many cases. And the U.S. already issues 10,000 U visas annually for the abused immigrant spouses of citizens. The new version of VAWA would add 5,000 visas a year, “a smaller increase than has been requested by the Secretary of Homeland Security,” according to a memo from sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy’s office.

Advocates sound exasperated that their years of effort have been ensnared in political maneuvering. Take the provisions about Native American women, who suffer domestic violence at a far higher rate than the general population, and who have been separately addressed in VAWA since its first version. “[Republicans] would leave you with the impression that this VAWA is unique in its focus on the particular needs of Native women,” says Jacobs. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” The new bill simply eliminates the hurdle for Native women married to non-Native men, as 51 percent of Native women are, and living on reservations that requires them to report abuse to non-Native law enforcement. Instead, it gives some authority to tribal authorities in responding to a domestic violence report.

“With particular respect to the Native issues,” says Jacobs, “we did not have a clue that [Grassley] had any issue about that until we got to the markup last month. Any number of people had met with his staff on numerous occasions” without hearing about any objections.

As for the immigration issue, Grassley said recently that “the questions had to do with the additions that have been made to this bill related to illegal immigrant visas.” Under the assumption that women pretend to be abused rather than be deported, Grassley tried unsuccessfully to force an amendment that would have required that the crime be reported within 60 days and that it be under active investigation, making it significantly more difficult to qualify.

But the visas already long made possible by VAWA are fairly narrow in scope: The abused immigrant spouse, child or parent has to have lost status due to domestic violence in a marriage to a U.S. citizen, and therefore be eligible to petition directly to the Department of Homeland Security to qualify for a new visa. The additional 5,000 visas will help clear the backlog that has built up due to bureaucratic red tape.

These U visas, initially created by the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, also aid in law enforcement purposes. As Jacobs puts it, “The green card can become a weapon of abuse; for example, ‘Go sell drugs for me or I’ll withdraw your petition.’”

Finally, there’s the assumption that there is some sort of vast expansion of resources or recognition to LGBT communities. In fact, VAWA grants administered by the states have gone to groups that have served LGBT communities for years; separately, in 2010, the Justice Department issued a memo clarifying that criminal provisions in VAWA apply regardless of gender or sexuality. What’s new in the most recent VAWA is the anti-discrimination language, saying that grantees can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Like the new measures for immigrant and Native American women, the new language doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Says Jacobs, “While we knew that same-sex relationships were not the favorite things of lots of people on Capitol Hill, we didn’t think we were breaking a lot of new ground.”

While Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were recalcitrant, the current bill still has Republican co-sponsors and supporters, including Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who publicly recanted her party-line vote on contraception and who joined the Senate women on the floor in support of VAWA. According to the New York Times, she warned her party in a closed-door meeting that if it picked this battle, it would cede the Democrats’ war on women line. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee seems to hope it can pull an “I know you are but what am I” on the Democrats with women. It recently released a video claiming it was Obama who was attacking women, mostly because he took money from Bill Maher. Best of luck with that one.

A friend who was violently mugged blocks from where the alleged rapes took place responded to my Facebook post: “Like I always say, don’t walk alone at night! Cabs are your friend!!!” Later that night, talking about the attacks, my roommate said, “It’s crazy, she was on her way to work — it’s not like she was walking down the street at night in a skirt.” In our fear, out of an emotional grasp for control, were we falling back on the stalest of sexual assault myths — indirectly blaming the victim?

The notion that the way you dress influences your chance of being raped is just one of the ways that we delude ourselves into believing that rape happens to other women – women who aren’t as smart or cautious. According to the “just-world hypothesis,” we search for mistakes that the victim made so that we can maintain our belief that there is order and predictability in our universe. I’ve spent enough time in the feminist blogosphere to know that it isn’t just the big, bad patriarchy that sustains victim blaming — it’s terrified women, too. This brings up a question that I’ve long struggled with when reading feminist theory on the subject: How can we dispense useful advice in a way that doesn’t blame the victim?

There are plenty of egregious examples of how not to do it: Most recently, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board launched an ad campaign against excessive drinking. One of the print ads featured an image of a woman lying on a bathroom floor with her underwear around her ankles. It warned: “When your friends drink, they can end up making bad decisions, like going home with someone they don’t know very well. Decisions like that leave them vulnerable to dangers like date rape.” On the one hand, it’s a great idea to keep an eye on friends who are so drunk that they’re more vulnerable to crime. On the other hand, as Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan wrote of the ad, “Rape is not just a bad thing that happens to someone after drinking too much. It’s a deliberate act on the part of the rapist, a violation of another person committed solely because the rapist wanted to rape. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we’ll be rid of stupid, finger wagging ads like these.”

Amanda Marcotte of the lefty-feminist blog Pandagon argues that the “proliferation of ‘tips’ on staying safe actually have the opposite affect in a pragmatic way.” That’s because these tips transform “in the police station and courtroom into a list of reasons to let the rapist off the hook,” she says. “I can’t really think of a tip that hasn’t been wielded by a defense attorney at some point in time to insinuate consent on the part of the victim, which inclines me to just oppose the whole art of scolding potential victims about their responsibility to prevent rape.” She also points out that “rapists live in the same culture as everyone else, and so they know all the ‘tips’ to avoid rape, and so they specifically set out to attack women who are in violation of one of these rules.”

In an email to Marcotte, I detailed my conflicted feelings:

Everyone’s forwarding it around with tips to stay safe and my immediate inclination is of course to do the same, but then I wonder what the point is, really — to make sure my friends are actively scared of being raped by a stranger on the street? What good does that do? And isn’t it misleading, doesn’t it create the false sense of security that they won’t be attacked if they avoid doing what this latest victim did (walk to work at 6:30 in the morning)? At the same time, you don’t want to throw your hands up and just say: Screw it, there’s nothing we can do to prevent this happening to us.

Marcotte says she understands “wanting to assert control, but I also think most women already live in a constant state of low-grade fear. Were women not already doing their best?” Indeed.

Melissa McEwan, who runs the feminist blog Shakesville, writes in an email, “It’s my experience that there’s really no way to pass on prevention tips aimed at potential victims that isn’t problematic, because prevention tips aimed at potential victims necessarily carry the implicit (if unintended) message that ‘if you don’t do these things, you might get raped (and it will be your fault for not doing these things),’” she says. “And, frequently, there are additional layers of ick, like the recommendation to always take a cab to one’s door — which assumes everyone has the financial ability to take cabs everywhere” and that “cabbies don’t sometimes rape people, too.” She asks, “Is it actually meaningful advice to warn women against walking home alone, or is it just advice that sounds useful in the void of meaningful rape prevention?” – in other words, prevention that instead targets potential rapists.

“The truth is, there’s no such thing as a ‘rape prevention tip’ for potential victims, because the only way to prevent being raped is to never be in the same space as a determined rapist, over which we often have no control, which is why most survivors have been raped in a familiar place by a person known to them,” she says. McEwan has written numerous times on her blog about being assaulted herself:

I was sober; hardly scantily clad … I was wearing sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt; I was at home; my sexual history was, literally, nonexistent — I was a virgin; I struggled; I said no. There have been times since when I have been walking home, alone, after a few drinks, wearing something that might have shown a bit of leg or cleavage, and I wasn’t raped. The difference was not in what I was doing. The difference was the presence of a rapist.

Jaclyn Friedman, author of “What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety” and “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape,” echoes that point: “Even with a serial rapist on the loose, women in your ‘hood are still much, much more likely to be raped by someone they know,” she says. “Focusing so hard on stranger danger means we pay less attention to warning signs from people we’re acquainted with, and it also contributes to our cultural unwillingness to believe victims when they’re attacked by someone they know.”

That said, she’s “all for practical strategies to keep women safe” — that’s why she taught self-defense for years. The problem is that “most ‘safety tips’ are beyond unhelpful — they’re dangerous.” That’s because they often aren’t based in fact but rather legend. “The reality is, there’s zero evidence linking how ‘sexy’ a woman is dressed with her likelihood of being raped,” she says. “None.” Friedman would know: She’s been a major proponent of the Slut Walk movement, which was sparked in response to the rape-prevention advice given by a Toronto police officer: “Women should avoid dressing like sluts.”

It’s also the case that most of us have already deeply internalized basic prevention tips, so you have to wonder about prevention campaigns like the one out of Pennsylvania, which was recently canceled in response to protest. “Are there any women in the U.S. who don’t know that drinking makes you more vulnerable to sexual predators? I’m willing to believe that number approaches zero,” she says. “Repeating that advice isn’t helpful, it’s just shaming all of us for not being perfect at following those impossible rules.” Friedman suggests an important question in evaluating rape-prevention advice: “Does this advice create more fear, or more power?” This is important because “rapists look for victims who seem vulnerable.” She continues: “You know what makes us seem vulnerable? Absorbing so many ‘safety tips’ that we’re afraid for our safety all the time.”

After broadcasting the local rape case on Facebook, I logged onto the online sex offender registry — which I have previously criticized for hindering rehabilitation and reintegration — and mapped the oogie-boogies in my neighborhood. My boyfriend and I started playing a ghoulish game: We would click on a dot on the map, bringing up a photo of the perp and then guess his crime, “Child abuser, rapist or flasher?” (What can I say, I’m a great date.) In truth, this exercise was meaningless, thanks to its absurd selection bias: They’re all sex offenders, so it inherently validates one’s ability to spot “bad guys.” But the fantasy of total mastery and control is preferable to the reality that sometimes bad things happen to good — not to mention smart and cautious — people.

Jill Filipovic, a lawyer and blogger at Feministe, puts it simply: “Human beings always balance risk with reward — and the truth is, there are lots of reasons to go out with your friends, or take the subway instead of a cab, or go into a bedroom with someone you know,” she says. “We assess risk all the time, and women should be given the tools to do that accurately.”

A few things happened around the time I decided to leave. First, I lost a lot of weight. Then I bought new clothes, clothes that were a far cry from the jeans-and-hoodies gear I’d adopted to avoid attracting attention. I started wearing skirts and cute little dresses with cute little heels. I got a shorter, more daring haircut; with my diminished size I began to look nearly gamine. Exercising made my skin glow. I discovered liquid eyeliner. “When did you become such a babe?” a co-worker asked. “You’ve been an undercover hottie all this time,” said another. I would remember this as I’d go to the gym or plop down sums of money on the sorts of clothes that had been unimaginable only months before.

You might think, as I did at the time, that my self-guided makeover was about rediscovering my self-worth. It was partly that, yes: When your “emergency contact” is the same person at whose hands you have suffered an emergency, your sense of self-worth isn’t exactly at its healthiest. But this physical transformation wasn’t just about restoring my self-esteem.

When you’re in an abusive relationship, or at least when you are me in an abusive relationship, you don’t recognize how standard your story is. You think that you’re special. That he’s special, that he needs your help and that’s why you can’t leave; that you’re special for recognizing what a great gift you’ve been given, despite its dubious disguise. I never bought into the “he hits me because he loves me” cliche, but I came close: I stayed because I truly believed I alone was special enough to see through the abuse to see him, and us, for what was really there. It was an isolating belief — another characteristic of abuse, one I didn’t recognize at the time — but moreover, it was a combustible mixture of arrogance and piss-poor self-esteem, and one that made me feel unqualified to ever play the role of Just Another Person.

After I left the relationship I’d finally recognized as anything but special, I wanted nothing more than to be unremarkable. Striving to be conventionally pretty was my way of reentering the world of, well, convention. It was no accident that the first post-breakup date I accepted was with the most conventional man I’ve ever gone out with: a hockey-loving lawyer with a tribal armband tattoo who used the term “bro” without irony. I needed to prove that the “special” men weren’t the only ones who would see me and want to see more. So I put on a pretty little dress with pretty little lingerie underneath, and I let him buy me dinner. I showed little of my inner self to him — I wasn’t ready for that, and I knew he wasn’t the one to show myself to anyway. But eagerly, and with every convention a pretty girl might use on a good-looking bro, I showed him the rest.

Beauty became a tool that allowed me to begin to believe that I was worth being seen. After years of longing for even a single day when the first thought that entered my mind in the morning would have nothing to do with him, after years of exhausting my every resource to try to convince my family and friends and boss and above all myself that I could handle it, the stream of assurance I got from looking pretty in an everyday, pedestrian, stock-photo, conventional sort of way was a lifeline. I let the slow drip of looking unremarkably pretty sustain me while I began the real work of rebuilding. Beauty — or rather, giving myself the tools of banal, run-of-the-mill, utterly ordinary prettiness — allowed me to reconstruct a part of myself that had gone mute for years. And then I constructed another, and another, and another.

Eventually, I abandoned my strict adherence to this new style. The cute little dresses, the high heels, the smart haircut: In embracing that part of myself to the exclusion of all others, I was still reacting to a desperately unhappy time of my life. I wore red nail polish because my ex hated it; I wore heels because he liked me so much in sneakers. I wore dresses because, for the first time in years, I truly wanted to be seen. I embraced a conventionally feminine look for a time because I needed to radically alter how I presented myself to the world.

People who are recovering from difficult situations are often told to draw from their “inner strength” — good advice that forgets that sometimes, every gram of inner strength is going toward just holding yourself together. And with abuse, which is known for its power to erase the victim’s identity, the concept of “inner strength” is particularly questionable: You can’t draw from inner strength when you feel like nothing is there. I needed to draw from outer strength; I needed a routine that would help me reconstruct. I eventually got to reconstructing the inside. But I needed the framework first.

Attention to one’s appearance cannot be the end point of becoming our richest selves. But for some — for me — it can be a beginning.

When the police returned, Ray said he had a video that captured part of the attack.

“They said they didn’t want to see it because they didn’t have a complaining witness,” Ray, who did not want to give a last name, told the Crime Report. “Then they drove off.”

The incident shook the residents of the block in Park Slope, a brownstone-lined area in south Brooklyn. A month after the screams, they had heard nothing from the police. The neighbors did the only thing they could think to. They called the New York Daily News.

The video of that attack, captured by a camera outside of one neighbor’s house, went viral. It became one of what police came to call a “geographical pattern” of assaults in south Brooklyn.

By mid-October, the number had reached 20. One was a rape. Others were filed as attempted rapes, sexual assaults and gropings.

For weeks, residents, police and the press believed one of New York City’s most coveted neighborhoods had a serial rapist on the loose. The unraveling of that narrative illustrates our persistent misunderstandings about the nature, and prevalence, of sexual assault.

Truth In Numbers

The National Crime Victimization Survey estimates 188,400 people were raped or sexually assaulted in 2010. Yet thousands of these crimes go unreported to police. The survey shows only half of rapes and sexual assaults were reported to police. Even fewer made the news.

The stories that do appear in the press shape our understanding of sex crimes. At best, they empower victims to report, and the public to hold law enforcement to account. At worst, they serve to monger fear and convict the innocent.

The most salient example of the latter may be the 1989 rape of the Central Park Jogger, recently revisited by the Crime Report. Calls by the press and public to hang the “wolf pack” that allegedly raped the attractive 28-year-old investment banker encouraged the false conviction of five young men of color.

In 2002, a man serving a life sentence confessed to the crime. DNA evidence confirmed his guilt.

The case spoke to the public anxiety about the crime that plagued the city. Then the New York “Miracle” brought a precipitous drop in crime that outstripped even the steep fall seen around the country. Murder in New York has fallen nearly 75 percent since 1993, according to the NYPD’s CompStat data. Rapes have dropped by half.

Numbers, however, can lie.

Investigations by newspapers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and elsewhere have revealed elaborate schemes by police to make rape and sexual assault disappear. Some departments “downgraded” reported felonies to misdemeanors or non-criminal complaints. Others questioned the account of the victim or lost files in bureaucratic limbo.

A year after the Baltimore Sun revealed that police had deemed hundreds of potentially legitimate sexual assaults “unfounded” to keep numbers down, reported rapes have risen by 50 percent.

“More people are coming forward and reporting,” Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Baltimore Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, told the told the Sun in July, “and those reports are being taken and handled appropriately.”

David R. Thomas, a law enforcement instructor at Johns Hopkins University’s Public Safety Executive Leadership Program, is a part of an effort to change the culture of policing around sex crimes.

“When we’re talking about sexual assault, when we’re talking about rape, the only other worse crime is murder,” Thomas said. “Look at the way we investigate this crime — it’s just appalling.”

His training deals with all facets of the investigation, and focuses in particular on teaching law enforcement to treat people who report assault as victims rather than suspects.

“Training has to address the attitude that we walk in there with, because it totally impacts not only the victim sitting there before us, but other individuals that may be victimized in the future,” Thomas said.

Neighbors React

 The officers’ attitudes after the March attack never sat well with neighbors in Park Slope.

Though clearly an assault, “they tried to say it was a girlfriend and boyfriend fighting,” neighbor Joe Barton told the Crime Report in June.

His wife, Gretchen, who had phoned 911, said the police “weren’t interested; not at all.”

“They just drove off without looking at the tape,” she added.

Law enforcement sources told the New York Post that the responding officers later told a 911 dispatcher that the complaint had been “unfounded.”

A few hours later, the victim phoned police. The report on her assault notes the existence of a surveillance video, sources said, but the police who interviewed her never went looking for it. Instead, her case was closed.

When the woman called back 10 days later to ask about the investigation, police apparently realized they had improperly closed the case. But Ray said that only after the video ran in the Daily News several weeks later did the Special Victims Unit ask to see the footage from his camera.

Gretchen Barton said investigators from the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau told her in May they were looking into the case. “Something’s clearly not right,” she said.

As news of the attacks mounted, the wider community felt the same.

For weeks, news outlets and blogs reported on the Rapist, the Groper, the Monster, the Perv terrorizing the women of south Brooklyn. Police sketches posted throughout the neighborhood showed an array of generically Hispanic men in their 20s and 30s, described as short and wearing dark clothing.

Cyclists and walkers offered to escort women home from the subway. Locals organized a march to “take back our streets.” Feeling the pressure, police stepped up their presence. In the most affluent areas, they stood on every other corner.

Then on the evening of Oct. 11, the 72nd Precinct, where the majority of the incidents had taken place, held its monthly meeting. Cameras zoomed in on Precinct Commander Jesus Raul Pintos. In the last month, he said, four more women had been attacked. But the NYPD’s theory had changed.

“We’re not talking about a serial groper,” Pintos said. “It’s not some organized thing where there’s one guy.” How many “guys” might be going around, Pintos could not say.

A Hidden “Epidemic”

Even after the NYPD had given up the idea of a single attacker, the press and residents still talked about “catching the perp.” There was comfort there. To think of this as one man, or even a few, who terrorize the neighborhood made the threat tangible, but it also made it finite.

The truth about the Brooklyn attacks seemed more complicated. Asked if the spate of attacks could be gang-related, or the work of copycats, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, “There may be some copycats. There also may be increased awareness of this and perhaps better reporting.”

Experts agreed.

“The problem of sexual harassment and groping in public spaces is epidemic,” said Suzanne Goldberg, director of Columbia University’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. “I think most women do not report women being groped on the street or in public transportation.”

“A value of increased media coverage is to empower women to report these incidents,” Goldberg explained. “The more reporting, the more chance that perpetrators will be caught, and that law enforcement will take more action.” Even so, she said, “It is very difficult for police to find the perpetrator and prosecute.”

By national standards, New York investigators appear to be doing better than most.

Experts believe about 400,000 rape kits sit untested nationwide, with dire consequences, as the Crime Report has explored. New York City, however, has tested every one since 2003. Officials believe this has led to an arrest rate of more than 70 percent.

Yet taking cases to court poses challenges. Research from the National Institute of Justice has shown that prosecutors can shy away from cases in which the victim has a previous sexual relationship with the perpetrator, cases that lack physical evidence, or instances in which the victim has been drinking.

Two of New York’s biggest news stories of the summer showed how bumpy the process can be.

In May, two police officers charged with raping a young, drunk woman in her home were acquitted of those charges. After the trial, Juror No. 8 published a 60-page account explaining how the 12 arrived at the verdict, which shocked much of the city. “We all felt they were guilty, but couldn’t prove it,” Patrick Kirkland, the juror, told CBS News.

The second is the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund. In May, a hotel maid accused him of forcing her to perform oral sex in his suite at the Sofitel Hotel.

The case began to unravel after prosecutors said the maid, for whom the traditional anonymity given to rape victims soon vanished, had lied throughout her accounts. The Manhattan district attorney decided the story told by Nafissatou Diallo, a 32-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was too tenuous for trial. In August, a judge dismissed the case.

Dismissals in assault cases are commonplace. In New York City, 2,629 felony and misdemeanor sexual assault cases went through the courts in 2010, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. Less than 56 percent resulted in a conviction. More than 40 percent of cases were dismissed or not pursued by prosecutors.

The “Perp” Walks

 In Brooklyn, police have struggled to build a strong case in the string of assaults. Three men have been arrested in connection with the 20 attacks. Charges were dismissed against the first man after police decided they had collared the wrong guy. A second walked free after a victim, who had originally picked him out of a lineup, recanted her identification. She said she just could not be sure.

If national statistics hold, thousands of assaults remain unreported in New York.

“The public just doesn’t have an accurate assessment of the prevalence of crime in their communities,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Woman’s Law Project, who has been working to get widespread changes in the classification and investigation of sex crimes.

The narrative of the Brooklyn Groper has opened Brooklyn’s eyes to the prevalence of sex crimes.

But a yawning gap persists between the way we talk about sexual assault, and how it plays out in our communities.

As the tally of gropings climbed, certain numbers did not appear in the press. As of Oct. 16, 174 rapes were reported in Brooklyn South, the patrol borough made up of 13 precincts in the area. That number is up more than 58 percent since 2009. NYPD did not respond to requests to specify how many reported rapes were committed by strangers, or how it was addressing the increase.

The 72nd Precinct, where much of this story takes place, has 19 rapes on the books for 2011 — a 90 percent increase over two years ago. To date, only one of those rapes has been tied to the assaults that have held the borough, and the press, in thrall.

Currently, the only sexual assault the UCR collects data on is “forcible rape,” which it defines as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.”  Because “carnal knowledge” is defined as penetration of the penis into the vagina, the definition excludes oral and anal rape, as well as assaults with foreign objects. It also excludes male rape.

When Tracy spoke with The Crime Report last summer about the difficulties involved in prosecuting sex crimes, she was frustrated and disheartened at the lack of progress on changing the 80-year-old definition.

In the wake of bombshell reports about thousands of unexamined rape kits languishing in police storage and several recent investigative series, including ones by the Baltimore Sun and the New Orleans Times-Picayune that indicated police often downgrade reports of sexual assault, Tracy said she believed that part of the reason departments weren’t taking these crimes seriously was because national bodies like PERF and the FBI were not showing proper leadership on the subject.

“I actually think we’re losing ground,” she said.

But the future now looks a little brighter.

“There was a clear consensus at the meeting that the UCR definition had to change,” says Tracy, who attended the closed meeting at the invitation of PERF.

Though the proposed change must still go through a working group in October and an advisory group in December, Tracy is hopeful that the momentum is finally on her side.

Scott Berkowitz, the president and founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, agrees:  ”I feel pretty good that it’s actually going to get changed this time.”

Changing Police Paradigms

According to Gregory Scarbro, unit chief of the FBI UCR program, the impetus to reexamine the rape definition came in early 2010 when the agency received a letter from Tracy requesting they look at the issue.

Since then, Scarbro says his office has been discussing the “antiquated” definition with the Department of Justice, the Office on Violence Against Women, and the Office of the Vice President, and working on ways to change local reporting systems to collect the data differently.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” Scarbro told The Crime Report. “We’ll need new forms, people will need to be trained, and there’s no money for it. We know we need to do it — it’s just about getting everything in place to get it done right.”

Scarbro says he hopes to walk out of next month’s working group meeting with a new mechanism that will allow the agency to collect a wider range of data on sexual assault.

Part of the reason this can happen is that police agencies, who the FBI relies on to report to the UCR, are coming aboard. A recent PERF survey found that 80 percent of the more than 300 responding police agencies did not believe the FBI definition of rape was adequate.

According to PERF’s director of communications, Craig Fischer, the push within PERF to change the definition was spearheaded by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who testified with Tracy in September 2010 before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs about underreporting of rape.

Ramsey was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Statistics on the crime of “forcible rape” collected by the UCR have historically been significantly lower than other counts, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey. For example, in 2009 the UCR reported just over 88,000 rapes, while the NCVS counted more than 200,000 sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults.

Part of the reason for the disparate numbers is that UCR records only crimes reported to police (and most experts believe fewer than 50 percent of sexual assaults are actually reported) and voluntarily reported to the FBI. The NCVS, on the other hand, collects data on victimization, regardless of whether the crime was reported.

But the difference also lies in the theory and attitude behind the NCVS survey, which collects data on several kinds of sexual assault, including attempted rape (of a man or woman) and unwanted sexual contact that may nor may not include force.

“We look at the broader scope of victimization,” explains Jennifer Truman, a statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

And this, says Carol Tracy, is exactly the point.

Police, she believes, should be investigating more seriously all sexual assaults, including those involving intoxicated victims and victims who work as prostitutes, because “there are serial offenders out there” and information gleaned from these crimes that police “don’t always take seriously” can help get these people off the streets. Tracy points to a case in Cleveland where police failed to properly test a rape kit that could have led them to Anthony Sowell — who was recently convicted of killing 11 women and burying them around his home.

This police attitude toward certain kinds of sexual assaults may contribute to low reporting rates. Although the reasons for not reporting an assault or attempted assault are manifold — from shame, to fear, to trauma-induced memory loss — many believe that part of the problem is law enforcement’s focus on investigating the victim’s behavior prior to and during the assault — instead of the perpetrator’s.

Some departments have even been found to routinely downgrade and re-classify rapes as non-crimes. This attitude can scare off already traumatized victims who know that they will have to endure an invasive rape kit as well as questions about their sexual past as part of an investigation.

All these issues, says Tracy, were discussed last Friday. And although the process is far from over, she believes a shift in police paradigm is on the horizon.

“I really feel like police are getting it,” she says. “We may have been preaching to the choir [at the Friday meeting] because everyone there chose to come to a meeting on this subject — but there were a lot of them.”