March 13, 2017
Professor Publishes Article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
Professor Erin Sheley has had an article accepted into the Journal entitled, "A Broken Windows Theory of Sexual Assault Enforcement" that will be published in a forthcoming edition. The article is available online, and the abstract is as follows:
The law of sexual assault is in an expressive crisis. Jurisdictions struggle with the conceptual shift from thinking of rape as forcible sex to a broader understanding that turns on the meaning of consent. Due to resource, evidentiary, and reporting problems there is a mis-match between the new substantive understanding of sexual assault and its actual enforcement. This has led to something of a cultural war by survivors and many women generally against the idea of 鈥渞ape culture,鈥 which runs the risk of categorizing all sexualized or gendered speech and much of male behavior as implicitly rape-supportive. This article proposes that lessons from broken windows policing can assist prosecutors in addressing the expressive gap between the law鈥檚 definition of sexual assault and the current realities of under-enforcement and victim disempowerment. I suggest that enforcement of existing laws against the lower level street harassment of women, on the occasions it already meets the elements of assault or sexual assault, will likely have two positive effects. First, while the efficacy of broken windows theory is hotly debated, to the extent that aggressive enforcement of lower level crimes of disorder does translate into a reduction in more serious offenses, more convictions for street harassment may result in a longer-term reduction in more serious sexual assaults that are much harder to detect and prove. Second, and perhaps more importantly, aggressive prosecution of even 鈥渉armless鈥 non-consensual street harassment would help to resolve the expressive problems surrounding the law鈥檚 definition of non-consensual sex more broadly. This would combat鈥攎ore concretely and less divisively鈥攖he norm of default access to female bodies than the amorphous, extra-legal critique of 鈥渞ape culture鈥 has thus far.