I Want To Press Charges...

[Healing Reins]

I think I'm ready to press charges against my rapist. But it's been a year, and there isn't any evidence. I mean there are pictures of my back that my youth group leader took, and she has a picture of my eye, and stomach because they were really badly bruised. but other than that there ins't any evidence.

only problem with pressing charges is, when it was reported I denied that anything happened because I was so afraid. How do I go about doing this. . .

I feel like the police won't believe me.

what is pressing charges like? When I talked to the police about an assault I was interviewed from 3 to 9 pm. Will it be that brutal again?

 

[Springer80]

I went through this process against my father. Ultimately all those worries you have, I had but the crux of it was that if I didn't try and pursue justice for myself, no one else was going to anything about him. I would have felt like I was allowing him to get away with it and more importantly, by implication I would be feel that I was saying to myself that I wasn't worth justice. The thought of not having tried would have haunted me.

However, it was not easy. I was trying to cover 6 1/2 years of abuse. I made the statement on my own, no professional support, no company. I struggled with chronology of events and dissociated etc.

The fact is the police may not believe you. But have a right to be respectfully questioned in the presence of legal or supportive counsel. Not bullied or interrogated. You are after all reporting a crime not a suspect. It may be of course that this person (do you know the guy who raped you?) has history for this kind of thing.

One of the things that I got some comfort from was that my Dad was picked up/taken from his house (hopefully people saw) and was taken into questioning on more than one occasion. He was arrested. I bet that shit him up because he had been getting away with this for a long time. It might have not made it to court but the Detective who questioned him said that she they had no doubt of his guilt.
I don't know if the fact he was questioned in relation to child rape and sex offence stays on file but that town is a small place. I hope he's paranoid as hell.

A thing you should consider that if you do this, it may help someone in the future if he does it again and sadly if he does and that woman comes forward her testimony may help yours. It's a screwed up, revolting state of affairs to consider but that's what society see to do for sex offenders.

You DO have pictures, you do have your youth group leader as a witness and support. The fact you denied anything happened because you were scared of it leading to having to face him or repercussions from him at the time, is something a trained sexual assault unit officer should understand. Your youth group leader should go with you.

Anyway, I would say don't think of the possible failure/s. Why is it that you need to do this? Are those reasons strong enough to drive you through anyway. If it is that fundamentally important to you you'll have to do it anyway, no matter the potential cost.

Good luck, your very brave to be considering this. Get support. You deserve justice and society needs to catch up on how this stuff is policed. The more people that can come forward the better.

 

[scout86]

I don't know if they will believe you or not. It seems quite likely that they will, because it's pretty common for people who have been raped to be reluctant to press charges.

There are a couple different levels to this "belief", though. They may well believe you, but pressing charges if there isn't enough proof might be something else. Just because you can't prove something doesn't mean it's not true, but it does mean you can't get a conviction in a court of law. Sounds like you have pretty definite proof of assault, with the pictures. I don't know what kind of proof it takes to win a conviction in court. You'll have to talk to the authorities about that and see what they say. I think the police probably tend to look at these situations from the standpoint of "Can we get a conviction with this?" where we all tend to look at it as "Do they think I'm making this up?" Even if there isn't enough evidence to prosecute him with your evidence, as @Springer80 pointed out, having a complaint on file against him is useful if someone else reports a similar offense.

 

[marylouise]

Do you have the resources (financial or personal) to find a good lawyer to talk to? Maybe you could start with talking to a lawyer rather than the police. The lawyer could give you a sense of what to expect. Like @Springer80 and @scout86 I think there is social value in pressing charges even if this doesn't lead to a conviction in a court of law, but you need to decide what you can handle and what would make it worthwhile for you personally.

 

[open eyes]

I think you should only go about pressing charges if you can emotionally handle the possibility that you could be accused of lying, or that there won't be enough evidence for the police to do anything about it.

 

[Justmehere]

Talking to the victim advocate with the local rape crisis center could really help as well.