There were two published articles back in February 2018 that claimed 35 states allowed their police officers to rape women who were in custody. This report incited fear to the public and people are now asking if it is true or just a hoax.
Where did the assumption come from?
The articles about the legality of rape in 35 states came from a case of a teenager in New York who accused two police officers of handcuffing her in a police van and taking turns in raping her.
While some people thought that the article stated that it is legal in 35 states for police officers to rape women who are detained, the article actually talked about how it is not illegal in 35 states for an off-duty police officer and a detainee to have consensual sex.
The statement about the legality of rape in the police force in 35 states all started with the poor reading comprehension of a story that was published by BuzzFeed News on February 7, 2018.
The report talked about the account of sexual assault of a teenager named Anna from Brooklyn, New York, and the article described the assault as a legal loophole.
Buzzfeed released an article on the case because the site wanted to report that there are no laws in 35 states in America that defines the sex between police officers and detainees as non-consensual, it showed that if the officer is off-duty, then the sex is consensual.
That means that a detainee might feel obligated to consent to sex just to avoid being detained or arrested, even if the charges are not true.
On February 10, 2018, an article from the site Feministing, explained the issue. It stated that a person in police custody can't give genuine consent because it is not free from coercion. Police officers have the power to arrest them, even on false charges, and that fear prevents them from saying no.
The article also explained that if you are in the back of a police van, you are at their mercy. The police should not exploit their power to force themselves on vulnerable women, yet some still do so and they do not face any legal consequences.
What is the truth?
The article that BuzzFeed published created confusion because of the wording, the reality is it is not legal in all 50 states for police officers to rape women in custody. According to BuzzFeed, the two police officers who attacked Anna have been arrested.
When Anna was detained, the cops made no arrest, issued no citation, and filed no paperwork. Hours after Anna's release, she and her mother went to the hospital where Anna told nurses that two detectives had sexually assaulted her.
The hospital records matched her claims and the semen collected from her rape kit matched the DNA of 37-year-old detective Eddie Martins and 33-year-old Richard Hall from the Brooklyn South narcotics unit. Both have been removed from the force and they have been charged with rape.
What is missing in BuzzFeed's article is that laws exist in 35 states that sex between a detainee and a police officer on-duty is non-consensual, the article pertained not to the laws "allowing" police officers to rape detainees but to the lack of laws in many states that defines sexual contact between an officer and a detainee as non-consensual.
