In proposing prohibitions against even asking alleged victims of alleged sex crimes to submit to a polygraph test, Governor Kaine, marching in lockstep with the federal Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA), says we need to turn our attention to how we treat victims of sexual assault. Both he and the VAWA are making one very big assumption; that just because someone has claimed to be the victim of a crime, that they in fact actually are one.

It can usually be safely assumed that stabbing and shooting victims didn’t consent to being stabbed or shot. Although they may be lying about the circumstances of their injuries, the fact that they are the victims of some crime is evidenced by the seriousness of their injuries. With sex crimes, police cannot make the same assumptions. People do, everyday, engage in risky and casual, but entirely consensual sex with people they have just met, only to regret it afterwards for any multitude of reasons.

Whereas the stab wound or the bullet hole are almost always evidence of a non-consensual crime of violence, bodily fluids, and stray hairs, by themselves, are evidence only that sex took place. The circumstances of that sex often depend solely on the testimony of the alleged victim, frequently amounting to little more than, “He said. She said.”

If the Duke Lacrosse case, and the Jennifer Wilbanks, Audrey Seiler, & Karyn McConnell-Hancock abduction hoaxes, just to name a few, teach us anything, it should be that just because someone says they are the victim of a crime, it isn’t necessarily true. If it were, we could dispense with trials, and convict people on accusation alone.

Tamara Ann Moonier plead guilty to falsely accusing six men of gang rape after video of the incident showed her actually directing the action, even complaining about one of her “rapist’s” inability to perform sexually. Unfortunately, police rarely have videos and must rely on the good character of the accuser; which is unfortunately, not a given.

Gary Dotson spent 8 years in prison, and a quarter century under a cloud of suspicion, before finally being pardoned by the governor of Illinois after DNA tests cleared him of the rape for which he had been convicted. Those tests confirmed that the incriminating biological evidence found on his alleged victim belonged to her boyfriend at the time, corroborating her recantation that she falsely cried rape because she was afraid the reckless but consensual teenage sexual encounter may have resulted in a pregnancy.

An article published in the Virginian-Pilot on March 12, 2005, chronicled the tragic story of Michael Williams, convicted of rape and subsequently exonerated with DNA evidence after languishing in a Louisiana prison for 24 years. The article read in part, “Williams was convicted in a case with no physical evidence and one eyewitness — the 22-year-old victim, who had tutored him on his schoolwork.”

Many deceptive accusers claim their victimization at the hands of some vaguely described stranger who exists only in their imagination. In those cases, the resulting harm is limited to wasted police resources and unnecessarily frightened communities. However, unless someone, by coincidence, fits her fictitious description, as happened in the Dotson case, that is the only damage done. Oftentimes though, as in the Duke case, real people are accused. These potential victims, and their families, are every bit as deserving of protection from the state as are potential rape victims. In these cases however, the devastation inflicted on the wrongly-accused and their families, will be carried out with the state’s complicity if the police are prohibited from conducting a fair, thorough and objective investigation to include, when appropriate, the use of polygraph tests, simply in deference to political correctness.

What should frighten everyone is that forced sex, like consensual sex, typically occurs in private, without witnesses. These allegations can and are prosecuted with no evidence whatsoever beyond the credible-sounding story of the alleged victim, whose actual credibility is protected from even reasonable challenge by rape-shield laws. When police are prohibited from using one of the few tools available to them to help determine the truth in such situations, even less information is available to those making decisions whether or not to prosecute.

Polygraph tests are a tool. They should not be a routine requirement, but should remain an option available to police when there are already other reasons to doubt the veracity of an alleged victim’s story.