Response To Women

It happens, and in many states there are no laws to keep rapists from terrorizing their victims all over again. Imagine getting raped, got pregnant and the predator wanted custody of the child. The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal response to women who become pregnant as a result of rape. Specifically, it asks why more than two-thirds of states have failed to pass laws restricting custody and visitation privileges of rapists over their rape-conceived children. A woman who is raped and conceives a child faces uniquely vulnerable circumstances whereby the initial act of violence results in an opportunity, created by law, for the rapists to continue to torment her. The law has created this opportunity; thus the law must end it.

80%

Only between 16% and 19% of rapes are reported to law enforcement. Once it is reported, rape is rarely prosecuted. Therefore, federal data does not provide a complete picture of prosecution rates and results. Social science research has found that 7% to 27% of rapes reported to law enforcement are prosecuted; and 3% to 26% of these prosecutions yield a conviction. When these estimates are combined, researchers estimate that of 100 forcible rapes that are committed, approximately five to twenty will be reported, 0.4 to 5.4 will be prosecuted, and 0.2 to 5.2 will result in a conviction. In other words, of the small number of rapes that are reported and prosecuted, at most 5% of perpetrators will be convicted. It is difficult to determine with certainty the outcome of the approximately 25,000 to 32,000 rape-related pregnancies that occur in the United States each year. One study found that 50% of women who became pregnant by rape underwent abortions, 5.9% placed their infants for adoptions, and 32.3% of raped women kept their infants. So a significant percentage of raped women choose to raise the children. Under most states’ laws, a man who fathers a child through rape has the same legal rights to custody and visitation in regard to that child as does any other father of a child due to the absence of any laws restricting or terminating such rights; as a result, many raped women face significant consequences following

The Rape Survivor Child Custody Act incentivizes states to adopt laws that allow mothers of children conceived through rape to terminate the parental rights of their rapists. The bill intakes that when a rapist pursues parental or custody rights, the victim is forced to “have continued interaction with the rapist, which has savior psychological consequences making recovery a difficult task. The bill puts an emphasis that courts shall grant termination of parental rights “upon clear and convincing evidence of rape.” $5 million in grant funds has been distribute to states that have laws “that allow the mother of any child that was conceived through rape to seek court-ordered termination of the parental rights of her rapist.” The grants would be authorized under the STOP Violence Against Women Formula Grant Program and the Sexual Assault Services Program of the Violence Against Women Act. Although a significant movement has been made at the state level, with thirty-one states allowing partial or complete termination of rapists’ parental rights there are 13 states that still allow both visitations and custody to the father under the parental rights laws, Nebraska is one of them. And even in the thirty one states that restrict any type of connection with a conceived child there are always exceptions to the rules such is true in in