Judge bans the word ‘rape’…during a rape case.

It’s not enough that rape survivors are re-victimized in the courtroom by having their sexual histories brought up or are accused of “wanting it.” Now they can’t even call their assaults, well…assaults.
From Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

…a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.

The first trial resulted in a hung jury last year, and in the retrial the words will once again be banned. The only word left to use by both the defense and the prosecution to describe what happened? Sex. Uh huh, that’s lovely.

Bowen testified for 13 hours at Safi’s first trial last October, all without using the words rape or sexual assault. She claims, not unreasonably, that describing what happened to her as sex is almost an assault in itself. “This makes women sick, especially the women who have gone through this,” Bowen told the Omaha World-Herald. “They know the difference between sex and rape.”

The article points out that judges have been known to keep certain words out of the courtroom, like ‘victim’, because it implies that crimes was committed. Safi’s lawyer, Clarence Mock, argues that the word rape is similar: “It’s a legal conclusion for a witness to say, ‘I was raped’ or ‘sexually assaulted.’ … That’s for a jury to decide.”
Lithwick hits the nail on the head: “The fact that judges are not rushing to ban similarly conclusory legal language from trial testimony—presumably one can still say murder or embezzlement on the stand—reflects not just the fraught nature of language but also the fraught nature of rape prosecutions. We as a society still somehow think rape is different—either because we assume the victims are especially fragile or because we assume they are particularly deceitful. Is the word rape truly more inflammatory to a jury than the word robbery?”
Even worse? Jurors won’t be told about the banned words.

They are not merely too emotional to hear the phrase rape kit. They are also evidently too emotional to know it’s been hidden from them in the first place.

And apparently, this is becoming a trend. What if this happens in all rape trials? For some women, it’s hard enough to name what happened to them as “rape” at all. If we’re banned from calling it ‘rape’ in the courtroom, when will we stop calling it ‘rape’ in our lives?