Prior to your graduation from AIU, you have been working as the Victims’ Assistant Advocate for the office of the local county prosecutor. You have a great working relationship with the prosecutor, Mary, and the remainder of the office. Normally, when you speak, the staff and the prosecutor know that you are speaking from a knowledge base that you have gained from personal experience, research, and reading, so they know that your comments are facts. You use APA format to cite your sources for this project.
You have decided to speak with the prosecutor, Mary, on behalf of Maureen, a college student who was a sexual assault victim (date rape). You want to convince Mary to support a change in the prosecutor’s policy of not prosecuting sexual assault (date rape) cases when drugs or alcohol is involved. Mary has a strict policy: When someone wants to speak with her about changing an established policy, she wants the person to submit a PowerPoint presentation that outlines his or her argument for the policy change prior to meeting her. This way she feels that she is not blind-sided, and that she has an opportunity to research the topic prior to the meeting.
You follow her policy and prepare a 10 to 15-slide PowerPoint presentation, hoping that you can persuade Mary and the chief prosecutor to change their policy or, at a minimum, meet with you for a discussion about changing the policy. Maureen knows that other young women are being attacked and that often drugs are used.
Mary has agreed to review your PowerPoint presentation, which includes video links.
- Educate Mary about sexual assault (date rape) cases, statistics and date rape drugs.
- Explain why not prosecuting the cases is the wrong public and social policy. Provide crime statistics reported by Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) relating to rape and the strengths and weaknesses of each type of reporting.
- Define the term date rape (or acquaintance rape; the terms are interchangeable) and how date rape is distinguished from stranger rape, statutory rape, and spousal rape.
- List the types and uses of date rape drugs.
- Describe the victim–offender relationship, including the following:
- How victims are viewed by perpetrators of date rape.
- The special problems of date rape prosecutions.
- How society and jurors may view date rape (e.g., blaming the victim based on the perceived precipitation, facilitation, or provocation of the victim).
- Use a case example (see resource for this assignment).