Over the last few months, as there are more and more reports of sexual harassment and abuse by men in power, we hear the refrain: Believe women.

If we are to believe women, we also must broaden our focus to those who are marginalized — those who are specifically targeted because people won’t believe them. When Roy Moore was district attorney, he reportedly took advantage of his power in law enforcement and targeted people for that very reason.

“He told me, he said, ‘You’re just a child,’ and he said, ‘I am the district attorney of Etowah County and if you tell anyone about this no one will ever believe you,’” Beverly Nelson told the Washington Post about the night Moore, now a Senate candidate in Alabama, allegedly sexually assaulted her.

It’s not just Moore. There is a systemic problem in our criminal justice system of men who are supposed to uphold the law, and there have been a multitude of cases of police officers who target marginalized women for sexual violence precisely for that reason.

According to Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, police frequently target marginalized people with sexual violence. That includes young women and girls, women of color, transgender women, sex workers, homeless women, women with mental illness, undocumented women, women who are addicted to drugs and alcohol, women with disabilities, and low-income women. Because the perpetrators are so powerful and because the victims are so marginalized, the problem of police violence often feels intractable, experts say.

But the first step toward dealing with this problem is to acknowledge that it is far more pervasive than people would like to think.

A well-established pattern of police sexual misconduct
Moore’s case has gotten a lot of media attention because of his status and because of his bid for a Senate seat. But the problem with police and sexual violence is widespread.

In October, two New York Police Department detectives were for arrested for rape and pleaded not guilty. A teenager, who goes by the name Anna Chambers on social media, said she was pulled over with two male friends, handcuffed by the officers, and placed in an unmarked police van, where she said one officer raped her and both forced their penises in her mouth. The officers claimed it was all consensual sex — even though she said she was in handcuffs the whole time.

For full story visit: https://thinkprogress.org/police-abuse-systemic-24d7bed99605/