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From the article: SALT LAKE CITY — Sexual assaults in Utah are going underreported, but the work of a BYU professor is helping to convince lawmakers and law enforcement to pay more attention to prosecuting such cases. Julie Valentine, a sexual assault nurse examiner and nursing professor at BYU, found that only 6 percent of cases in Salt Lake County have been prosecuted. Valentine examines rape victims and collects forensic evidence for cases. As she examined victims for prosecution, she would not hear back about any follow-up and wanted to find out why. “We would do these examinations — we’d do hundreds — and it was rare that we would hear anything about the cases. I only testified in one case,” Valentine said. Valentine attended a forensic conference in Puerto Rico, where Rebecca Campbell, whose research focuses on violence against women, spoke on prosecution outcomes when a sexual assault nurse examiner program exists in a community. “I went to the conference and was blown away and thought, ‘We have to do something about this,’” Valentine said. She, with the help of two other students and a BYU ORCA grant, conducted a study on prosecution outcomes with sexual assault nurse examiners throughout the state of Utah. She examined 270 random study cases out of a total of 1,657 cases in Utah, spanning from the year 2003 to 2011. The outcome of the study was published in 2013. In that time span, only 6 percent of all sexual assault cases were prosecuted. That number is supported by a recent review in Salt Lake City that found police there had a backlog of more than 600 rape examination kits. Connecting DNA in the rape kits to known offenders tracked by law enforcement is often the first step to prosecution...According to Valentine’s study, the most commonly written reasons for not screening a case were because the victim did not want to pursue, was unavailable for contact, the suspect was unknown, or the victim would not cooperate.

Prosecutors tend to prosecute cases they can win and not prosecute cases where they have a decent chance of losing.

the victim did not want to pursue, was unavailable for contact, the suspect was unknown, or the victim would not cooperate.

You can hardly blame the prosecutors in light of this line of the article.

I don’t think this is what the lady who did the study intends, but it seems to me that she is saying that I can not trust any testimony from the victim of a sexual assault. Or any assault, really.

So I shouldn’t believe anything they say.

Is this really the message she wants to get out?