The Golden State Warriors, Anthony Lamb, and Rape Culture
Look, this discussion won’t be an easy one. I’m sure most can agree that the victim of sexual assaults have a right to seek relief through the criminal justice system and that the accused must be protected until proven guilty. But, these rights are often in conflict with one another—especially given that it is often the accuser’s word against the accused. (The Trevor Bauer situation is a great example of this.)
We can also agree that a simple accusation of any crime, let alone sexual assault, does not bar an individual from employment and should not infringe upon their personal or professional pursuits.
Still, these agreements to do not preclude us from questioning the Warriors’ decision to employ an individual who has been accused of sexual assault, and they certainly do not require use to feel satisfied with the organization’s justification for employing the player.
Of course, that player is Anthony Lamb.
The accusations surrounding Lamb arose from the UVM Empowering Survivors Instagram page, an account not affiliated with the University of Vermont. Here are both the posts that implicated Lamb, as posted by the Vermont Sports History, Stats & Information Twitter page:
While both posts mention Lamb by name, a victim has never directly accused him. These posts constitute hearsay, which doesn’t meet the threshold for prosecution.
The point here is not to prosecute Lamb for alleged sexual violence. No, the point is to call into question the justification used by Bob Myers and the Warriors when defending their signing of Lamb to a two-way contract.
The decision to sigh Lamb, as Bob Myers said, was “difficult,” “taken seriously,” and note done “lightly.”
When asked to elaborate on the process used to verify Lamb’s character by Madeline Kenney of the Bay Area News Groups, Myers deflected responsibility, saying: “We checked with the NBA, we checked with the two teams that had prior signed him and didn’t hear anything as far as official charges or anything like that.”
Myers added: “We can only at times look at what the law has done and also follow the leadership of the NBA. If the NBA had said, this is not something we would recommend or do, or if there’s an ongoing investigation, we would have not moved forward. They have more information than we do in this situation, and we had to lean on that. We had to lean on the prior teams that signed him.”
Despite proclamations to the contrary, Myers’s justification doesn’t suggest this case was taken seriously. Myers really only offers cliches rooted in some of the more pernicious myths about sexual assault and its victims, not any sort of proof that the organization or the NBA acted seriously or even thoughtfully.
Myers repeatedly acknowledges the lack of official charges as justification for the signing. But, this doesn’t speak to the inconvenient truth that sexual assault victims don’t go to the police.
That’s according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), at least. According to the Office of Justice Programs, “Sixty-three percent of completed rapes, 65% of attempted rapes, and 74% of completed and attempted sexual assaults against females were not reported to the police.”
For women in college, the percentages are even more bleak. Per a report on campus sexual assault by the DOJ, 95.2% of completed raps, 100% of completed “sexual coercion” and about 99% of “completed sexual contact” with or without force were not reported. A more recent study of college-age females by the DOJ found that only 20% of students reported their sexual assaults compared to 32% of nonstudents.
The reasons for not reporting are varied, for sure. 26% believed it was a personal matter while another 20% feared reprisal. 10% did not want the perpetrator to get in trouble — potentially because in more 80% of cases, the victim knows the perpetrator. Ultimately, it’s important that we understand how rarely victims of sexual assault seek justice. (This, of course, is to say nothing of Title IX and the regulations and processes that govern how sexual assaults are adjudicated on college campuses, which is hyper-relevant to the allegations made against Lamb.)
Myers’s fixation on the lack of charges belies the fact that reports of sexual assault are rarely prosecuted.
In the few instances wherein the victim does seek justice, they are unlikely to find relief. Statistics from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network show that “Out of every 1000 instances of rape, only 13 cases get referred to a prosecutor, and only 7 cases will lead to a felony conviction.” For victims of general sexual assault, the numbers are slightly better: Fewer than 5% are referred to a prosecutor while 2.8% of cases lead to a felony conviction.
Of importance is what happens when the sexual assaults are reported. The Globe and Mail used Canadian policing data to find “a national unfounded rate of 19.39 per cent — nearly twice as high as it is for physical assault (10.84 per cent), and dramatically higher than that of other types of crime.” One likely reason for this: Police simply do not believe the victim’s testimony.
A survey of police in the UK found that some officers believed as many as 90% of sexual assault allegations were false. The overall mean of responses regarding the beliefs of the number of false reports was 53%. The study’s author Lesley McMillan said of this discrepancy between perception and reality: “What is evident in the perceptions of those police officers who reported higher levels of false allegations is an implicit belief that women are deceitful — that they lie about rape.”
Not unlike those police officers in McMillan’s study, Myers deflects responsibility and in effect recites common rape myths to justify such deflection. Those myths center on the belief that had a rape occurred, the police would have been informed and charges would have been filed. In absence of a police report and formal charges, then sexual assault must not have occurred and the accusation must have been false.
Though not stated explicitly, Myers justification for the signing is effectively that Lamb’s accusers are lying.
While this is not to say that false accusations of sexual assault are not real and serious, it does contradict the most burdensome of facts: Most accusations of sexual assault are credible.
For every 100 accusations of sexual assault, between 2 and 10 are confirmed false, according to a meta-analysis done by researchers from the University of New England and Queensland University of Technology. Okay, so some of us might raise an eyebrow at a study with partial roots in Australia (Perhaps we’ve accepted Bluey into our hearts, but not the Australian academe.) No problem there: A study of 2,059 sexual assault reports across 8 U.S. communities found that “140 (7%) were classified as false.” For those keeping track, 7% is in fact between 2% and 10%, so we’re good there.
If we want to narrow our scope to more closely match the circumstances surrounding the Warriors and their two-way player, we can look at a study conducted by United Educators wherein 305 claims of sexual assault from 104 college and universities in the United States were analyzed. While this study didn’t look into false allegations, they did review the litigation that arose as a result of the sexual assault claims made against athlete perpetrators. (Researchers defined “litigation” as “lawsuits, complaints filed with OCR [U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights], and demand letters from claimants that may never result in a lawsuit or OCR complaint.”) 63% of athlete perpetrators were found responsible through the institution’s adjudication process while 13% of victims withdrew their complaint. 24% then were found “not responsible.” That is a near two-thirds majority of cases that at the very least have been shown to violate the institution’s sexual assault policy—although not the super majority needed to override presidential veto, it would be more than enough to finally make Washington D.C. a state.
No matter the study, the data here is clear: Sexual assault claims are largely valid.
Again, I am not arguing that the accusations made against Anthony Lamb are valid. I am not even arguing that the Warriors should not have signed him to a two-way contract. I am saying, however, that the facts on sexual assault cases demand more from the Myers and the Warriors.
They demand more than the philosophical waxing on what whether it would be fair to not sign Anthony Lamb. They demand more than such cheap whataboutism.
Fans and sexual assault victims deserve a thoughtful response wherein Myers speaks directly and truthfully about these allegations and what exhaustive steps the Warriors and the NBA took to ensure that these allegations are untrue. But that’s not what they were offered.
Just today, the Warriors released their City Edition jerseys. Designed by Bay Area artist Allison Hueman, the jersey is being marketed as symbol of women’s empowerment.
The video makes reference to community values centered on the belief in empowerment and in allyship. Ironically, the symbol of that belief system is a rose, the same symbol of female genitalia and of a woman’s individual sexuality—the very sexuality which Lamb has been accused of rapping and which the Warriors have now undermined.
In their justification of the Lamb signing, the Warriors chose to empower the central myths of rape culture, proving female empowerment is nothing more than a slogan, not an institutional value. While not surprising, it is disappointing nonetheless.
