One of the revelations of the #MeToo movement is the fear of victims of sexual assault or harassment to report crimes. Modern psychology can explain the fear, but society and our legal system tend to discredit victims who don’t report crimes promptly, and in some cases the perpetrators of crimes may even escape punishment because of a delay in reporting.
The news is filled with accounts of sex crime accusations being made in some cases decades after the alleged attack. This week, comedian Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman 14 years earlier. Some of the allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein date back to the 1990s and late 1980s. A report last month by a Pennsylvania grand jury described sex crimes by Catholic priests over a 70-year period, and as of the time of this writing, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was fending off allegations of a sexual assault that allegedly occurred 36 years ago.
A relatively new technology — called blockchain technology, which also power Bitcoin — may, however, provide victims of crime with a method of creating a credible written record of the facts.
Why Victims Delay Reporting
Psychotherapist Beverly Engel describes 10 reasons why victims of sexual assault may not immediately (if ever) report a sexual assault. These reasons include shame, self-blame, fear that they won’t be believed, and fear of retaliation, among others.
Being sexually assaulted is one of the most shame-inducing traumas that a person can experience. So it is understandable that victims don’t need to be further shamed by being shamed for not reporting the crime. And yet, that is exactly what happens whenever we hear, for the first time, about a sexual assault that occurred months or years ago. “Why didn’t she report it before?” we ask. “Why didn’t she come forward a long time ago, right after it happened?”
– Psychotherapist Deborah Engel
Statutes of Limitations Limit Prosecutions
The #MeToo movement may have helped to remove some of the stigma from victims of sexual assault and harassment and encouraged them to come forward, but fears remains a factor in the decision to come forward. The law in many states has not caught up with the recognition of the psychology of a crime victim. In most of the United States, laws called statutes of limitations prevent prosecutors from filing criminal charges if a certain amount of time has passed following the crime.
Statutes of limitations are designed to protect people from prosecution after a period of time when physical evidence may have disappeared or memories may have faded.
According to a report by PBS NewsHour, some states have recognized that it may take time for victims to come forward and have begun extending the period for prosecuting sex crimes, particularly those involving young victims, but states are “behind the curve” in extending or eliminating statutes of limitations for adult victims.
Even if a crime can be prosecuted within the applicable statute of limitations, the success of that prosecution may be hampered by faulty memories and even a jury’s bias against victims who delay in reporting a crime.
Crime victims have always had the ability to write down contemporaneous details of the crime, which could aid in a prosecution and in convincing the police and prosecutors (not to mention, the general public) of the truthfulness of a claim, but these writings may be subject to attack in a courtroom or the court of public opinion. Handwritten notes could have been written at a later date. Even techniques such as emailing a written account to yourself may be problematic as emails could still subject to forgery and victims could be spooked by new reports that the content of emails may be scanned by service providers.
How Blockchain Technology Can Help Create a Credible Record
This is where blockchain technology comes in. What is blockchain technology? Blockchain is a digital ledger — a log of transactions. The ledger is shared across a network of computers, and transactions are recorded onto the ledger only if the computers on the blockchain network reach consensus on the validity of the transaction. Transactions are logged on the ledger as part of a block, and the blocks are strung together in a chain, with each including a reference to the preceding block – thus the name “blockchain.”
It may be best known for being the technology behind Bitcoin, but blockchain also has uses outside of digital money. These uses already include keeping track of goods in a supply chain, maintaining the security of health care records and securing financial transactions. The process for recording transactions on a blockchain makes it very difficult to change what has been recorded but at the same time it also allows for the storage of records in a very private, secure manner. That’s why blockchain technology is being used by various services that attempt to replicate the services of notaries public. A notary public is a person with authority granted by the state to certify the proper execution of documents. The notary public places a stamp on the document and signs and dates it.
One of the blockchain based notaries is called Stampd. Stampd offers a web application for the time-stamping of documents. Stampd claims that “notarizing your content on the blockchain is totally straight forward and cannot be forged by anyone.” Stampd uses a technique called hashing to produce a digital fingerprint of a document and then attaches that fingerprint to the Bitcoin blockchain where it is stored in a tamper-resistant manner. The document itself never leaves the user’s device; no copy is stored by Stampd or anywhere else. It would be virtually impossible to take digital fingerprint and derive the original document. The digital fingerprint Stampd provides a certificate via email that would allow the user to prove with a high degree of certainty the date and time of the original document (the user would need to keep a copy of the original). Below are screenshots of the Stampd process and certificate.
Typically, in U.S. courts documents notarized by a traditional notary public are considered authentic. Although there are no reported cases of courts considering blockchain-notarized documents (and they wouldn’t be given the automatic deference of traditionally notarized documents), the fact that the digital fingerprint recorded on the blockchain could be matched with the original would make it likely that the document is admissible in court.
This piece is not advice to victims to not report crimes, and there is no guaranty that a victim’s story will be believed (or that a case would move forward) even with blockchain notarized documentation. Obviously, it would be better if victims of sexual assault did not feel fear in coming forward and even better if sexual assault never occurred. But the reality is that sexual assault does occur and that there is real fear of reporting, and this article outlines one option victims can consider to protect themselves if the day arises when they feel than can report the crime.