sorry I suck
If she could prove it then today - we would have a conviction
In 1980's 50/50 - just teenagers having fun that got out of hand... it was the way it was
I'm unsure if this is the actual case. I understand this is widely perceived, but I'm unsure if it's true.
According to the report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010, and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting data, The clearance rate for rape cases (which seems to include attempted rape) was 51.1% in 1995, and was 33.6% for rape and 37.7% for sexual assault in 2017. This would seem to indicate that there was a better chance at conviction in a rape case in 1995 then in 2017.
The attempts to extrapolate total number of sexual assault/rape victims from the numbers reported seems a bit like voodoo to me, but I'm not a statistician. Apparently the rate of sexual assaults reported to police have run between 25% to 60% between 1995 and 2010. The number for 2016 is 22.1%. Today the rate is basically close to what it was back in 1995.
Reasons given for not reporting sexual assault to the police have shifted over the years. Between 94 and 98 the percentage who did not report because they believed the police could not or would not help was 8%. In 2010 that number was 15%. I imagine the percentage is even higher today. The top reasons that sexual assault was not reported to the police by females was fear of reprisal, which has also grown, from 17% to 20%, and "other", which is at 30% in 2010. Fear of reprisal and "other" covers 50% of reasons that sexual assault was not reported in 2010.
There IS a great shifting of perception by women that the police cannot or would not help. But I can't really find data that supports this. I know there is a lot of anecdotal stuff out there, but I personally try to base my views off the data, rather than stories. This I why I don't believe that illegal aliens are a huge crime problem, despite all the anecdotal bs that gets thrown out about them.
The only thing that seems to bear on the subject is that in the past, law enforcement did indeed have a better clearance rate for sexual assault cases.