'Because Ladies Lie': Eliminating Vestiges of the Corroboration and Resistance Requirements from Ohio's Sexual Offenses

Throughout the history of rape law, sexual assault victims have been subjected to many unique substantive and procedural obstacles adversely affecting the successful prosecution of their attackers. Among these were the corroboration and resistance requirements. Under the former, no prosecution could proceed absent corroborating evidence; the victim’s testimony alone would not suffice. The corroboration requirement exhibited an explicit distrust of female rape victims because no other common law crime had a similar requirement. Under the latter, rape law required victims to demonstrate adequate resistance to the rape or forfeit their right to protection from sexual predators. The resistance requirement was also unique among common law offenses. It demonstrated a tacit distrust of female rape victims because resistance helped to verify non-consent. Evidence of physical resistance — perhaps of bruises and other injuries — proved that the rape victim was not lying. In response to alarming statistics about the dearth of rape cases brought to successful fruition, feminist critiques of rape law, and changing attitudes about sexual autonomy, sexual offense provisions in America have undergone enormous revision during the last few decades. The barriers to successful prosecution of rape cases — including the corroboration and resistance requirements — have been slowly eroding in modern statutory law. Despite rampant rape reform, these old-fashioned requirements have been remarkably persistent, and vestiges of them remain in twenty-first-century statutory enactments. For example, although the Ohio legislature has made considerable progress in modernizing the state’s rape laws, Ohio’s contemporary sexual offenses include remnants of both the corroboration and resistance requirements. The corroboration requirement (1) still applies to the crime of sexual imposition and (2) is used as a grading factor in gross sexual imposition. The resistance requirement (1) has been eliminated from rape and gross sexual imposition, but not sexual battery and sexual imposition, and (2) the wording of the resistance-elimination provisions is legally inaccurate. Finally, (3) resistance language (i.e., “ability to resist”) appears in subsections of the rape, gross sexual imposition, and sexual battery statutes, causing confusion about whether physical resistance is required by victims of these offenses. The Article proposes to modernize Ohio’s sexual offense provisions by eliminating the remaining vestiges of the corroboration and resistance requirements. The proposed changes are relatively modest in scope and would be easy to enact. The symbolic and real-world consequences of doing so are substantial.