By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
Superstar Bill Cosby’s arraignment on criminal sexual assault charges followed a year of intensified media coverage and allegations from dozens of women, all claiming they had been drugged and assaulted by the cultural icon.
“It’s had a cumulative impact,” says victims’ advocate Mariam Gerges. She’s noticed more women coming in for assistance at her resource center, Healing Space.
“I absolutely am not surprised by the spike in the reporting,” Georges said. “It just takes one person to start speaking about it, and you’ll see an influx of people saying, ‘It happened to me, too. It happened to me, too.This is not an isolated incident.'”
For years, New Jersey’s Uniform Crime Report of rapes never broke 1,000. In 2014, the report logged 838 rapes from January to November. This year, the total jumped to 1,121 reported rapes over the same time frame, up 283 cases, or a 33.8 percent increase.
“Celebrities can drive the trend. Lady Gaga and her music video ‘Til It Happens To You’ and Viola Davis who came out to speak about her sister’s sexual assault when she was younger, and how that’s affected her life,” Georges said.
Healing Space counselor Megan Gluchoski, who helps victims report rapes to prosecutors, says, “I think we’re starting to believe women a lot more than we have. I think law enforcement has become a lot more sensitive to the needs of survivors.”
Outreach programs at college campuses and publicity from high-profile cases apparently prompted victims to report cases that predate 2015. Police say that happened this year in New York City.
Gluchoski continued, “I would say a lot of our callers are people who want to report and talk about something that happened in years prior, not necessarily this year.”
Prosecutors charged Cosby only days before the Pennsylvania statute of limitations expired in the case. New Jersey has no statutory limit for reporting sexual assaults.
However Gluchoski stated, “We do have a statute for how long we’ll hold evidence for. Survivors can have evidence collected within five days of being sexually assaulted and they’ll hold the evidence for five years.Even without an evidence kit, victims turned up wanting to report the crime. They really wanted somebody to pay for what had been done to them so they couldn’t do it to anybody else.”
A victim’s silence only enables sexual predictors. Advocates say case like Cosby’s can give victims the courage to break that silence.