It's not "the specific legal term". It is a term with a huge range of different (albeit related) legal definitions which vary in their details from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Not all jurisdictions use that term in their laws–sometimes, they use other related terms instead, e.g. "rape","forcible sodomy","sexual battery",etc. In some jurisdictions, "sexual assault" is a general term for all sex-related criminal offences, in others it refers to some specific subset of those offences.
You cite 34 USC 12291 as a defining it, but it says at the start of that section that those definitions are specific to that subchapter of the US Code, which deals with federal grants for victims of crime services and requirements for the Attorney General to make various reports to Congress (provisions which are not criminal law per se, since they don't by their own terms make anything a crime.) So, that's not a general definition applicable across all of US federal law; and even if it was, it wouldn't automatically apply to state or territorial law, which are allowed to define legal terms differently from how federal law defines them.
I think Stallman's point is this – the term "sexual assault" has a wide variety of formal definitions, but most people know little about those definitions, what counts for most people is what it means in the "popular imagination" (which isn't constant either, it varies across time and space). The term brings to mind certain scenarios; sometimes, the case under discussion is a scenario of that sort, other times it is not the first thing one thinks of when one hears the term. In the later case, even if the term "sexual assault" formally fits under one of its many formal definitions, it is going to mislead in practice. And given all this potential for confusion, it might be better to avoid the term entirely, especially in cases whose fact patterns are unusual.
(I'm not going to defend his every choice of words in making that point. Probably, he wouldn't either. But, I think, if he realised when he wrote them that people were going to endlessly pick his words apart and use them to construct a noose with which to end his career, he would have chosen them much more carefully.)
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Re: 20 years late ?
Date: 2019-09-17 07:36 pm (UTC)You cite 34 USC 12291 as a defining it, but it says at the start of that section that those definitions are specific to that subchapter of the US Code, which deals with federal grants for victims of crime services and requirements for the Attorney General to make various reports to Congress (provisions which are not criminal law per se, since they don't by their own terms make anything a crime.) So, that's not a general definition applicable across all of US federal law; and even if it was, it wouldn't automatically apply to state or territorial law, which are allowed to define legal terms differently from how federal law defines them.
I think Stallman's point is this – the term "sexual assault" has a wide variety of formal definitions, but most people know little about those definitions, what counts for most people is what it means in the "popular imagination" (which isn't constant either, it varies across time and space). The term brings to mind certain scenarios; sometimes, the case under discussion is a scenario of that sort, other times it is not the first thing one thinks of when one hears the term. In the later case, even if the term "sexual assault" formally fits under one of its many formal definitions, it is going to mislead in practice. And given all this potential for confusion, it might be better to avoid the term entirely, especially in cases whose fact patterns are unusual.
(I'm not going to defend his every choice of words in making that point. Probably, he wouldn't either. But, I think, if he realised when he wrote them that people were going to endlessly pick his words apart and use them to construct a noose with which to end his career, he would have chosen them much more carefully.)