The Myth of the Perfect Victim:

Barriers to Prosecuting Sexual Assault

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 • 1:00pm EST

Join the IIP on April 30th for our Sexual Assault Awareness Month webinar unpacking the pervasive myth of the “perfect victim” and the role of prosecutors in pursuing justice in cases of sexual violence. Joining our discussion are: 

  • Jackson County, MO Prosecutor, Jean Peters Baker;

  • Deborah Tuerkheimer, Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law;

  • Anita Teekah, Chief of Advocacy at LatinoJustice; and

  • Moderator: Michelle Dempsey, Professor of Law, Villanova University

Sexual and gender-based violence impact thousands of people living in the United States every year. Data from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center demonstrates nearly one in five women in the U.S. have been victims of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. The percentage of women who have been victims of sexual assault and harassment is estimated to be as high as 80%. Sexual and gender-based violence disproportionately impacts LGBTQ and transgender people as well. 

Our conversation with leading experts in sexual and gender-based violence will push back on the myth of the perfect victim and the deeply problematic barriers this trope presents to prosecuting sexual violence. We will also provide prosecutors with specific guidance on how to improve victim services for survivors of sexual violence.

Jean Peters Baker

Jackson County, MO Prosecutor

Baker was appointed prosecutor in May 2011 and elected to the position in November 2012. She is only the second woman elected to lead the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office; the first, now-U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, hired Baker as a young assistant prosecutor. Baker has since served in nearly every unit of the office.

Baker is widely credited with being unafraid of tackling difficult cases. In 2011, the new prosecutor Baker prosecuted the bishop of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph for failing to report potential abuse of children by a priest. The case attracted national attention after a Jackson County grand jury’s indictment made the bishop the highest-ranking cleric in the United States to face a criminal charge related to church’s child sex abuse scandal. In another case that attracted national attention, Baker, as a special prosecutor in October 2013, filed charges in a high-profile sexual assault involving high school football players in northwest Missouri. And in 2021 and 2022, Jackson County prosecutors convicted a series of police officers accused of wrongly using excessive or deadly force on citizens. In 2021, Kevin Strickland, who had spent 43 years in a Missouri prison, was freed after a team of Jackson County prosecutors, led by Baker, demonstrated to a judge that Strickland has been wrongly convicted in 1979. Today, Strickland is a free man.

Over her career in the prosecutor’s office, Baker has served in practically every unit of the office, including Chief Warrant Officer. In 2018, she created a Crime Strategies Unit, to enhance the office’s data analysis and to promote evidence-based decision making. A key outcome was an examination of drug prosecutions in Jackson County, which found significant racial disparities in the cases referred to our office and little effectiveness in achieving meaningful outcomes. Today, the office continues to accept Kansas City drug cases, but it stresses that these cases must have a connection to violence or be a community concern, such as a drug house disrupting the street’s peace.

To address violence, early in her tenure, Baker initiated a new violence reduction effort that now is known as the Kansas City No Violence Alliance. The effort is led by a governing board that includes Baker, Mayor Sly James, Kansas City Police Chief Darryl Forte’ and U.S. Attorney Tammy Dickinson. Using an evidence-based or proven approach known as focused deterrence, KC NoVA in 2014 was able to help the community reduce homicides in Kansas City to the lowest level in four decades.

Baker briefly left the prosecutor’s office in 2010, when she was elected as a Missouri State Representative and served as the leader of the Freshman Democrats during her tenure in the General Assembly. She spearheaded the Kansas City Caucus and served as a co-chair of this group to promote economic development issues for the Kansas City area. In 2011, Baker stepped down as state representative and was appointed to succeed Jim Kanatzar as the county’s top law enforcement official -- Jackson County Prosecutor.

Baker grew up in an Osage County, MO, farming community, received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in Columbia, MO, a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a law degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

Anita Teekah

Chief of Advocacy, LatinoJustice

Anita Teekah is LatinoJustice’s Chief of Advocacy and oversees the organization’s policy and advocacy campaign work related to worker and immigrant rights, voting rights, criminal and economic justice reform and issues affecting Puerto Rico. Anita is an experienced lobbyist and brings over a decade of advocacy experience in issues including refugee and migrant rights, human trafficking and economic justice with Amnesty International USA. She successfully, in coalition, secured passage of the START (Survivors of Trafficking Attaining Relief Together) Act in New York, which enables victims of human trafficking to seek criminal record relief for convictions related to their trafficking, and has also supported multiple reauthorizations of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and the International Violence Against Women Act.

Prior to joining LatinoJustice, Anita was the Senior Director of the Anti-Trafficking Program at Safe Horizon, the nation’s largest victim services agency, and supported social workers, immigration attorneys and human trafficking survivors in providing direct services and engaging in advocacy. Anita has worked with child labor and sex trafficking victims and child laborers in the Philippines and was a litigator. She holds a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law (2008) and a B.A. in Political Science from The George Washington University (2005).

Deborah Tuerkheimer

Professor of Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Deborah Tuerkheimer joined the Northwestern Law faculty in 2014 after serving as a professor at DePaul University College of Law since 2009 and the University of Maine School of Law since 2002. Professor Tuerkheimer received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her JD from Yale. She teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, evidence, and feminist legal theory. Her book, CREDIBLE: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers, was published in October 2021. In 2014, Oxford University Press published her book, Flawed Convictions: “Shaken Baby Syndrome” and the Inertia of Injustice. She is also a co-author of the casebook Feminist Jurisprudence: Cases and Materials and the author of numerous articles on sexual violence and domestic violence. After clerking for Alaska Supreme Court Justice Jay Rabinowitz, she served for five years as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney's Office, where she specialized in domestic violence prosecution. In 2015, Tuerkheimer was elected to the American Law Institute, an esteemed group of judges, lawyers, and legal scholars dedicated to the development of the law.

Michelle Dempsey

Professor of Law, Villanova University

Michelle Madden Dempsey joined Villanova in 2009, after teaching at the University of Oxford, where she was a University Lecturer (CUF) in Law and Tutorial Fellow. Dempsey teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, feminist legal theory, and philosophy of law. She has served as chair of the American Association of Law School’s Section on Scholarship and Section on Jurisprudence. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Her book, Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis, published by Oxford University Press, was awarded second prize in the UK’s Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Award for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Her articles have been published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, Ethics, Criminal Law & Philosophy, Criminal Law Review (UK), American Criminal Law Review, and elsewhere. Her co-edited volume, From Morality to Law and Back Again: Liber Amicorum for John Gardner, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Dempsey received her doctor of philosophy (PhD) from the University of Oxford, LLM from the London School of Economics, JD from the University of Michigan Law School and BA from the University of Illinois. She is the co-editor-in-chief (with Matt Matravers, York) of the multidisciplinary, international journal, Criminal Law & Philosophy, co-general editor (with Jeremy Horder, LSE) of OUP Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice, co-founder and executive committee member of The Collective: Women in Legal Philosophy, and served as the co-director of the Criminal Law Theory Program at the Robina Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School from 2009-2016.

Following law school, she worked as a domestic violence prosecutor in the Champaign (Illinois) County State's Attorney's Office and later as a plaintiff's tort litigator in one of Chicago's premiere personal injury law firms. As a civil litigator, she obtained a record-setting jury verdict of $10.62 million in a medical malpractice trial and a $3.5 million jury verdict in a wrongful death case involving a shooting death by Chicago Police officers. She remains a licensed member of the Illinois State Bar and a member of the Trial Bar of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Illinois.

Dempsey was a tutor in law at University College London and served as an expert consultant on domestic violence prosecutions to the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales prior to joining the Oxford Law faculty in 2005. At Villanova, she regularly teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, Advanced Criminal Law and Sexuality and Law, and has previously taught Jurisprudence, Feminist Legal Theory, Gender and Law, Race and Law and Domestic Violence and Law. In 2014, she co-founded the Villanova Law Institute to Address Commercial Sexual Exploitation.

Dempsey previously served as associate dean for faculty research and development from 2013-2017 and was appointed to the inaugural Harold Reuschlein Scholar Chair in 2018. She was awarded the Villanova Law Student Bar Association Faculty Member of the Year Award in 2019 and 2021, and was awarded the Diane Ambler Scholarship Impact Award in 2022.