I think the difficulty in comparing is that murder has a clear and defined definition in everyone's minds - person A willfully did something to end the life of

I think the difficulty in comparing is that murder has a clear and defined definition in everyone's minds - person A willfully did something to end the life of person B. I posit the two conditions are universally known (you may need to tease the willful part out of some), the end result is universally accepted to be bad, and the only time victim "has it coming" is in very exceptional cases where the victim is disliked or "provoked it", and even then the murder is still very frowned upon. Rape is different because across persons within societies, "what rape is" varies, culpability varies, and the end result, having had sex, is considered a good thing by many people. Some people honestly believe forced oral sex isn't rape. Or that one member of a couple can't rape the other. Additionally, many still believe you can "ask" for rape. As others already noted, rape is a murky case in many times because of how frequently both parties are intoxicated, lack of reliable witnesses, and difficulty in determining culpability of the persons in the case. Add in that you have a public which judges with varying degrees of understanding as to what rape is, and that's why many people argue that it needs to have some special consideration; the societal odds are stacked against the victim, and of course, the non-intended punishments are very serious for the accused. Juries in general are really a problem for these sorts of cases not only because of the individual biases that they bring, but also because jury duty is a horrible component of the US legal system in general: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/16202923895/interlude-the-jury http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/16202923895/interlu... (semi- long comic) It's really not too suprising why there was a strong push to believe victims - everything about the process is just a mess for them, along with the judgement that does come for victims. To make the entire issue of rape more complex, even non-convictions still damage all parties involved. The truth is that in a legal sense, rape is understood like any other crime - the problem is that society still has a wildly varied opinion on rape as a crime. Legally, there are a lot of very common sense practicalities which, while being a bit of a wet-blanket on sex, give clear legal and actionable definitions to parts of relationships/intercourse. (e.g., sex is a contract) I don't thnk it's that the law needs to catch up - society needs to come to a better conclusion on rape.