I would agree that it is unfortunate the lengths that women may have to go to in order to minimise their risk, however I don't think that ignoring these factors does anybody any good. Ideally nobody should have to take any measures to prevent anything bad from happening, but that's not how the world is.
I am in the UK , so perhaps culture is somewhat different here but I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed.
In fact there have been cases of premature "justice" taken against individuals before all of the facts are in. And it's not completely unknown for threat of fake rape accusations to be used as a method of blackmail. In other words branding somebody as a rapist is a sure fire way to fuck their life up, quite different from "everyone blames the victim".
Even though it is not pleasant reading I don't think it hurts to report on all of the facts in such cases if doing so might help others to avoid these situations. For example if I had a daughter I know I would want to give frank and strongly worded advice if I thought it might make her even a little bit safer, but if something were to happen I would certainly not blame her.
"I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed."
Unfortunately, this is not typically what happens. Remember, we're not usually talking about some guy leaping out of a dark alley and grabbing a stranger walking by. Most rapists know their victims and interact with them socially in the lead-up to the assault. Many deliberately arrange circumstances designed to create doubt about what happened and whether it was consensual.
I hate to link to a scumbag, but there was a reddit post several months ago by a serial rapist describing his methods that illustrates this quite clearly: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/x6yef/reddits_had... It is absolutely chilling reading, but horribly informative (as are his replies to questions later on). I'm as skeptical of anonymous comments as the next guy, but in the aftermath I saw a number of people saying, "Don't give him the attention he wants: you can see exactly the same methods and mentality in formal studies of convicted rapists instead." (Sadly, I never saw links to those studies, so I'm still linking to the scumbag.) It's clear that this isn't the sort of thing that inspires vigilante mobs, but my understanding is that it's by far the most common scenario.
Meanwhile, you need to be really cautious about bringing up the "false rape accusation" objection. Yes, they happen, and it's awful when they do. But every statistic I've ever seen indicates that the number of false accusations is miniscule compared with even the number of reported rapes, let along the number that don't get reported at all (perhaps because the only evidence was "he said/she said" that would get brushed off as potentially a false accusation). Treating actual rapes and false accusations as some sort of evenly balanced poles deserving equal consideration is not justified by the statistics.
I am in the UK , so perhaps culture is somewhat different here but I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed.
In fact there have been cases of premature "justice" taken against individuals before all of the facts are in. And it's not completely unknown for threat of fake rape accusations to be used as a method of blackmail. In other words branding somebody as a rapist is a sure fire way to fuck their life up, quite different from "everyone blames the victim".
Even though it is not pleasant reading I don't think it hurts to report on all of the facts in such cases if doing so might help others to avoid these situations. For example if I had a daughter I know I would want to give frank and strongly worded advice if I thought it might make her even a little bit safer, but if something were to happen I would certainly not blame her.