A Cleveland juvenile court judge has ordered at least four teenage girls who were victims of sexual assault to submit to polygraph tests, baffling prosecutors and upsetting the victims, reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Judge Alison Floyd ordered victims in separate cases to be examined after she had found their attackers delinquent. Floyd also ordered the teenage boys who were accused of rape and other sex crimes in those cases to undergo polygraph examinations as part of an assessment done before the teens would be sentenced. None of the teen victims has followed the judge’s order.
“The situation made no sense to us,” the mother of a 16-year-old victim said in a message relayed through Cleveland Rape Crisis Center. “I believe even more damage was done by the judge letting the perpetrator know she was ordering the victim to take the polygraph. He apparently took this to mean the judge did not believe her and he used this to tell their peers that the judge did not believe her and was ordering her take a lie detector test,” the mother wrote. Megan O’Bryan of the Rape Crisis Center said the center — which is assisting three of the victims — does not condone the polygraph tests for sexual assault survivors. “It violates federal law mandated through the 2005 Violence Against Women Act,” O’Bryan said.