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A meme long circulated via social media holds that in 31 states it is legal for a rapist to sue his victim for custody of a child conceived during a sexual assault, but in no states do rape victims have legal standing to sue their attackers for child support: The latter claim was the more straightforward, asserting that in all 50 states a victim of rape cannot sue her rapist for child support. We were unable to find any law expressly prohibiting such an action in any state, although objections to the structure and efficacy of mandated child support in rape cases remains controversial. For example, a June 2015 article reported on a case involving a teenaged rape victim who was compelled to seek support in family court, effectively commanding her to maintain a relationship with her attacker: A 2013 legal paper noted that victims of sexual violence hide from their abusers, and child support orders and proceedings [frequently triggered by requests for social assistance] necessarily renew contact between rapist and victim. The paper further explained that a dangerous absent parent may react to the child support notification by renewed violence or by asserting rights to custody and visitation, which would seriously harm the mother and child. In a preface, the paper noted that conditions differ from state to state with respect to the burden of proof placed upon rape victims in cases involving child support due to various requirements with respect to social programs and assistance (known sometimes as paternity cooperation requirements): No aspect of that preface suggested that victims of rape cannot seek child support, only that laws in some states are structured in a manner that effectively discourage or present difficult-to-surmount barriers to such action. The primary claim, that 31 states allow a rapist to sue a victim for custody and visitation rights, is far murkier. Unrelated actions decided upon by the Supreme Court in the mid-1990s have upheld state authority over federal authority in cases pertaining to rape. A possible source for the 31 states assertion appears to be a 31 August 2012 item published by The Atlantic titled 31 States Allow Rapists Custody and Visitation Rights. That piece referenced a 2010 law journal article about what might be called a legal loophole, while observing that between 2010 and 2012, several states had amended their laws: That 2012 reporting hinted at one factor pertaining to the claim's accuracy: the passage of time. In 2016, CNN reported that additional states had implemented legislation to address circumstances where the law might not sufficiently protect a victim of rape from being forced to interact with the attacker: CNN's coverage also alluded to another difficulty in precisely determining a rape victim's vulnerability to custody challenges, namely that a rape conviction is necessary in order for the victim to request her attacker's parental rights be severed. The piece observed that the requirement is problematic, as the majority of sexual assaults don't even make it to prosecution, according to Bureau of Justice statistics: The article was footnoted with a state-by-state guide to rights granted to both victims and their attackers, laws which very rarely appeared to resemble one another. For instance, the burden of proof in the state of Michigan was clear and convincing evidence that a child was conceived through sexual assault, but the alphabetically-adjacent state of Minnesota [did] not currently have any legislation protecting mothers who conceived their child through rape from facing their attackers over custody and visitation rights. Whether those laws have changed since 2016 is unclear, and the details of such laws vary to a point where comparison between them is effectively impossible. The meme's fundamental premise (that 31 states allow a rapist to sue a victim for custody and visitation rights) is somewhat flawed in the sense that we could not find any state with a law on its books expressly permitting the perpetrator of a rape, convicted or not, to subsequently re-traumatize his victim using the court as a weapon (as opposed to states that lack laws expressly prohibiting such conduct). Determining a specific number of states in which rapists are not prevented from seeking access to the children of their victims is virtually impossible due not only to rapidly changing laws, but also to broad differences in how such a legal barriers might be enacted in any given state.
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