Rape occurrences up, says the Times
The Times reported the other day that the number of reported rapes in England and Wales has gone up by a substantial amount (though the only statistic they quoted was for 2002, with around 11,700 reported, and an assumption that the real figure was four times that), although the conviction rate has fallen to a record low of 5.6%, and the article notes that this low rate is a source of disappointment for the police, government and Crown Prosecution Service, who “have succeeded in encouraging more and more women to come forward to report rape but still too many cases never get into court”. The article also notes the rise of rapes of drunk women, which now exceeds attacks using sedatives like Rohypnol.
The story didn’t make it to the Guardian, which is probably a good thing because it would then have led to an op-ed piece by someone a lot like the loathsome Julie Bindel. Bindel runs a group called Justice for Women, which might be better called Leniency for Female Murderers, and campaigns on behalf of women who kill violent partners. Many of their well-known cases involve women who have actually stabbed their husbands as they slept. Some of their cases are legitimate, but they have also helped to establish a culture in which “cumulative provocation” is somehow seen as justified in a case of premeditated murder.
Feminists like Bindel have propounded a series of lies over the years, among them:
(1) Women don’t lie about rape
(2) There’s no difference between archetypal rape and “date rape”
(3) A woman’s history is of no importance
(4) No always means no
The first contention can be proven false; men have been convicted of rape, and then their convictions overturned on appeal, after women have given false testimony that they have been raped. Even young girls have been known to do this, notably in the case of Roger Beardmore.
The difference between archetypal rape and “date rape” is not in its seriousness, but in the difficulty of proving the case. Archetypal rape is violent, usually involving a woman attacked in the street or some other public place, or by intruders in her home, and leaves physical injuries. If a female college student who takes a male student into her room comes out with these sorts of injuries, then it can be assumed to be rape; otherwise, it simply can’t, unless the man admits it. This is the main reason why so many rape cases fail – lack of physical evidence, and it’s no good to claim, as Bindel did after the Soham murder case, that “it is rare to find a case where there is no corroborative evidence, when the police and CPS have looked for it”, unless the evidence actually points to the man raping the woman. The guy being a thug or a general nasty piece of work (like a lot of the dead men in Bindel’s murder cases are alleged to be) doesn’t count.
Date rapes are more likely also to have complicating external factors, such as the complaint being motivated by a personal grudge or being a reaction to a personal offence against the complainant (like two-timing or otherwise doing “the dirty”). It’s necessary for the court to know why a woman might make the accusation.
In some cases, a woman’s history is brought up where it has no relevance (as in a particularly awful case in Scotland, where a girl who was raped in the street was told in court to hold her underwear up for all to see, and read out the slogan). In others, it could well be relevant, as in the case referred to in this piece at Harry’s Place, in which the defendant “was not permitted to cross examine on the undisputed fact that the complainant was a prostitute, and that – according to the defendant – the complaint had followed his refusal to pay her”. (I once listened to a late-night phone-in programme in which a woman from a major women’s magazine was being interviewed, and a man called in about an “extraordinary” rape case in which a man ran off without paying the prostitute and was charged with rape. The woman thought it right and proper that an act which would otherwise constitute breach of contract or theft was in this case rape, because the “trade” was sex. The woman then took exception to the man’s accent, saying he sounded rather disgusting, and asked the host to cut him off, which he did!)
As for the fourth, it’s undisputable that if a woman is up front that she does not wish to have sex and is coerced, that’s rape. It does happen, however, that a woman will sometimes tell a man to stop during sex without actually wanting him to stop, and when he does, she asks him what he stopped for. Say a woman does this a number of times, and the man learns that this is what the woman wants; then she discovers something about the man’s behaviour that she doesn’t like, and cries rape. Of course, it’s necessary that these details are known to the jury, but it’s better that the case not get to court at all.
And that’s how it is with a lot of these cases; the reason a lot of cases don’t get to court is because it’s both wasteful, and undesirable, that cases get to court when all that’s there is a man’s word against a woman’s (and this applies in any case where all that’s there is an accusation). Where there is a lack of concrete evidence, both sides resort to intrusions into each other’s private lives, assassinations of character and mention of irrelevant details, and the jury may well make a subjective judgement on the basis of each litigant’s performance. We need more pre-trial filtering of cases, not less, and it’s not only men accused of rape who will benefit, but anyone accused on the basis of shaky evidence.
