Rape convictions won't improve "until women stop getting drunk"?

...says Judge Mary Jane Mowatt.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11056243/Rape-conviction-statistics-wont-improve-until-women-stop-getting-drunk-says-retired-female-judge.html

"It is inevitable that it is one person's word against another, and the burden of proof is that you have to be sure before you convict.

"I'm not saying it is right to rape a drunken woman and I'm not saying for a moment that it's allowable to take advantage of a drunken woman.

"But juries are in a position where they've got a woman who says: 'I was absolutely off my head, I can't really remember what I was doing, I can't remember what I said, I can't remember if I consented or not but I know I wouldn't have done'.

"When a jury is faced with something like that, how are they supposed to react?"

Katie Russell (from Rape Crisis England) disagrees: "...the legal responsibility is on the defendant to evidence how they sought and received that consent, not on the survivor to recall every detail of events"

Thoughts on this? Do you agree or disagree with her? Why?

Scroll to see replies

Reply 1

Wee.Guy

Original post by HeavyTeddy

Katie Russell (from Rape Crisis England) disagrees: "...the legal responsibility is on the defendant to evidence how they sought and received that consent, not on the survivor to recall every detail of events"

she is advocating guilty till proved innocent which is totally wrong.

Reply 2

lamyers1

The judge is totally right in that a woman saying "I would never have consented but I can't remember what I said" is not admissible in court, you can't convict someone based on that. The woman from Rape Crisis England has a biased point of view, in that she is actively trying to increase the number of convictions, so will promote a way of doing this.

Reply 3

Mackay

Original post by Wee.Guy

she is advocating guilty till proved innocent which is totally wrong.

Agreed! Worrying statement. Really ill-advised.

Spot on

Original post by HeavyTeddy

As other have said.... it's really worrying someone for such a group would even say that :K:

Sorry for using the F word but this stinks of Feminism..... *waiting for abuse*

Reply 6

Sanctimonious

Original post by HeavyTeddy

Yes lets go back to the days of the Tudors. Just what everyone wants. :rolleyes:

Reply 7

andrew2209

If people want to stop "rape culture", and all these situations where women can't recall having sex, then I think we need to teach people at school about the dangers of alcohol, excessive drinking, and personal responsibility. It would go a lot further in dealing with the issue of drunken sex, than simply telling men "not to rape".

Reply 8

Old_Simon

This issue is always just so heavily clouded by the very difficult and unfortunate fact that many young women seem to want and enjoy casual sex but prefer to go out half naked and to get drunk first before they "pull". The dangers are obvious but anyone who takes the brave step of pointing out this dichotomy is accused of blaming the victim. The judge is quite right. A huge number of these very messy cases come before the courts. There is also no doubt true that skilled sexual predators seek to take advantage of drunken girls for the very reason that the issue of consent is then going to be very difficult to prove.

Reply 9

Le Nombre

Rape full stop is difficult to prove.

The same can be said for rape by an acquaintance when sober. 'I went round to his room in halls to work on a uni project, he locked the door, pinned me down and raped me'. 'I didn't'.

It's not beyond reasonable doubt, though you may well think it fairly likely on the balance of probabilities.

Reply 10

miser

Seems right. No witnesses, one person's word against another's, defendant can't even remember - if there isn't evidence of the crime, how can a jury possibly determine what happened?

Reply 11

MagicNMedicine

A lot of guys will take the default position of agreeing with this and taking the moral position "women shouldn't get completely off their faces" and that if they do, they forfeit the right to the protection of the rule of law because they took a decision to put themselves in a vulnerable position.

But I expect a lot of these guys expect the right to get completely off their faces themselves, and do so on regular occasions, some nights by 2am they don't know where they are.

So if one time another guy decides that it's time to introduce them to some sexual experimentation when they were in that state, and pins them face down whilst raping them, how would their view on consent and the rule of law come in there?

Realistically should it be for the rule of law to protect a man when he has voluntarily got wasted and off his face? I expect a lot of guys in that situation would start whining like a bitch about the 'shame' and how one drunken shag has 'ruined their lives'.

When you think how many men are out every weekend in a state of complete inebriation, think of the possibilities if they are no longer protected by the rule of law.

Reply 12

orange crush

It's all very well trying to increase convictions but you can't do that if it is coupled with locking away innocent people. The sad state of affairs is that rape is very difficult to prove.

We talk about women being "too drunk to consent reasonably", but then can a man plead that he was "too drunk to realise she was too drunk to consent reasonably" and then we're stuck in an infinite loop.

Reply 13

Le Nombre

Original post by MagicNMedicine

Think you have to accept the nature of witness evidence based convictions is you aren't protected.

If I'm that smaashed I can barely remember and someone rapes me, kind of have to just suck up the fact there's no way on Earth I can prove beyond reasonable doubt that it happened.

Any decent barrister will just rip into the, inevitable, holes in your recollection of events, and at that point you're sunk in terms of getting a conviction.

Reply 14

Mackay

The onus for things like rape will always be on the defendant. An accusation is as bad as a conviction.

Reply 15

flyyoufools

It's a bit of an awkward one :/

No, I don't think it's okay to tell people to just stop getting drunk to avoid rape but I do see how it's causing issues where people can't remember exactly what happened. I have friends who have done stuff when drunk but later denied that they'd ever do it out of free choice.

Idk what to say really because it's not okay to tell people not to drink but it's also not okay to accuse someone of a serious crime when you don't actually know if that's the case buuuuut it scares me that someone might get away with rape just because the victim wasn't in a state to recall it properly, despite them knowing it happened :/

Reply 16

username1258398

Original post by flyyoufools

I don't think it's okay to tell people to just stop getting drunk to avoid rape

Why? Will it hurt their feelings?

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 17

flyyoufools

Original post by StrangeBanana

Why?

I don't think it's fair to stop people from doing something they enjoy when it's not the root of the problem. I won't deny that I can see how a rapist might target someone drunk but telling people to stop drinking to avoid it just fuels the 'victim blaming' culture we have surrounding rape and distracts people from one of the main problems; our culture and attitudes. I'm not an idiot and I do realise that rape will never completely disappear because there will always be sick people but we can decrease the amount by educating people about consent and getting rid of 'rape-culture'. Telling people to just not get drunk just goes against that but I'm not saying they shouldn't be careful, there should be a lot more education around getting drunk and staying safe.

Reply 18

UniOfLife

Why is it even a thing to want to increase the conviction rate? From the point of view of justice there is no optimal or desired conviction rate. The unstated assumption here is that lots of the people who are found not guilty of rape are actually guilty but got off because of some fault in the system. We don't take this attitude with other crimes. We don't complain about the conviction rape for murder or theft or any other crime. In all those cases we assume that the justice system works and that, for the most part, those who are guilty are found guilty and those found not guilty are innocent. So why are we having a discussion about how to increase the conviction rate unless we are assuming that in rape cases those found innocent are actually guilty. And that is *******s because they've been tried and found innocent and therefore we should assume they are innocent.

Our default position should be that if the conviction rate is 60% then that is because the CPS is prosecuting innocent people for rape.

Reply 19

username1258398

Original post by flyyoufools

No-one is stopping people from drinking, they're suggesting people refrain from getting so drunk they have no, or little, recollection of the night's events the next day, so that if a crime is committed against them, they can remember it. Drinking in moderation is fine, and so is getting piss-drunk (it's a free country), but people should be aware that the latter will render their testimony of the time when they were piss-drunk too flimsy for court.