I am not saying that a crime should not be prosecutable by the state if the victim does not fight back. I am saying that lack of physical evidence renders it unprosecutable whether we like it or not, and that the insistence on prosecuting such cases regardless of their unprosecutable nature leads to the kind of nonsense we are witnessing on the Assange case.

Damages are a totally separate issue and therefore are a matter for civil courts. The word ‘crime’ doesn’t even figure in these matters: one is compensated for damages, not a crime, and a crime need not even occur for damages to be legally present. This has been so for centuries. I didn’t move the goalposts: these are totally different and separate ones.

I don’t take it personally at all that you dismissed my comparison as “stupid”, since that was simply part of the misdirection tactic. I suspect that you’d have used the same ploy regardless of who it was that pointed out the silliness of your argument insisting that crime victims must physically fight back and put themselves at further risk before they could ask the state to prosecute the criminals.

In the case of rape – a “successful” rape – the damage is permanent and irreversible – just like after nurser, albeit arguably lesser in degree. You could just as well imply that a victim should not put up a fight against a murder attempt for fear of getting killed.

Three years of the degree, and 12 more of working in the Lord Chancellor’s Office, I resigned, completely disillusioned about the whole thing. The Law is an impersonal and unfeeling machine that exists to reward vested interests, but you don’t realise this when you start out- only gradually. It has nothing to do with Truth and Justice at all. It’s about Politics and Control.

When llamas said earlier that we must have studied at different Law schools he was exactly right, we did. For different times and places makes all the difference.

I graduated in the early 70′s. The Law on Rape then was fairly simple. There was Rape Rape (the nasty pounce from the bushes kind) and there was Statutory Rape (the underage kind). There were no other kinds. I just checked with google and find that the 2003 Sexual Offences Act now includes Anal Penetration and Oral Penetration, when they were not there before (no wonder Bill Clinton, a lawyer, kept insisting “I did not have sex with that woman!). There was no “Date Rape” either when I took my exams.

So what I am saying basically is that Law has been politicised. Feminists have taken over this particular one (Rape) with a vengance.

The likes of Harriet Harridan has often expressed the view that there are not enough convictions for “Rape” She will quote figures like 70% of all rapes go unreported. Erm… well how the hell do you know that, if they are unreported? Unwishful thinking or the back of an envelope calculation? This is the Law used as an instrument of Political and Social Oppression, not Truth and Justice as I thought I understood it as a naive 18 year old.

Rape is the only crime I know that the accuser remains anonymous and the alleged perpetrator is named before the trial. This is just not on if Truth and Justice is our goal.

Why? Well according to the Harriets of this world it encourages the victims to come forward and “Get Justice done”. It might even get other women who recognise the name of the assailant to come forward and give corroborative evidence.

Um, so why does not witholding the name of the alleged victim do the same? There may be blokes out there who have been falsely accused of rape by the same lady, been found innocent and have no chance to add to the current case, and help to prove the current defendants innocence.

Anononymity for alleged victims has to go. If they were assaulted by knife gun or baseball bat, they would be known, but assault by the pork sword… no.

We really have to get to grips with what various factions and interests are doing to our once majestic Common Law, or it becomes the Law of Rules, not the Rule Of Law.

Rape and Robbery are two quite different things. If your wallet is found in the possession of the local trackie wearing chav junkie, chances are it is not there with your consent.

However, if you have sex with a woman then more often than not it will be with their permission.

While I’m not talking about legal requirements here, from a purely pragmatic point of view struggling so as to provide physical evidence with which to later on differentiate rape from consensual sex is just common sense.

Then she better fight him with all her might – even if he does overpower her, at least she may have created some physical evidence. In such a case I would be more than happy to call it a rape, and see any such evidence used against the bastard.

This is as stupid as demanding that for (e.g.) cases of robbery and mugging the victims must always fight back and put themselves at great risk of severe bodily harm or death, because they should only be allowed to press charges if they surrendered their valuables to the criminal after they were killed, knocked unconscious, or otherwise incapacitated.

Because otherwise the state has no right to interfere in these private ‘he said she said’ monetary transaction disputes between individuals.

If somebody perjures their testimony or by similar means attempts to get somebody judicially punished then the intentional perjurer should be charged and tried and, if convicted (with a level of proof appropriate to a criminal conviction), should be sentenced to the same sentence they were intending to inflict through perjury.

These counter charges should carry a very high burden of proof and not be brought for less than clear, grand jury level, appearance of intent. These counter charges must not be brought for errors or unreliable memories. They must only be brought on evidence of intent to deceive the judicial process and intent to use the process itself to commit a crime (via the wrongful sentence). Absent intent, no charges. A criminal level of proof for conviction.

My opinion of this matter is heavily influenced by having grown up in a county where three prosecutors (one of whom I think I voted for) and four deputy sheriffs over the course of years repeatedly and knowingly attempted to frame a rather unsympathetic lowlife for capital murder that they knew he did not commit. A neighboring jurisdiction even had the murderer in custody for a similar murder and he had confessed in detail to the one that my county was attempting to hang on a thief. The LE community protects its own and the 7 taxpayer funded attempted murderers escaped a criminal conviction but the tax payers were out millions in civil proceedings (not to mention the cost of defending the tax payer funded murder attempters).

I suspect that false charges of all kinds would be reduced if everyone who ever contemplated making them had to worry whether they had left any evidence of their intentions. And further, had to worry about receiving a sentence of the same magnitude as they are attempting to inflict via the judicial process.

“She said I could go to
second base, so she has
nothing to complain about
if I went for the home run
- three times. While she
was asleep.”

Then she better fight him with all her might – even if he does overpower her, at least she may have created some physical evidence. In such a case I would be more than happy to call it a rape, and see any such evidence used against the bastard.

My point is that both men and women would do well not getting themselves into a ‘he said she said’ kind of situation in the first place, but if they still choose to do so (and I have nothing against casual sex per se), they should be prepared to bear the risk of not being able to prove the guilt of the attacker. Freedom without personal responsibility is meaningless and unsustainable.

Off the soapbox now.

*I do realize very well that even in cases of real rape clear objective evidence may be hard to come by or even unavailable for all kinds of reasons (which, BTW, also happens in cases of murder). But in cases such as the ones we are discussing here, such *objective* evidence is unavailable due to their very nature. They don’t call it ‘he said she said’ for nothing.

I absolutely agree with the rest of your comments.

We used to have essentially two types of rape: forcible rape (violent sexual contact) and statutory rape (consensual sexual contact with someone who is defined, by statute, as lacking the necessary capacity for consent: i.e., underage). Now we have a whole range of activities between those extremes which are all catagorized as “rape”. Once upon a time they had different names (generally, “sexual assault” in various degrees), which made perfect sense. The fact that they are all now commonly referred to as “rape” tells volumes about our society. Anti-male feminists have succeeded in defining down the term. That re-definition must be resisted, and neither Johnathan nor Llamas does us any favors by accepting, and thereby perpetuating, this change. Words matter.

And I still believe that everything, even rape, is a proper subject for humor, its seriousness notwithstanding. Indeed, the more serious a subject the more it demands the application of humor.