Sex
with drunken women could be rape, review to signal – Telegraph.
Harriet Harman is an enormous threat to liberty and justice. She has
commissioned a study into how to "improve" the conviction rate for rape.
Rape is by its nature a difficult crime to prosecute. It is often not
witnessed. I am sure many rapists go unpunished, either because women do
not report the offence or because there is insufficient corroboration.
That's sad, but the cries to lower the standard of proof for rape are no
solution. A conviction rate is not "improved" by convicting the
innocent. Just as dangerous is the wheeze thrown up by the report Harman
commissioned.
I agree completely with the report's author, Baroness Stern, when she
said (of men who commit rape when drunk):
who become drunk are responsible for their actions. It is not the
alcohol that commits the rape… It is not an excuse. It used to be
regarded as such, but it is not…"
Exactly. The only
way to handle the dis-inhibiting effects of alcohol is to hold drinkers
accountable for what they do when drunk. In some ways, this may seem a
bit unfair. Most of us have made choices we regretted under the
influence of alcohol. But the alternative is to provide people with too
easy an excuse for their unwise actions. But how can someone capable of
articulating that thought go on to argue that a drunken woman's consent
to sex is invalid? How quaint to argue that men are accountable not only
for their own actions when drunk, but for those of women too.
This
will make bad law. Very bad law. At the very least, men will be
blackmailed by women who will falsely claim, after the event, that their
consent was invalid. How can it ever be disproved? Even a woman who was
stone cold sober could lie. Innocent men will be wrongly convicted
because it is impossible to assess (the effects of alcohol varying as
they do by individual and by occasion) whether a woman consented or not.
This proposal is vile, unjust and typically puritanical. On Labour's
past record that's good reason to expect it soon to be law; further
de-normalising relations between the sexes in the UK.








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