Where Are The Headlines For Those Who Don’t Come Forward?

The Telegraph reports today that a woman was sentenced to 8 months in prison for falsely retracting a rape accusation. Not falsely accusing, falsely retracting a claim. The full story can be read here, and Rape Crisis’s statement here. Briefly, the woman went to the police, and reported that her husband had raped her 6 times on 3 occasions. Several months into the trial, she contacted the police to drop the charges. When the court proceeded, and she was arrested for perverting the course of justice, she admitted that the allegations had been true but she had been emotionally blackmailed by her husband’s family to drop the charges so he would receive a lesser penalty.

This story is chilling on a number of levels: it continues a trend of women being prosecuted when rape cases they have brought fail, and on a wider scale makes women far less likely to come forward. Unless you’re raped by a complete stranger in a dark alley, you can expect clouds of doubt, questions about your behaviour, and whether you brought it upon yourself. If you know, or even worse, you’ve dated or previously consented to sleep with your rapist, you can expect the sympathy to dwindle. If you had a drink beforehand, or were wearing, well practically anything, ditto. Stranger rape accounts for a small fraction of rapes reported, and yet it’s still viewed as a yardstick by which to judge how much someone has suffered. Never mind the emotional torment bound up in being raped by someone you’ve trusted, or even loved. Whoopi Goldberg was able to claim that Roman Polanski drugging and raping a minor wasn’t “rape rape” without much backlash.

And the way society views rape by someone who is known to you, and assumes that you could have prevented it, is massively damaging. I can count, from the top of my head, 11 women I know, myself included, who’ve been raped. They all knew their rapist, two-thirds were raped by an ex-boyfriend. None of them went to the police. It all came down to one reason: they knew they wouldn’t be believed, or if it did go to court would go nowhere due to lack of evidence. What evidence can you provide? Several of them had been drinking before being raped. Some had shared a room with the perpetrator. None of us felt able to go to the police. Perhaps most worrying is that two of them were law students.

I can’t see this getting any better under the current government with their grandstanding over anonymity for defendants in rape cases, and the fact that forces are now being pulled up for handling rape cases abysmally shows how rotten the system is. But I know that everytime the tabloids report and vilify a woman who’s been prosecuted, women read the story, and a large number decide there’s no point reporting rape.

As a friend asked recently: where are the headlines for women who don’t come forward, for fear of not being believed?

Your Freedom: A Cynic’s View

The government’s  Your Freedom site has attracted a fair amount of interest since its launch yesterday, and is the second high-profile public consultation since the formation of the coalition government. It’s an interesting concept, but despite the initial public interest, I suspect it will be as low impact as the consultation on cuts. Much as the spending cuts consultation framed the debate so that cuts were portrayed as inevitable, Your Freedom posits that scrapping legislation is the only way to secure civil liberties. This is patently not true in all cases: repealing the Human Rights Act, as a case in point. But essentially, that’s besides the point. The government have decided which laws to repeal or modify: they are using this exercise as a savvy way to give the impression of public inclusion in law-making. One contributer on the site described himself as a:

Long time voter; first time legislator.

depicting the manner in which the public are intended to view their role in this exercise. But contributing doesn’t make you a legislator: you’re not in government. Most of you probably didn’t vote for them either. The site is tokenistic, poorly designed and serves only as an exercise to make the government seem liberal and concerned with civil liberties whilst they refuse to intervene in the forced eviction of Democracy Village protesters that can be seen from MPs’ windows.

As much credibility could be gained, surely from looking at laws that garnered particularly intense backlash in the media and through protests, such as the extension of detention for terror suspects, certain SOCPA powers (especially regarding photography), the Digital Economy Bill and, I don’t know, the fact that several thousand people stood outside the coalition negotiations telling Nick Clegg not to give up on the prospect of electoral reform for a little power.

The site isn’t all bad though. Two people have called for the repeal of Sod’s Law and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The government may be stronger than we suspect if they can pull that off.

Photograph by Lewishamdreamer used under Creative Commons Licence.