“The one who insists he was first in the line Is the last to remember her name”
“Pretty In Pink” by The Psychedelic Furs
There is an urban legend about a brutal college practice called Rodeo: A fat girl is enticed to a room where she has sex with a man “doggie style”. At a certain point a signal is given and people rush in: The object of the “game” is to keep having sex with the girl whilst she struggles , to hold her for 10, hence rodeo. Nasty, huh. Probably happened.
In the Campus Comedy film genre one can sometimes hear references to “doing the football team”. It refers to a (normally drunk) girl having sex with an entire football team (voluntarily) in one session. Certainly happened.
Slang language is laced with terms to describe situations where one woman has sex with multiple men (e.g. “She pulling a train”, “gangbang”). These words and phrases exist because these things happen.
Now virtually no man would like to think their sister or mother might have unloaded a gang of men in one sitting, or that their wife or girlfriend may have been gleefully spit roasted* whilst a crowd cheered. It would send a shudder down male spines thinking that their womenfolk might have been used and abused in that way. Yet would that stop a man from joining the queue? Probably not.
With a full surge of sex hormones and lust signals from the Limbic system, one is not thinking “This is someone’s little girl”. Glans command does the ordering, neo-cortex is dismissed from duties. The primitive brain takes charge. Someone’s little girl gets it.
Who are we to judge whether that free woman can or cannot engage in that activity. Who is to say it is wrong or harmful or bad? We have been hearing for years that women are bawdier than we (men) can imagine and that they are free do whatever their consenting minds direct them to do. “Suits us”, say men. “Us too” say modern women. A perfect alignment of modern freedoms and primitive lusts.
Well, that is one way of looking at it.
But what happens when it all goes wrong? When the girl is insensate or unwilling? When she is the victim of a Rodeo or similar humiliation?
You have a rape, thats what.
The recent fuss about an alleged gang rape of a 17 year girl by several top football (soccer) players is making this topical. The details of story are sketchy, but something very bad happened in a central London hotel and a now is girl is alleging she was gang raped. The papers, of course, are all over the story.
The names of the alleged rapists are being posted on the Internet and the police are beginning what looks like a witch hunt trawl:
Detectives investigating the football gang-rape claims are to broaden their inquiry to examine other possible allegations against the players. Scotland Yard is expected to liaise with other police forces in this country, and possibly abroad, to look at the past behaviour of the stars.
(I can remember a time when the past behaviour of the victim was a strong factor in rape cases (”She was a slut”, “She slept with three men in three weeks”, “She wore a short skirt”), now it is the accused who are being subjected to the same unfairness.)
This case is very worrying for a variety of reasons. I would like to explore some of them here.
First and foremost, a young girl may have been gang raped. This could be personal disaster for the victim and for football and those accused of the crime. What more the response to the case has highlighted some worrying facts: It would appear that the progress that has been made regarding anonymity for those accused of rape is easily undone by loose lipped police sources and the Internet. It appears that old evidence gathering techniques are still being used which are dangerous and discredited. It show that several meme-streams ( anti-male, anti-celebrity and anti-footballer) are combining into a super-meme that may strongly prejudice the accused. It appears that political meddling in the rape matters is hampered the fight against rape and damages both the innocent accused and the real victims. And finally, it shows that the media cannot act responsibly in these situations because the very nature of modern news reporting makes it impossible, yet the media is still being “played” by interested parties who imagine it can be directed to support their agenda. It cannot, and the unintended consequences of their efforts are extremely deleterious.
Anonymity for rape accused
Merely being accused of rape can destroy a man. There have been dozens cases, some high profile (John Leslie) where men have been falsely accused and had their lives ruined. There is anecdotal evidence of spiteful mothers using such accusations to help their case in the family courts. Several prostitutes have made false claims (probably hoping to pay for their retirement from the post-trial civil case). No matter how ludicrous and far fetched, the police need to take all such allegations completely seriously. Real rape victims not only have to compete for police resources with liars and spiteful false accusers, but when these cases are thrown out of court, some women get the idea that there is a crisis in the justice system that needs urgent attention.
There is no crisis. A senior barrister gives an insight into what is happening:
“A leading barrister today sparked a storm of controversy by claiming too many young women are crying rape.Jonathan Davies, who also sits as a Crown Court recorder, spoke out as an increasingly high number of rape trials end with the suspect walking free.”
He said: “The offence of rape is being downgraded and acquittals are increasing. Young women should be told the truth: juries will not convict when the complaint is, ‘Yes we went to bed but he wouldn’t stop’.
“Juries will go on thinking this no matter how much campaigners inveigh against the unfairness of the system to women. It is a truth that is producing acquittal after acquittal. Yet the Crown Prosecution Service and the police are still afraid of saying, ‘This case will never succeed’.
“Instead, they pass it on to the person up the decision chain until an individual decision becomes entwined with a policy of prosecuting and complaint, however ridiculous.” [Source: http://www.thisislondon.com/news/articles/528478]
So false accusations damage genuine rape victims, they destroy innocent men, they heighten fear of rape and they sows misandy. By protecting the identity of the accused, one does not damage the real victim who want justice delivered by the court. It does however frustrate the false accuser. By not protecting the identity of men accused of rape, enormous powers are given to vindictive women who can exploit it for malicious reasons or simple financial and sometime psychological gain.
The definition of rape - like the definition of racism - keeps expanding because the government is under political pressure to solve the false problem of low conviction rates. The conviction rate will improve dramatically once proper prophylactics against false accusations are in place (anonymity for the accused, prosecutions for perjury and perverting the course of justice).
As I wrote previously, all the while rapists operate on the streets, brutally raping women who might have been protected had the detectives looking for such rapists not spent hundreds of hours chasing false leads and investigating false claims.
There is good news.
It would appear that the argument is being (partly) won. The Home Office has acknowledged that false rape accusations are a problem and can destroy lives, so their response is to allow men to have “their identity concealed up until the time they are charged”. This is no good. This still means that mean falsely accused and charged will be hurt. And we know from barrister Jonathan Davies (above) that being charged is almost inevitable because “police are still afraid of saying, ‘This case will never succeed’”. So it delays the damage, but does not stop it. But it is positive development even if it has been done for no other reason than to head of Conservative demands for anonymity.
It is also a good sign that the woman who accuse Neil and Christine Hamilton of raping her , Nadine Milroy-Sloan, was prosecuted and sent to prison for three years for two charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice. Hamilton labelled her “a gold-digging little slut who has now been properly punished. Let this be a lesson to all the others of her ilk not to follow her example…I think the sentence is just because she committed not just a crime against the Hamiltons by falsely accusing us, but against all genuine victims of rape and sexual assault,” he said [ source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/14/nmilr14.xml].
Considering the above, I have to ask: Why has this case been fed to the press? Knowing it would prejudice the case and harm the players, why did the police leak it? Did the UK press want their own Kobe Bryant [ see http://news.google.com/news?q=Kobe+Bryant ] like circus this winter?
Internet privacy
Assuming we get anonymity for the accused (as discussed above). It will be rendered completely useless unless police/press relations are not overhauled and protections put in place for the accused.
In the age of the internet, nothing stays private for long. As soon as people have even a tiny bit of information, a collective effort is underway to identify participants. Rumours and guesses vie with facts for attention and credibility. Kooky theories and exaggerations abound. In a the fact starved environment strange mental flora bloom. This is particularly true of the already famous (although as the recent White House spy case is showing, one can be made famous by the process). It is a feedback loop. No one controls it, it is emergent behaviour, and there is little anyone can do to stop it. The best policy is not to start it.
The alleged gang rape of a 17 year old in a London hotel room might make the national newspapers - for one day. A real media frenzy is only activated when fame is added to the mix. Any suggestion of it should be left out of police press releases or statements. Not only is it irrelevant but it adds the media complication factor to a case and it tarnishes the assumed innocent man as a rapist.
Methods of investigating sex crimes (the trawl)
Another worry I have reading about this case is the way police investigate this and other sex crimes. It seems they are still continuing with a tactic known as the trawl despite forensic psychologists objecting strongly to the practice. Gisli Gudjonsson, world renowned expert and author of “The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A Handbook” says
“I believe false confessions today are less of a problem than false allegations. There is accumulating research evidence that it is much easier for people to make up false allegations, even serious allegations, than the courts realise.“People are often too eager to help the police. They may have an over-extended imagination. If the police ask all the people from a certain care home, ‘Were you abused?’ Even that may be sufficient for people to think, ‘Maybe it happened to me then, even though I don’t remember it. I think I was abused. Yes, I must have been abused.’
[Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/story/0,3605,861305,00.html ]
It is with this in mind that I read that
“Detectives investigating the football gang-rape claims are to broaden their inquiry to examine other possible allegations against the players. Scotland Yard is expected to liaise with other police forces in this country, and possibly abroad, to look at the past behaviour of the stars. [Source: http://www.thisislondon.com/news/articles/6957609]
What does this mean? It looks suspiciously like a trawl to me. So much for presumption of innocence.
Anti-footballer or anti-male?
I am anticipating the onslaught from feminist pundits. There anti-footballer meme, already well propagated by the media and widely supported by feminists, is getting a strong boost. Footballers are the heroes of unreconstructed masculinity and idolised hundreds of millions of boys and men across the world. This makes them figures of hate for anti-male elements and predictably they come under attack for doing typically “male” things - fighting and fucking (although, this generally includes women). They are also a useful control point: Get them to change their behaviour and you can gain massive social engineering leverage as the boys and men who imitate those men change too. Or so the theory goes.
“If only we can get Beckham to sit when he urinates, we can eradicate the hinged toilet seat!”
May justice prevail.
{ 0 comments… add one now }