The Independent reported on that “debate” about rape at LSE that Luke Gittos of Spiked considers an important contribution to the “discussion around rape.” You can tell from the very first sentence that what we have here is not an important contribution but an opportunity for someone to be showily “provocative” and “controversial” about a crime against other people.
A leading barrister has waded into provocative territory with comments that people shouldn’t assume that in rape “the victim is utterly innocent.”
Right, just as it’s “provocative territory” to say that in murder or assault with a deadly weapon or grievous bodily harm people shouldn’t assume that “the victim is utterly innocent” – or to put it another way that the victim is a victim.
Here’s the thing about that: it doesn’t matter whether the victim is “utterly innocent” or not; the point is that people don’t get to murder or assault or batter or rape people, PERIOD. You don’t get to punish non-innocent aka guilty people by assaulting them, except in self-defense. Rape is never a form of self-defense. If a woman is about to stab you, rape isn’t the way to stop her.
Barbara Hewson attacked the “ideology of sexual victimisation” during a debate at the London School of Economics, and questioned the long-term damage rape causes.
The ideology is it. And I suppose there’s an ideology of vital victimization around murder, is there? Or in murder do we just accept that the victim is a victim, by definition?
The article in Critical Legal Thinking that Gittos so scorned had this to say about Hewson’s status as a “leading barrister”:
Prior to the LSE debate, Hewson was probably best known outside the legal world for her regular and often provocative contributions to online magazine Spiked, and her public defence of another barrister’s description of a 13-year old child sex abuse victim as ‘predatory’. Hewson has variously been referred to in the media as a ‘leading’ and ‘prominent’ barrister, but Hewson does not practice in criminal law and it is unclear what expertise she possesses with respect to the issue of rape that led the LSE to deem her qualified to take part in this debate.
The Indy quotes some of Hewson’s contribution to the “discussion around rape”:
“The first,” she said, “is the idea that rape and sexual abuse is very widespread but largely unrecognised even by victims themselves who need to be taught to realise what’s really happened.
“Secondly, that it has long term damaging effects. Thirdly that its morally absolutely unambiguous, the victim is utterly innocent and the victimiser is utterly guilty and this is infinitesimal. And finally that claims of victimisation must always be respected, anything less is victim-blaming.”
I look forward to her contributions to “debates” about murder and assault.
Is there any other crime where the accused has the right to a presumption of innocence but the accuser does not?
it‘s
sounds about right, by definition
wut
it’s very, very tiny? wtf?
This mentality is based on the idea that sexuality is wrong, dirty, and damaging only for the female. Women who have sex are no longer “innocent” because innocence is something that exists between our legs. That virgin/whore dichotomy – if you’re not one, you are the other. So the burden is on the female (they don’t seem to care what age) to prove she falls in the first category. Actually, it’s not even women and girls who have sex, it’s any female human who shows any signs of having sexuality at all. Because sex is for men, and women and girls = sex. So you can’t blame a guy for using a woman (or girl child) for what she is made for, unless she goes to great lengths to present herself as a thoroughly asexual being.
I can’t believe people still think this way in the 21st Century. It’s Puritanical bullshit. Not edgy, not provocative, just the.same.old.shit.
Well … I guess it might be possible, but I’d want to see quite a bit of hard evidence. You know, extraordinary claims and all that shit. It certainly isn’t the way to bet.
And if it’s both true and relevant to the case, then wouldn’t that essentially have to mean that she raped him? Again, not impossible, but extremely unlikely.
Or in other words, no, I don’t believe that.
Furthermore, based on Hewson’s arguments alone, I’d conclude that the girl was certainly an innocent victim … these “arguments” are both disgusting, hard to believe, and don’t do a thing to shift the blame even if I did believe them.
I wonder what it is in her past that makes her say shit like this … but I’m not an experienced enough armchair psychologist to hazard a guess.
Seldom have I seen such an unconnected analogy.
OK there would be blame attached to falling drunkenly off a stool but that doesn’t apply here. It’s more like me smashing somebody around the head with a bar stool then claiming that a totally sober person would have been able to duck out of the way. Funnily enough I can’t see that one flying as a defence.
Wait I’ve got it – a bloke is innocently showing off the effects of a viagra overdose and a drunken woman trips and impales herself on his penis several times. That must be the scenario Barbara Hewson is thinking of, and. I retract my previous doubting of her logic.
@khms, she was considered “predatory” because she was “experienced” … So there was some suggestion that her previous victimisation by paedophiles meant she was socialised to offer sex to men. Apparently this makes her a “predator” and presumably the adults involved were poor weak men who are unable to say no to sex with children when it’s offered to them. So they are saying that men are unable to control themselves when presented with a 13yr old victim of child abuse. Presumably therefore these men are the victims. Totally ridiculous, but that’s what some people believe apparently.
@6 oolon, yeah, and then they tell us that feminists are the ones who hate men.
While I don’t agree with Ms. Hewson’s comments, I don’t think the murder analogy works here. Nobody ever falsely accused someone of having murdered them. False accusations by the victim of assault or other crimes, yes. Murder no. In addition (Dr. Kevorkian being the exception) there’s no real credence that will be given to a claim that the murder victim actually wanted it.
I remain baffled by the idea that a 13 yo child can be considered a predator though.
johnmckay (#1) –
Not with any legal standing, no. But you will hear scum try to defend those who hunted down and killed people after their attacker was no longer a threat. There are cases where robbers a store owner who fights them off (which is self-defense) and the robbers escape. Then the owner leaves the store to shoot and kill them instead of (or before) calling the police.
Somehow I suspect that Hewson and those who agree with her comments about rape would also defend those who cross the line from self-defense to murder, or defend a Rodney King-type assault because the person “resisted” (read: writhed in pain while being assaulted).
Beth @8: Are you saying no one has ever faked their own murder for some reason? I find that hard to believe – in fact, impossible. Sometimes suicides do just that, knowing their insurance won’t pay out on a suicide. At that point, suspicion will fall on someone, perhaps on a lot of someones, all of whom are as innocent as the man accused in a false rape accusation.
And false rape accusations are rare, in spite of what you may have heard.
Yes, people have faked their murders, but they can’t simultaneously point to someone and testify in court pointing at the accused and saying ‘he murdered me’. That means the analogy of murder to rape doesn’t work here.
The reports I’ve read indicate that false rape accusations occur at about the same rate as false reports of other crimes. It’s a low percentage, but I don’t think we should simply dismiss such crimes. Telling a victim that such things hardly ever happen so you are going to assume they are lying about it, and if it did happen, it’s was their fault for not being careful enough seems wrong to me, whether you are talking to a victim of rape or a victim of a false accusation.
Beth,
Are you serious?
FFS.
Beth@11:
Even disregarding cases where people fake their own murders, it’s entirely possible for someone to be wrongly accused of murder every bit as much as someone can be wrongly accused of rape. Obviously not by the victim but that’s not strictly necessary to make the analogy work. Making it work here, it’s completely possible for the defendant in a murder case to be falsely accused but that mere possibility does not lead us to conclude that no murder took place. Right?
But this is something that drives me crazy about arguments surrounding analogy. Whenever someone offers an analogy someone objects to it on the grounds that it doesn’t perfectly coincide with the target of the analogy. Well no, of course not. That’s because it’s an analogy and not a description of what happened. Analogies are — by their very definition! — not identical to the state of affairs to which they are offered as comparisons.
No one so much as suggested or implied that we should simply dismiss “such crimes” or that we “are going to assume they are lying about it.” Who are you trying to argue with here?