For probably the first time, I am in almost complete agreement with David Cameron on the announcements he made today about the appalling conviction rates we have in this country when it comes to rape cases.
What makes the figures even worse is the large number of unreported rapes where people don't go to the police because they know that the chance of a convictions is negligible.
I had a close friend who was raped whilst at University. She was brave enough to tell her friends, but as a student of law, she knew that the amount of evidence in her case meant that a conviction was virtually impossible. It was devastating for her and had a profound affect on us as her friends. She never told us who it was that did this to her, all we knew was he was a student on her law course, which of course made it worse because he knew he was going to get away with it.
There is also a problem with the seriousness with which the police treat sex crimes of this sort. I heard on radio Five Live earlier about a woman whose daughter was raped. the police said they had a cast iron case based on mobile phone evidence. When they turned up in court, the police had made an error and had never kept the mobile phone evidence meaning the case fell apart. When this sort of thing happens, how can anyone trust the police ?
One issue I would have liked to see Cameron address in his speech was the issue of male rape. i have seen statistics before which show that male rape goes almost completely unreported but is much more common than the statistics suggest. Rape is a crime who ever it is perpetrated against and should be treated more seriously in all cases.
The one thing though that worried me about what Cameron said was his quoting of statistics. You see, David Cameron has a history of completely making statistics and facts up out of thin air. So when he said that 50% of young males think they could get away with rape, I have to wonder if this was a soundbite just made up on the spot or genuine and real factual evidence that he can back up. And that, for me sums up the problem with Cameron. His lies and the glib way he makes things up weaken the message when he has something important to say.
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I am in my mid fifties and have never hurt a woman yet but, as an indictment of the society we live in, I have been accused of violence twice and rape once by three separate women and finally violence by my daughter aged ten.
Five potential statistics there and the case for action against myself seems pretty damning but lets look at one set of details (and this needs doing per claim multiplied by the total claims in the population …all claims need investigating or you have no full and effective system of justice).
I was interviewing potential tenants for a house and a strange rather shifty person spent half an hour with me. The next day at short notice an outgoing attractive woman came to look and spent her interview puzzling me by increasingly being sexually provocative (unsuccessfully!) before giving up and telling me she was from Rape Crisis and the previous interviewee had claimed rape against me almost certainly to get on the housing ladder. Rape claims can be as simple as that...and if things go right like this you can breathe again but if things go wrong with the system (eg influenced by pressure groups and lack of resources?...do Rape Crisis check nowadays? I doubt it...are they still in existence even?) a knock on the door can thus lead to an entirely innocent person perhaps dying battered and brain-damaged in prison. In hindsight Im sure Rape Crisis wont be doing these potentially dangerous checks nowadays so the police are your only chance of fair play....so do we really want to lean on them to produce convictions as we’ve started to..
I can detail the false violence claims but it will take too long here and rape claims is the subject so for perspective Ill just mention the child...my loved daughter... contact with whom was taken away because her mother has persuaded the child that the same old violence lie used by her will get her out of the chore of contact. Unbelievably that works! It is so simple and so wrong (delinquent) …and its so simply wrong (legally) We are running less-effectively in this area than an average village court in the Third World.
Votes are an active ingredient in the thwarting of proper legal process and we are generally in an era of cynical scam. This is from the political level to the individual family level. I personally cannot fault the police , as a single island in this, in their ability to rationally check whether they have a true case on their hands (eg it took them 20 minutes once they started investigating to check out the mothers claim of violence and find she had a chain of such claims on record against different men... the last one as recently as three months earlier).
Perhaps I could fault them for not prosecuting her maybe...but at least they didnt put an innocent man behind bars for longer than overnight.
I think people should stop mindlessly lashing out against the police because for sure they are the only rationality around when you need it. Hinder them and there’s none when you are powerless in a world where things are not what they seem.
A feminist could read this and say ah-ha the police were male-orientated and so they let myself …an 'obviously violent' man …walk free but actually the claimant was a pregnant ex-police officer, ie 'one of their own' which is really the strongest hand re bias, so (by Ockhams Razor) you really do have to conclude that what decided things was their professionalism and correct process.
By comparoison with the police Family Court is completely irrational nowadays. If you get caught by someone’s calculated manipulation there then justice is dead meat because there is no police involvement and the magistrates simply rubberstamp decisions made by overworked social-workers (a bunch of truly low-grade politically-indulged radical 'freedom-fighters' called cafcass)who make decisions by the latest doctrine rather than investigatively, eg 'the child must be listened to' (how convieniently low-cost?) whereupon they assume the child is telling the truth.
I dont know if I should even publicize how fatally the Family Court thus fails the children in the hands of unscrupulous adults... but without publicity where does remedy start?
So... abandoning the nation’s children…back to the social indignation about the rape prosecutions statistics?
Womens Hour the other day noticed a huge amount of women prisoners in Russia. The Russians could be getting it wrong. There is an alternative though. We in the UK could historically have been getting it wrong by refusing to see that at least half the liars and cheats in our society are female! Attitude check… thats obviously true but I seem to be saying something disgustingly offensive about the nations womenfolk. From this you can deduce that a naïve patriarchal protective attitude has already biased our legal system and we certainly do not need any more of it (in a nutshell the state-of-play here is “little girls screaming for daddy to hit their brothers”....it just hasn’t got that far in Russia!). However (leaving Russia aside ) another good indicator of our historic problem is that for a century we’ve given absolute criminal hell to male homosexuals(again some have literally been beaten to death in our prisons) whilst completely denying there is such a thing as female homosexuality, at worst merely frowning on it, and least of all criminalising it
This clearly establishes the existence of a blind protective patriarchial attitude deeply governing our behaviour and an enlightened non-paternalist view is to allow the full range of human behaviour as fact, ie., ...that, on the whole, as many women err to lying and cheating as men err to violence (with many overlaps and crossovers of course but in the minority). . We need to learn this (wise people already know it)….and learn it in our guts…and until such time actively resist putting political forces on the police re convictions in particular areas
As a general rule when hearing rape claim figures the right policy is to think what that word ‘claim’ actually means and to practice immediately halving the figures despite the howls of anguish from activists....and then I think you’ll find the resulting number puts the matter into an area where only the subject specialists know whether the prosecutions are truly too few. I expect the prosecutions probably are too few to some degree (but the basis of our legal system ...bias against convicting the innocent…weighs in at this stage and confuses accurate deductions). Whats for sure is that sorting out whats what is not within the realm of the average person….so the main danger is of our headless emotional responses being whipped-up and recruited to a bandwagon for pressurising our police as is happening (that is the last thing you want to do…you may think as a woman perhaps that youll be safe from bad effects of that but not so youll find when you get ten years for a conspiracy you didn’t do having been set up by police corrupted elsewhere by being over pressed for convictions!...(no woman is an island either!) )
What we certainly need is a functioning system of criminal justice with enough funds. If that cant be found in the Exchequer we could perhaps consider saving some money by closing down Family courts entirely, where justice for children is certainly dead and merely twitching occasionally. But lets talk about rape…as we always do and will carry on doing like abortion for ever and ever it seems because its simply far more sensational and suitable for whipping-up hysteria than addressing our most important social failings.
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