Attempt to extend victimhood trivialises the real evil of rape
Friday January 25 2008
Last weekend a 37-year-old man was acquitted of raping a young woman, having admitted having had sex with her and without her spoken consent. Ah. Male justice for the male accused as always, the sisters might say: except it was, effectively, an all-woman jury which acquitted him.
The complainant and the accused had met on what is now a fairly typical Dublin night: alco-pops, cocaine, nightclub, et cetera. They had more drink in a mutual friend's bedsitter. They then went to sleep, she in a bed, he in some undescribed manner nearby.
He says that he woke to find her hand on his leg, and soon they started having sex. When she said (by his account) that she had no protection, he withdrew. And then they got dressed. He agreed that he had not asked for permission to have sex.
According to her version, she had gone to sleep and had woken up to find herself having uninvited sex with the man.
Another woman in the bedsitter then advised him to leave, and said that she would "sort this out".
Unsure what was going on, he then saw the complainant talking to two other guests in the bedsitter. Which brings the total of people present for the "rape" in a single room now to five.
Later, when he heard that a complaint of rape was being made against him, he presented himself to An Garda Siochana.
Garda Louisa Heffernan told the court that he had been very cooperative. After a seven-hour deliberation, the jury found the defendant not guilty. An earlier trial had failed to reach a verdict.
That a trial took place in such circumstances is idiocy. Drunken, remorseful girls can do a couple of things after they've discovered they're having sex, or just had it, without knowing too much about it. They can write the night off as human
folly, blaming themselves and the men concerned for getting so drunk so as not even to be conscious of, never mind responsible for, their deeds, in which there is no conscious consent, no conscious denial, no conscious intent, no conscious assent, and most of all, no conscious violation.
Or they can go to the gardai -- which is what happened here. And fortunately for the accused, the 10 women on the jury apparently agreed with his version of events.
But a question arises here. Was it purely a coincidence that the jury was composed of enough women to have, in due course, found a majority guilty verdict?
For if it was not a coincidence, but actual policy, should we not be told? It might be good, or it might be bad, but either way, we should know: for if the intent is now for rape juries to consist largely of women, then it cannot be said that the accused is undergoing trial by his peers.
Anyway, as we know, these 10 jurywomen presumably accepted that merely because the complainant said she was unaware of having consented, this did not necessarily mean that the accused consciously intended non-consensual sex.
Furthermore, there were three other people in the room. You might have sex in the company of others: but you only perform rape in those circumstances if your companions are party to your intentions, which was not so.
Presumably, the couple were so overpowered by drugs and drink that the ordinary decision-making processes were too blown-away to know what was -- or had been -- going on.
And the defendant was lucky with his female jury. An all-male jury, intimidated by decades of feminist propaganda, would probably have never allowed common sense to triumph. Moreover, if the judge had then been reckless enough to deal with the "culprit" lightly, he most certainly would have been the centre of a firestorm of feminist wrath.
For the feminist lobby has redefined rape to include consensual sexual activity, while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
This new interpretation of "rape" has been officially endorsed by the British Home Office, which conjured up figures declaring that one in 20 British women had been raped, though, of course, the overwhelming majority don't even know it.
This obsessive attempt to extend victimhood as widely as possible is perfectly grotesque, not least because it trivialises the authentic evil of rape.
But there is another, even more disturbing trend here.
The drunken capers at the heart of this analysis seem to happen only in Ireland and Britain.
These are the culturally conjoined islands in which ruinous alcohol consumption leads to public urination, brawls and semi-comatose, imbecilic sexual activity around dawn.
We have a common alcoholic ethos, in which there is neither willpower nor discipline, assent nor consent, certainty nor lucidity, and most of all, neither genuine intent nor binding veto.
The slobbering madness that results is then retrospectively presided over by a strutting posse of feminist vigilantes, who presume to police the behavioural sink of the night before, meticulously measuring and assessing events according to the bizarre and demented Koran of feminist dogma.
This is the United Drunkdom of Britain and Ireland: conflation once again. Swift himself could not have invented such a hell.
- Kevin Myers
