Janet Bloomfield has written about 13 reasons women lie about rape, Hannah Wallen has written about 6 dangerous rape myths, and of course we mustn’t forget the 10 reasons false rape allegations are common.
Following our public call three days ago for Vera Baird QC to resign as Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria – on five different counts – we thank a supporter for sending us a photograph of a poster in Newcastle, at the bottom of which is Vera Baird’s name, and the logo of Northumbria police. The poster declares:
If she’s drunk, she can’t legally consent.
Sex without consent is rape.
If the first statement is true, then surely the following must be true, too:
If he’s drunk, he can’t legally consent.
So when a drunk man and a drunk woman have sex, is neither consenting? Or maybe they’re raping each other simultaneously? Arguably, both these absurd propositions follow from the first line on the poster.
Legally, however, even when a sober woman has sex with a drunk man it isn’t rape, because of how the Sexual Offences Act 2003 is worded – an Act passed by a Labour government, of which Vera Baird was a member. Rape perpetrators can only be men, according to the definition of rape employed in the Act, although we know from major surveys that men ‘being made to penetrate’ women – in the published guidance of the Crown Prosecution Service, ‘a female equivalent of the offence of rape’ – is far more common than popularly believed. And, of course, men will bear financial responsibility for children conceived during their sexual abuse.
We cover the issue of sexual abuse of men by women in our general election manifesto, pp31-37. The CPS guidance on ‘a female equivalent of the offence of rape’ is on p36. Needless to say, the ‘equivalence’ doesn’t extend to equivalence of maximum custodial sentences.
Feminist thinking in the area of women’s consent to sex with men, as with so many other areas, infantilises women, robbing them of moral agency. It cynically exploits the gynocentric societal paradigm that men are ‘actors’ and women ‘acted upon’. It’s why people struggle to see men as potential victims of sexual abuse or domestic violence at the hands of women, regardless of the evidence.
There’s a vast amount of evidence on the abuse of men by women, it grows with each passing year, yet it continues to have no impact whatsoever on government policies. In relation to domestic violence, there is virtually no provision of state support for male victims, nor provision of treatment for female perpetrators. The justice system has virtually no interest in pursuing cases of women’s sexual abuses of men – nor of children, for that matter.
Alison Tieman, a Canadian men’s human rights advocate – a Honey Badger – produced an illuminating video on the theme of men being ‘actors’ and women being ‘acted upon’ – here. I met Alison during the AVfM Detroit conference on men’s issues and found her delightful, as were all the Honey Badgers. I look forward to this year’s conference, details of which will be released shortly, I understand.
