Times caption: Germaine Greer says that women are treated as “a piece of evidence” during rape cases YUI MOK/PA
A piece by Will Humphries in yesterday’s Times. As always with Greer, the recurring theme is that sex is something men DO to women, not something men SHARE with women. Women have no moral agency, no responsibility towards their partners. What an odious woman, why was she ever let into the UK? In a fair world she’d long ago have been locked up in the Tower of London, the only reading matter being admiring biographies of Margaret Thatcher.
Constant “unconsiderate” sex with a partner can be worse than rape by a stranger, the feminist writer Germaine Greer has suggested.
While rape by a stranger is “bloody bad luck”, it does not necessarily force a woman to reassess her whole life in the way that abuse by loved ones can, Greer said.
The Australian writer was speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme as part of a round of publicity for her essay On Rape, which has prompted controversy around the world.
She said: “I think it is important we don’t diminish the effects of constant unconsiderate use of a woman’s body by the man she loves.
“In some ways, it is worse to be abused and treated without consideration by the people who are at the centre of your life.
“Stranger rape is bloody bad luck, for sure, but it is like being run down by a bus. You don’t have to internalise it and look at the structure of your whole life from that point of view. It is way out there on left field.”
Greer said that she would like the law to be changed so that women are a formal party in any court case relating to their rape or sexual assault.
Existing laws mean that when women make complaints, their assaults are treated as alleged offences against the state, with the victim playing the role a witness or a piece of evidence, she said.
“The woman who complains of rape is herself not party to the action,” Greer said. “She is a piece of evidence and she will be examined to find out if the claims she is making that the offence has occurred is true.”
She added: “The better way would be to begin again to look at it from a woman’s point of view, rather than the point of view of the patriarchate.
“When you go to the police, you are asking the state to clean up an offence against itself, whereas if we were in Belgium you would be a party to the action as the victim and you would have a voice in court.
“As it is now, you have no voice in court, you don’t have anyone representing you and you can’t be helped to deal with the cross-examination. You are being treated almost like a child.”
Greer has previously said that newspapers and broadcasters report rape trials with “crushing detail” and suggested that one way to mitigate victims’ pain would be for such cases to be heard in a closed court. That is done in Ireland, which also has a statutory definition of consent and is considering adopting the system used in France and Belgium whereby the complainant is a party in the case.
In Ireland the name of the accused is also not made public unless they are convicted.
However, any move to make rape hearings in England and Wales private is likely to be strongly opposed. Matthew Scott, a criminal barrister, said: “Save in totally exceptional cases, all criminal cases should be heard in public. Secret criminal trials are extremely undesirable.”
Greer also proposes a second reform — separating the elements of assault for which consent is not an issue from the actual rape where it is the only issue. It should then be possible to convict at least on the assault charges, she suggests.
The incidence of rape has remained intractable, with one in five women experiencing sexual violence, she says, yet few rapes find their way into court.
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