The proportion of rape prosecutions which will fail to lead to convictions will inevitably fall because of this matter. Our thanks to Alan for an email, its content takes up the remainder of this blog piece:
Mike,
I saw this article on a classic piece of worthless advocacy research in this case designed to bolster the idea that the accuser in rape cases should be believed uncritically.
The objectives of the study are obvious given the false premise implied in the Professor’s statement about her goals:
Professor Heather Flowe, who led the study, told i she hoped the findings would mean investigators thoroughly look into a case even “if it comes to light there’s alcohol involved in the assault”.
She seeks to imply that as soon as alcohol is involved the police are not interested. The stories of Ched Evans, Sean Bw Parker and countless others suggest this simply isn’t true. The police are in fact very happy to prosecute cases involving alcohol. I don’t know of a study but I would imagine that many, perhaps most, rape cases taken to court involve the consumption of alcohol by both parties.
Her claim is that a frequent defence against charges of rape is that the complainant was drunk and has misremembered and that this defence is invalid.
I know of no theoretical reason why people who are more intoxicated will later come to confabulate,…
Somewhat surprising for a professor of psychology as there is an extensive literature on confabulation in alcoholics (Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome) There is also an extensive literature on the negative effect of alcohol on memory in general. That she ignores the well-established evidence for confabulation in alcoholics and cannot see memory loss due to alcohol as a plausible theoretical reason why people who are more intoxicated might create false or confabulated memories is more than a little surprising. It doesn’t give a great deal of confidence in her research as becoming familiar with what is already known is fundamental in any research. Her statement also sidesteps the extensive literature on how easily false memories can be created without the consumption of alcohol which she should also be familiar with.
Nevertheless let’s look into the experiment she performed.
Prof Flowe and her team worked with 90 women to establish the impact of alcohol on their memory of a fully hypothetical scenario involving rape for the study published in Frontiers in Psychology – Forensic and Legal Psychology.
They were presented with an encounter between themselves and a man they had recently met, and were asked to imagine how they would respond to passes he made, such as kissing. Finally they were told details about a hypothetical rape before being questioned about the events seven days later.
Women who had drunk alcohol up to the legal limit for driving as they learned of the hypothetical scenario were “incredibly accurate” when asked about the sexual activities they remember consenting to, said Prof Flowe.
There are two enormous problems with drawing the conclusions she does from this research.
The first issue is that the research subjects knew they were taking part in a research project and the study by its nature primed them to concentrate and remember the details for later recall. The events were not real but part of a script. Its unsurprising that memory in this situation is good but it’s completely different from the situation it’s supposed to be modelling in which there is no reason to concentrate and no priming of the subject to remember. How many of us can remember the details of our last journey home? We weren’t drunk and yet we remember none of it. This problem alone fatally undermines her conclusions but amazingly it’s not the most serious flaw.
The research was conducted with ‘women who had drunk alcohol up to the legal limit for driving’. The fact that this does not affect memory significantly should not be a surprise to anyone who thinks for a moment about how the legal alcohol limit for driving was set. It was based on research into the level of alcohol at which driving performance is significantly impacted and necessarily therefore below the level at which cognitive capability is markedly affected. Her research perhaps show that an alcohol level which has no marked affect on driving also has no marked affect on memory. Even if we accept this it is stunningly unsurprising. The legal alcohol limit was chosen to be a threshold below which there is not significant impairment.
Consider Professor Slowe’s remark:
She also hoped it would challenge courtroom perceptions of women being unreliable witnesses if they have been drinking alcohol.
Is the credibility of evidence from someone who drank moderately and remained sober actually an issue in the courtroom, or is the issue in fact the credibility of a witness who was, or is alleged to have been, drunk? How does her research shed any light at all on this situation?
The attempt to extend this to people who are well above the legal driving limit and drunk is dishonest.
What was the point of this research except to provide a veneer of science to misleading information which can be used to influence debate on the legal process? The study by design could not shed any light on the real situation at issue. The result was entirely predictable and contributed nothing to the sum of human knowledge. How does this sort of thing get funded?
More worryingly why does the Crown Prosecution Service welcome such research? [J4MB: Because it will give them an excuse to bring more prosecutions of men, inevitably leading to more men in prison, regardless of their guilt or innocence.]
Alan
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