Summary: Leftists run England’s core domestic policy. Their tinkering with the criminal justice system has produced amazing results, and especially with accusations of rape. (There was much discussion in the comments to the section of yesterday’s post about this. So I have expanded it. Esp. see the section added showing the astounding numbers about rape.)
In January 2015 The Guardian reported some good news: “Rape trials rise by 30% as courts fight to clear caseload” — “The Director of public prosecutions {Alison Saunders} says increase is good as it suggests more victims feel they will be believed. …About a third of crown court trial days are now taken up with cases involving sexual offences.”
Rumors about Director Saunders’ new regime soon circulated. Such as this by Allison Pearson at The Telegraph (only a woman can safely speak out about the feminist outrages).
“‘I began getting messages from police officers who had been sent on training courses where they were taught that any woman who said she had been raped must always be believed and referred to as “the victim’. …Obsessed with pursuing the VAGW (violence against girls and women) agenda, she was on a mission to boost the number of rape convictions and clearly could not give a damn about innocent men and boys who might suffer on the road to that goal. They were just collateral damage in a vengeful gender war.”
By July 2018, even the good liberals at The Guardian had to acknowledge the result.
A series of rape trials collapsed at the end of last year and the beginning of this year when text and social media exchanges belatedly emerged that undermined complainants’ accounts. Trials were halted and charges dropped. When she appeared before the committee in June, Saunders accepted that some people had been wrongly imprisoned as a result of disclosure failings. …
Bob Neill MP, the Conservative chair of the select committee, said: ‘Disclosure failings are extremely damaging for those concerned and can have a permanent life-long impact. These failings have caused miscarriages of justice and – as the DPP even admitted to us – some people have gone to prison as a result. …’
One of those whose trials collapsed late last year was Samuel Armstrong, chief of staff to the Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay. He had been charged with raping a woman in the palace of Westminster but was acquitted after material his lawyers had sought was finally handed over halfway through the trial. ‘The failures of disclosure were a consequence of a toxic culture that treated statutory duties as an administrative burden,’ he told the Guardian. ‘As a result, dozens of young people saw their lives ruined …It’s not about resources, it’s about culture. I was prosecuted by senior lawyers. They were very well resourced.'”
These are not the kind of sexual assaults that excite modern police.
What does this mean on the ground?
What about Britain’s law enforcement apparatus? Alexander Robertson at The Daily Mail explains.
“The five-year tenure of Britain’s top prosecutor has been branded ‘disastrous’ by critics as she prepares to leave her role for ‘a seven-figure salary’ as a partner of an international law firm. …Under her leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has come under extreme scrutiny over a raft of scandals, including the collapse of several high-profile rape trials.”
Forced by unavoidable facts, the leftists at The Guardian had to report the news: “Urgent review of all rape cases as digital evidence is withheld.”
“A rape trial {of Samson Makele, 28} collapsed this month after the CPS offered no evidence when it emerged that images from the defendant’s phone of him in bed with his alleged victim had not been disclosed. …Scotland Yard is already conducting an urgent review of similar problems after another rape case {of Liam Allan, 22} was halted in Croydon in December under similar circumstances when phone messages between the man and woman cast doubt on the prosecution’s version of events. Another sexual assault case {of Isaac Itiary, 25} was abandoned later in December after material recovered from the defendant’s phone was only belatedly handed over as the case was about to go to trial.”
See the horrific story of Allan at BarristerBlog. There were other incidents that The Guardian forgot to mention.
- The woman who falsely accused 25 men of rape, two of whom spent years in jail.
- A “woman cried rape after man she had first date train sex with ran away at his stop“. He was saved by Britain’s ever-present CCTVs.
- “Stalker who tried to ‘destroy’ a care worker with false gang rape allegations ‘because she was left out of a trip to the zoo’ is jailed” told by the Daily Mail. Her trial was still in progress as of September 21 (source).
- And many similar stories.
Others speak more harshly and completely about these events than The Guardian. Such as Allison Pearson at The Telegraph tells the story.
“I was also outraged by the case of Paul Gambaccini. The well-loved DJ, the gentlest and most civilised of men, was arrested in 2013 for historical sexual offences following allegations by two men he had never met, who were allowed to remain anonymous. For 12 months, Paul was plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare, despite there being no evidence against him, and no charge either. …
“Casualties like 17-year-old Jay Cheshire, who took his own life in 2015 after being accused of rape by a girl who withdrew her complaint after two weeks. Described by his mother Karin as “a vulnerable and sensitive boy”, Jay was distraught to be branded a “sex offender”. He had hoped to become a history teacher or a writer when he grew up. Now he never will. …
“{Eventually} the CPS was forced to order an urgent review of all ongoing rape cases. A stony Saunders tried to defend the debacle, telling Radio 4’s Today programme she didn’t think there were any men in jail who had been wrongfully convicted. …
“{On April 2} the Metropolitan Police announced it had ‘abandoned its policy of automatically believing victims’ …. Commissioner Cressida Dick said she had told officers they ‘must have an open mind when an allegation is made and that their role was to investigate, not blindly believe.'”
Juries are not impressed
Yesterday The Guardian attempted to spin the news to boost the jihad, despite the unfortunate facts Their skillful propagandists produced the following.
“Revealed: less than a third of young men prosecuted for rape are convicted.”
Due process and trial by a jury of one’s peers are considered obsolete by many on the Left. Those who care about our rights will prefer a more accurate headline …
Pursuing its feminist jihad, the government prosecutes with flimsy evidence so many young men that British juries convict only 32% of them.
A pop quiz
There were 45,100 rapes recorded by the police against both men and women in the year ending June 2017. How many were committed using a knife?
…
The number of rapes using a knife or sharp implement: 438 (1%). They do not show the number using a gun, probably because that is de minimis. Source: tables 2 and 3 from “All data related to Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2018” by Britain’s Office of National Statistics.
Another unfortunate effect of the feminist jihad
Crime has soared while Saunders pursued her radical feminist agenda.
“Meanwhile, the latest figures show that every category of victim-based crime has increased on her watch, with all crime going up by a third since 2014. Most shockingly, sexual offences rose by 89% from the year ending September 2014 to the year ending September 2017. The streets of London are now more deadly than New York, with the capital recording a higher murder rate for the first time in modern history in February. …
“In January, the BBC reported that the number of prosecutions in England and Wales that had collapsed due to a failure by police or prosecutors to disclose evidence had jumped 70%.” {The Daily Mail.}
Choices have to be made as to how much to spend on police, and which crimes are most serious.
“There were 21,331 fewer police officers in England and Wales as of March this year compared with the same point in 2010, according to the Home Office. Total officer numbers across the 43 police forces were at 122,404 as of March, the lowest number since comparable records began in 1996. {With a much larger population.} …Sgt Kempton said: ‘Knife crime in large cities is right on the brink of being out of control. …He said in Dorset the situation is so dire that even if every officer turns up to work every day the force ‘can’t do the job the public want us to do. So when people don’t turn up, we come very close to losing the streets when it is busy,’” {Metro UK, 8 September 2018.}
Repeat from above: “About a third of crown court trial days are now taken up with cases involving sexual offences.”
But all ends well …for Director Saunders
How was she rewarded for her failures? Her terms ends in October 2018.
“Alison Saunders will enjoy a £1.8million taxpayer-funded pension when she is replaced as Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) ….But despite facing criticism for ‘not being up to the job’, the QC, who has been with the CPS since 1986, has secured a top role at ‘Magic Circle’ law firm Linklaters, starting in the autumn. She is expected to earn a salary in excess of seven figures, with the average pay of equity partners at Linklaters surpassing £1.5million last year.” {The Daily Mail.}
The Empire always strikes back!
BuzzFeed complains that the British authorities prosecute women for false accusations of rape! The even have rules guiding when to do so!
“The Crown Prosecution Service, the state prosecutor for England and Wales, has even written rules for whom to target and when – something other Western countries don’t do, experts say. …At least 200 women in the UK have been prosecuted for lying about being raped in the past decade, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of press reports. …
“Britain’s approach stands in stark contrast to that of the US, Australia, Canada, and other European countries. Women in these countries do not typically face prosecution – let alone prison – for lying about rape, state prosecutors and experts said, because it’s not considered to be in the public interest. Norway’s public prosecutions authority, for example, said its priority is encouraging more victims to come forward and warned that ‘a low threshold for opening a false accusation case could counteract this goal’.”
Buzzfeed mentions this case: Rhiannon Brooker (30), a trainee barrister, was found guilty of fabricating allegations that led to her ex-partner Paul Fensome being jailed for 36 days. She was sentenced to three-and-a-half-year jail term {The Guardian}. Both The Guardian and BuzzFeed consider the sentence too harsh. Neither asked her victim’s opinion of the sentence.
See the surprising numbers
See the surveys and police data about sexual assaults in England and Wales. They are surprising to people who read the news. Here are the numbers for the year ending March 2017, for sexual assault of females in England and Wales. These are from the Appendix Tables of “Sexual Offences in England and Wales: year ending March 2017“. I found the report to be somewhat misleading. These numbers paint a very different picture about sexual assaults than do the news media.
Table 1: Survey data about rates of sexual assaults on women 16-59 in 2016-17.
Rape or assault by penetration (including attempts):….0.9%
Indecent exposure or unwanted touching:……………………2.7%
Table 25: Survey data – What was the outcome of the crime?
Outcome of police investigation of rape or assault by penetration (including attempts) experienced since age 16 by adults aged 16 to 591, by sex of victim, year ending March 2017.
Note that that answers are from surveys of self-identified victims.
14% – Police warned the person who did it.
43% – Police arrested the person who did it.
30% – Police charged the person who did it.
11% – Police took some other action.
07% – Police tried to take action but were unable to locate/identify person who did it.
19% – Police took no action.
04% – Too early to say.
Table 25: (same as above) Did the case come to court?
64% – Yes.
35% – No.
01% – Not yet.
Table 8: Police data – number of rapes of females, by age of victim, in year ending March 2017.
All:…………32,286.
Over 16:….26,464.
Under 16:….5,822.
Under 13:….4,369.
Table 8: Police data – Change in the number of rapes of females, by age of the victim.
Age……………………Since 2008-09….Since 2012/13
Age 16 or over:…….348%…………..……274%
Age under 16:………240%…………..……208%
Age under 13:………294%…………..……184%
Table 10: Survey estimating rate of rape of adult women (using traditional definition of actual or attempted penetration) in 2017-17.
All adults:..2.9%
White:…..…0.8%
Mixed:….…3.4%
Asian:………0.3%
Black:………1.6%
Other:……..1.7% (mostly Arab).
13% gave no ethnic group.
As often seen in these reports, the numbers in Table 10 don’t make sense. The rate of rape for all females is higher than for the subgroups (only 1.3% of the sample self-identified as “mixed”).
Note they do not track the ethnicity of the perpetrator. That would be wrong, a violation of political correctness! It is best that we do not know.
A closing thought
“{T}he increased victim orientation, the special attention paid to victims in the last 25 years, has primarily focused on specific victim groups and their protection. Maltreated children were ‘discovered’ first, later came women who were victims of violence and rape, and finally children who had been subject to sexual exploitation. The numerically largest group of victims of crime, on the other hand, continue to be overlooked and not regarded as victims: men and boys.
— From “Victim orientation in society, research, criminal justice and crime prevention: Status, problems and perspectives” by Wiebke Steffen in “More Prevention, Fewer Victims”, a Report for the 18th German Congress on Crime Prevention, 22-23 April 2013.
In this, as in so many things these days, men are second class citizens.
Other posts in this series
- MeToo = Salem Witch trials 2.0 — see the similarities.
- Hidden knowledge: false rape accusations are common.
- The astounding story of false rape accusations in England.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about women & society, about rape, about MeToo, and especially these…
- It’s time to forcibly re-shape America to fight the campus rape epidemic! Even if it’s fake.
- The University of Virginia “rape culture” story crashes and burns. Will this become a story of failed agitprop? Or a win for the Left?
- The University of Virginia shows how change comes to America: through agitprop and hysteria.
Books about self-defense – against false accusations
See “A sadly necessary handbook for men falsely accused of sexual assault“, Barbara Kay’s book review in the National Post discussing False Accusations of Rape: Lynching in the 21st Century
His other major book is How to Avoid False Accusations of Rape: Self-Defense in the Feminist State
You are correct that the 32% conviction rate is very troubling. But the question is, what is going on.
The Guardian, as you might expect, strongly implies in its piece that its due to juries failing to convict young men for reasons that have nothing to do with the strength of the case.
On this account, they are all, or almost all, guilty, but near on 70% of them are getting off. On this account, the solution is to educate and instruct jurors so that they convict more.
The alternative account is that the juries are correctly acquitting near on 70%, because the evidence is insufficient to justify conviction.
If the alternative account is correct, we have to give some explanation of how on earth the CPS ended up bringing prosecutions where the evidence was so generally insufficient.
We need to take a view of whether the police are receiving accusations which are founded in real rapes, or if they are receiving large numbers of false false accusations.
One explanation of both, and in support of the false accusation argument, would be that the authorities are on a sort of jihad, in cooperation with a raft of false accusations.
If this is correct, we are in the middle of an hysterical plague of false accusations of considerable proportions. In fact, there are probably, on this account, presently near on 50,000 false accusations a year.
Because the number of rapes notified to police in England and Wales from this impeccable source, the ONS, in the period up to March 2018, iwill be found here in table 3:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2018
It is close on 54,000. There were about double that many other sexual offences. If you look at figure 17, there is a chart of trends. Reports have risen a lot in recent years.
I have then tried to find how many of these were prosecuted, and have not found exact numbers for the same period, but by referring to the Crown Prosecution document ‘Violence against women and girls’ for an earlier period, and following up the data links, we can see that in round numbers there have been some 5,000 -6,000 prosecutions annually, of which something like 55-65% resulted in convictions. My source is Graph 9 in Violence against Women and Girls Crime report 10th edition, 2016-17
https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/cps-violence-against-women-and-girls-crime-report-2016-2017.
The Mirror (a Labour tabloid paper, which is definitely not liberal in the US sense) seems to be reporting accurately. I have not tracked down the exact source of its numbers, but the numbers from CPS and ONS are compatible with theirs.
The Guardian of course has an agenda which is US liberal – on all kinds of gender and social and political issues. I don’t see any reason to doubt its numbers, but its interpretation of them is and always will be ideological. In citing it in the earlier post I was not endorsing it.
What do we, can we, conclude? That the UK situation is completely unsatisfactory.
Either we have a raft of false accusations, or we have a failure of law enforcement, or both. That there are false accusations is certain from the cases cited. That there have been false convictions resulting from prosecution misconduct is also certain.
One question is how many of the 54,000 complaints in the year ending March 2018 were false accusations and how many were justified but went unprosecuted. Then we move to the roughly 6,000 prosecutions a year, of which around 40% result in acquittals, and the question is how many of the acquittals were sound, and how many of the convictions were sound.
That many rapes go unreported seems also pretty much certain. I myself know of three (I said two in an earlier post, having forgotten one of them). There have been some widely diverging estimates of how many, but it seems certain to be a significant number.
Saunders as DPP is widely admitted to have been a disaster. She took a wrong and ideologically driven approach to the problem, and corrupted justice as a result. But that there is a problem is surely not in doubt?
George,
“On this account, they are all, or almost all, guilty, but near on 70% of them are getting off. On this account, the solution is to educate and instruct jurors so that they convict more. The alternative account is that the juries are correctly acquitting near on 70%, because the evidence is insufficient to justify conviction.”
You’re hilarious. The people at the CPS have been proven to have screwed up so big that even their fellow leftists at The Guardian must admit it. And you think that their self-justification — with zero evidence — should be given equal weight with the long proven history of adequate performance of juries?
Note that the surveys show the number of rapes against men has risen even faster than against women under Saunders’ leftist jihad: +593% vs. +325% over the past 5 years.
Here’s a clue: perhaps you are making a category error. Consider how the nature of “rape” has changed. People voluntarily sleep together. Then days, weeks, months, or years later one party decides that he or she didn’t give “consent.” Worse, we’re apply a concept from contract law to sex – which is itself quite daft (as in all ideologically driven societies, we consider take things seriously that normal people consider quite mad). What would the survey show if the survey asked if force or threat of force was used? Perhaps we have two different phenomena, and need different labels.
Also, perhaps you should first solve the mystery of the mass kidnappings of children in the US — thousands or tens of thousands each year! And before that, the massive rings doing Satanic Ritual Abuse of Children — hundreds sacrificed each year. And before that, the recurring episodes of massive White Slavery (going back to the 1920s) – which police could never document (perhaps they just needed “training”, like today’s juries).
Then you will be ready to deal with the rape crisis!
George,
“Because the number of rapes notified to police in England and Wales from this impeccable source, the ONS, in the period up to March 2018, will be found here in table 3: …It is close on 54,000.”
It took a while to check the source you gave (you gave the wrong table). But the search was rewarding (as stray research often is).
(1) Table 3 is “Selected violent and sexual offences involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by the police” (to year ending June 2017). That is an interesting table. It gives us an indication of how many of the 45,100 rapes recorded by the police (against both men and women) was done using a knife: 438 (includes both men and women). Plus 182 sexual assaults using a knife.
Some were done using firearms, but those are rarely found in Britain. Or using just physical force, but that is a more difficult and dangerous way to commit rape (unless done by a group).
(2) Perhaps you were looking at Table 2: Police recorded crimes – rate, number and percentage change for year ending June 2017. But does not show “the period up to March 2018.”
(3) You were probably looking at Table A4. Total rapes for the year ending March 2018 are 53,977.
“But that there is a problem is surely not in doubt?”
I meant to add, what is in doubt is the nature of the problem.
Found this: “About Half of Rape Allegations are False, Research Shows” by RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting), undated.
Sven,
There are two problems here. First, false rape allegations are not PC. So the studies are either feminist advocacy or poorly funded and/or done by those on the fringes of science (going off the leftist party line is career death in many of the social sciences).
As in the Media Radar post. See the rebuttals here and here.
They mention some more interesting data, such as this from “Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science” — “Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence After Trial.” A report by by the U.S. Department of Justice, June 1996.
Commentary by Barry C. Scheck Is Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Education at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Postconviction DNA exonerations provide a remarkable opportunity to reexamine, with greater insight than ever before, the strengths and weaknesses of our criminal justice system and how they bear on the all-important question of factual innocence. The dimensions of the factual innocence problem exceed the impressive number of postconviction DNA exonerations listed in this report. Indeed, there is a strong scientific basis for believing these matters represent just the tip of a very deep and disturbing iceberg of cases. Powerful proof for this proposition lies with an extraordinary set of data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since it began forensic DNA testing in 1989.
Every year since 1989, in about 25% of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI where results could be obtained (primarily by State and local law enforcement), the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing. Specifically, FBI officials report that out of roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases since 1989, about 2,000 tests have been inconclusive (usually insufficient high molecular weight DNA to do testing), about 2,000 tests have excluded the primary suspect, and about 6,000 have “matched” or included the primary suspect.1 The fact that these percentages have remained constant for 7 years, and that the National Institute of Justice’s informal survey of private laboratories reveals a strikingly similar 26-percent exclusion rate, strongly suggests that postarrest and postconviction DNA exonerations are tied to some strong, underlying systemic problems that generate erroneous accusations and convictions.
It must be stressed that the sexual assault referrals made to the FBI ordinarily involve cases where —
Sven,
The second problem —
About that FBI data from 1989 – 1996. That’s 22 years ago. The meaning of “rape” has changed drastically since then. I suspect that most of those cases were “traditional” rape: done by explicit use of force.
I would like to know how many of the “rape” cases today include even allegations of force, vs. the woman’s decision hours – or days, or weeks, or months, or years — later that she did not give consent. These are phenomenologically different kinds of crime (that’s not the right word, but I can’t think of a better one at this moment).
I’ll bet that research into this would show that this change in definition from force to consent accounts for much of the drastic increase in the number of reported rapes. Perhaps more than the increased rate of reporting rape. There is substantial evidence that the number of forcible rapes has been declining for a long time. Although that might have changed in Britain, with the large numbers of immigrants who look around and see a nation of sluts deserving to be raped – by their cultural norms (which multiculturalism tells them are just as good as ours).
I nowhere said that I thought they should be given equal weight. What I said was that there were two competing explanations to explain a phenomenon, one of which seems to be favored by the Guardian, a paper, I repeat, which I do not endorse. I have agreed with you and other voices in the UK that the CPS under Saunders misconducted itself, and as I said, I agree that this has been shown to have resulted in unsafe convictions of innocent men.
It is not in dispute that there have been some false accusations and some unsafe convictions. The question is the numbers.
The thing we have to explain is that there are in the region of 54,000 accusations to the police in the UK in a year, of which about 6,000 are prosecuted, with about 4,000 resulting in convictions. In the case of young men, the conviction rate is much lower, about 32%.
Your explanation is that in many of these cases no rape in the traditional sense has taken place. You say:
That is a possible explanation. If this happened in around 45-50,000 cases last year in the UK, it would be very extraordinary, but it would explain the facts. We would have had somewhere around 50,000 women and girls in the UK who sleep with a man by mutual consent and then later decide that they were raped and go to the police.
Fulminations are not enough. We need evidence. Why are they doing this? I have no trouble believing that there are this many cases of women behaving like idiots and regretting it. But why does this lead them to involve the police, if that is all that happened?
I have no trouble accepting the evidence that there are some accusations which are frivolous or malicious. The question is how many. Without hard evidence I don’t believe that women in England and Wales are going to the police annually in the tens of thousands either maliciously or because they regret a moment’s foolishness. I am sure some are. That is what the anecdotal evidence shows. But tens of thousands?
The England and Wales Crime Survey gave estimates for “Sexual Assault by Penetration” of 39-86,000 at the 95% confidence level, with a mean of 62,000. This is for the year ending March 2016.
I don’t see any reason to think that these results are simply women reporting what was in fact stooping to folly, but which is being reported as assault involving penetration. This is inconsistent with your redefinition of rape argument. They are reporting to the traditional definition. And this is of actual rape, not including attempts.
My end view is that either way its a deeply disturbing situation. Either we have tens of thousands of false accusations, or we have tens of thousands of failures of law enforcement. Or both. And we are not dealing with it.
The Guardian has another story now.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/sep/24/prosecutors-rape-cases-cps-crown-prosecution-service-conviction-rates
It seems that the CPS has changed direction, because it is troubled by the proportion of prosecutions which result in acquittals, so its trying to adopt a policy which will prosecute only those cases with a higher probability of conviction by a jury.
The claim is that at the moment it decides to prosecute on the basis of the strength of the evidence alone. The test is whether there is a more than 50% chance that a correctly instructed rational jury would convict.
The question about this of course is going to be the well publicized cases in which it prosecuted despite the evidence clearly not being strong, and concealed exonerating evidence from the defence. We don’t know how often that happens, but we know it has happened enough to require major investigation and re-appraisal of cases. There is never just one cockroach. So are they really taking decisions based on a rigorous implementation of their criterion? It seems unlikely.
At any rate, the CPS is now apparently proposing to use a different criterion going forward, namely the historical rate of conviction from similar cases with similar evidence. They will prosecute now on the basis of whether this would lead to the view that the case has better than 50% chance of conviction.
My initial reaction is that this is managing the symptoms and not the problem. Although, if you have confidence that juries are making correct decisions, probably you would approve, because it seems basically to be saying that they will prosecute when a jury is as a matter of historical track record likely to convict, rather than when we think it should.
There is a reference in the piece to the problem of rape when the victim is drunk. I don’t know. I find all this quite baffling from a personal point of view. I simply cannot imagine ever feeling the impulse to rape, the idea is a total turn-off. But obviously some, maybe many, men are willing, eager and able to perform in such cases. How many?
Who knows? And I also find the idea of a woman drunk and comatose a total turn off. But it obviously is done. And finally, women getting obliviously drunk around lecherous men? Why on earth do they not have instincts for self preservation? Its like wandering around Cabrini Green at night wearing a very visible Rolex. Why would you do that?
Every now and then on English TV you will come on a news report with clips of the scenes in some city areas on a Friday or Saturday night. Lots of young men and women falling over drunk, throwing up fighting. It seems to be socially acceptable in those circles. The emergency services dealing with it, when the people are lucky. Fights, injuries, all kinds of assaults.
Larry has got one thing right. It is no longer Great Britain. Its not a country that can safely permit 24 hour serving of alcohol, and the sooner it admits it and goes back to restricted licensing hours, the better.
George,
“It seems that the CPS has changed direction, because it is troubled by the proportion of prosecutions which result in acquittals, so its trying to adopt a policy which will prosecute only those cases with a higher probability of conviction by a jury.”
The article says nothing remotely like that.
That’s two guys making a recommendation at a workshop, not a change of policy. From their titles, neither of them has the authority to set or announce policy. The second half is The Guardian quoting SJWs who put pressure on CPS to continue its jihad.
“There is a reference in the piece to the problem of rape when the victim is drunk.”
That’s The Guardian being coy about a policy that cannot honestly reveal to the public.
From press accounts we know that in many of these cases the man was also intoxicated. But SJWs are sexist, when useful to them. So the the man is by definition the aggressor. The woman is inherently Cinderella, giving consent. One hour in a bar will show that this is often not the case. Perhaps CPS leaders feared that content from the course would leak to the public, revealing the SJW policies at work in CPS.
This is the passage on which I based my conclusions:
The Guardian has another quite extraordinary story on this topic today:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/25/revealed-uk-police-demanding-access-data-potential-rape-victims
If this is correct, how an accusation is handled by the police and CPS varies enormously according to where you are in the country.
George,
I suggest paying attention to the what the article actually says. You frequently make up theories based on stray things in an article, and ignore the clearly stated facts in the article.
Also, that long quote does not even come close to supporting your claim. Only one sentence is relevant – an unnamed “source” with “experience prosecuting cases.” Might not even be in CPS, or have any knowledge of the workshop. Also, this person does NOT refer to a new change – but to a change “in recent years.”
“If this is correct, how an accusation is handled by the police and CPS varies enormously according to where you are in the country.”
Duh. That’s probably true in most nations. It’s certainly true in the US.
Well, we must agree to differ. I still think my interpretation of what is happening is correct. I am not saying its right or wrong. I can sort of understand why they are doing it.
How do you react to the information which police are reported to be demanding from accusers? I found that quite extraordinary.
As to the variety of procedures, yes, the US has a state based system with a local Attorney General. But England and Wales together are much smaller both geographically and in population, and the Director of the CPS functions as a sort of State Attorney General in these matters.
So I do find the large differences of approach surprising in a way that the US differences are not. And wrong. Its like there would be such gross differences within a state, from one county or city to another. It should not be that in Durham if you bring an accusation, the inquiry is confined to the facts of the event, but if you do the same in London, get ready to produce every past email, your laptop, your phone and records of any therapy or counselling you’ve been in. Going way back in time.
There should be one national standard, which is known, trained to and followed.
My own reaction to the information demanded would be the same as my take on anonymity: that we should have identical treatment. Whatever is being required of the accuser should also be required of the suspect. If we are giving anonymity to the accuser (which England and Wales do) then we should also be giving anonymity to the accused.
Something is going very wrong with our treatment of rape. I must say, thanks for posting on this. Even if we are not seeing eye to eye on it. It was not something I had given serious thought to before, and having done so, am finding the information that emerges both interesting and very disquieting.
George,
“Well, we must agree to differ. I still think my interpretation of what is happening is correct.”
Your interpretation of what? If it’s the alleged change of policy, you’re just making that up. You’ve cited no evidence of such a thing.
“As to the variety of procedures, yes, the US has a state based system with a local Attorney General.”
False. Procedural details of that sort in the US vary not just by State, but by locality. That is, counties and cities have elected Attorneys General (and sometimes elected chief law enforcement officers) who have wide power to set policy in such matters.
“But England and Wales together are much smaller both geographically and in population, and the Director of the CPS functions as a sort of State Attorney General in these matters.”
Wrong again. The population of England and Wales is about 56 million. That’s equivalent to the combined population of the smallest 26 states in America, which contain hundreds of counties and cities — each of which have their own elected DA and Sheriff (mostly) — and hence their own procedures in handling rape cases. Lots of diversity.
Leading feminists such as Bindel, are already calling for jury trials for rape and sexual assault to be ended, and this will be the next move of a feminist House of Commons. If that fails to get the numbers up, they will then demand, as they have in Canada, that judges be re-trained to follow the feminist cause. This poison needs to be first stopped in its tracks, and then pushed back.