criminal justice system

The Home Affairs Select Committee have announced that unlike people accused of any other crime, those accused of sex crimes (including rape) deserve anonymity until charged. It’s a decision that has been made without consulting rape victims or rape support charities, instead appearing to be motivated by sympathy for the DJ Paul Gambacinni, kept on bail for 12 months over an allegation that was eventually dropped. According to Committee chairman Keith Vaz “we have seen how destructive [releasing names] can be to a person’s livelihood, causing irreparable reputational damage and enormous financial burden.” We have also, one would think, seen how damaging rape – which happens to an estimated one in five women – can be, but apparently that’s less measurable (or less important?). In any case, the belief that a “special stigma” attaches to rape, making those accused more in need of protection from publicity, persists.

Personally I find it strange to think that we live in a world so appalled and outraged by rape that those accused of it are social pariahs. If that were the case, surely we wouldn’t be surrounded by men telling women that forced penetration and sexual coercion are perfectly fine. A world in which great stigma is attached to rape itself is not a world in which …

• Teenage boys film themselves raping young women and share it on social media
• The BMJ reports a “climate of coercion” surrounding anal sex, with men reporting attempts to “accidentally” penetrate women on purpose
• UK politicians still seek to make distinctions between “serious rape” and what is presumably the non-serious kind
• More than a quarter of people in the UK think drunk victims of rape or sexual assault are at least partly responsible for what happened to them
• Male university students publicly chant “no means yes, yes means anal” outside the halls of female students
• A third of male college students in the US say they would “act on intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse if they were confident they could get away with it”
• The UK student website UniLAD tells readers that since 85% of rapes go unreported, “that seems to be fairly good odds,” before reminding them that “Uni Lad does not condone rape without saying ‘surprise’”
• The victim of rapist footballer Ched Evans has been forced to change her name and move more than five times due to being hounded by strangers
• An estimated 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales every year

This is not a world in which rape is seen as a truly abhorrent act of violence. It is joked about. It is excused. It is filmed and shared between friends. It is committed time and again, by men who believe it is normal (just don’t say the “r” word, at least not outside your own circle of friends).

The stigma, if there is one, has nothing to do with rape itself. It’s to do with naming it. It’s to do with being accused. An accusation breaks all the rules. You haven’t properly overpowered a victim if she then complains. Her complaint makes you a Rapist with a capital “R,” as opposed to someone who merely “coerces” (every man coerces, doesn’t he? Coercion’s when you get away with it and that’s just fine).

I don’t believe for a minute that the tiny number of men falsely accused of rape suffer more than the tens of thousands of women raped every year who see no justice at all. Only someone who believes men are more human than women – or that forced penetration is no big deal since that’s what women are there for – could dare to think otherwise. If a false accusation of rape is more traumatic than one of, say, burglary or murder, this isn’t because we think rape is more abhorrent. We don’t.  Perhaps men feel pressured put on a show of distancing their behaviour and beliefs from those of someone who’s been “officially” labelled a rapist. Or maybe there’s a particular shame – a form of emasculation – associated in having your socially approved right to take penetrate more vulnerable bodies legally questioned. Whatever it is, it’s not that we think rape is worse than other crimes. We just don’t like having to think of it as a crime at all.

The current call for those accused of sex crimes to remain anonymous until charged harms victims several times over. It suggests rape is less acceptable than other forms of criminal behaviour (the opposite is true). It suggests accusers are more likely to lie (false accusation rates are no different than for other crimes). It suggests the chance that publicity could help other victims to come forward isn’t important (it is). It blurs the lines between “not charged” and “falsely accused” (not charging men accused of rape is common; charges and convictions for making false accusations are rare). Above all, it suggests being raped isn’t as bad as being accused of rape, making the convictions of serial rapists such as John Worboys much less likely in order to spare a handful of men the pain of being accused of a crime they didn’t commit (meanwhile any one of us could get accused of a crime we didn’t commit, but clearly only some of us matter).

Rape accusations are socially disruptive, but only because we live in a world that is perfectly fine with rape itself. That is the problem. Anyone who cared about victims and about the handful of men falsely accused would work on changing this.

(For help emailing your MP on this issue, click here.)

Victoria Smith  Humourless Mummy, Cuddly Feminist [@glosswitch]