Where’s the fury over false rape claims?

LEONA O’Callaghan called it ‘The shackles of shame’: that’s how she viewed the legacy of her rape, at the age of 12, by Patrick O’Dea. For more than 20 years she had been burdened by the trauma of O’Dea’s vile assault, and for so long she had wished, as she said, ‘that I could go back and give that paranoid, frightened child a hug’.

This week, when she faced O’Dea in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin and waived her anonymity to ensure he could be named, she did just that, by passing the shackles of shame to him.

O’Dea, who had 42 previous convictions, including a sexual assault on a child under ten, and the multiple rape of another girl over a six-year period, was just about as appalling a rapist as has ever come before our courts. And yet he was matched, in his depravity, by another serial rapist who came before the same courts within the space of 24 hours.

Patrick Nevin viciously raped or sexually assaulted three women he met through the dating app Tinder in an 11day period in 2014. His string of past convictions included the savage beating of a former partner, during which he battered her two pet dogs to death, and firearms charges.

There are few offences more shocking, more repulsive or more despicable than rape, and even within the criminal fraternity in prison, sex offenders are considered the lowest of the low, and must be segregated from other inmates for their own safety.

The fact that rape, like murder, potentially carries a life sentence is a measure of society’s abhorrence for such perpetrators. Being convicted of rape quite properly condemns the culprit to the status of an outcast from civilised society, hated and reviled by all rightthinking people.

The aftermath of the Belfast rape trial earlier this year, and the recent controversy in this jurisdiction over a defence barrister’s reference to a thong worn by the complainant in a rape case, have both turned a harsh spotlight on the manner in which such hearings are conducted.

Often, it is said, the alleged victim is the one who appears to be on trial. Her clothing and conduct may be scrutinised, her alcohol consumption examined, her testimony robustly and often traumatically challenged in the witness box.

The mother of a Scottish teenager, hearing of the furore over the ‘thong case’ here, came forward to tell of her own tragedy: Two weeks after her daughter was forced to hold her own underwear up in court during the trial of her rapist, the girl killed herself.

There is no denying that rape trials are a nightmare for all concerned: the awful reality, though, is that that’s how it may need to be.

Following the ‘thong case’, which made international headlines, protesters took to the streets across the country to insist that underwear is not a form of consent, and the ‘#IBelieveHer’ Twitter thread, which started in the aftermath of the Belfast trial, flourished again.

But there was another case in the courts, this week, which made for far smaller headlines, generated zero indignation and yet was hugely significant to this entire, fraught debate.

A 26-year-old woman called Kerry Holt was convicted of falsely accusing a homeless man of raping her.

She and her boyfriend had been staying in a homeless hostel in Tralee, Co. Kerry, at the time she gave gardaí a detailed account of how another resident of the facility had forced her to have sex.

The accused man was deeply upset, anxious and embarrassed, as rumours that he was a rapist quickly spread through the community.

WHEN Holt told the same yarn to her boyfriend, denying that she’d willingly slept with the other man, he doubted her story and went to gardaí with his suspicions.

Holt was given a suspended sentence of two and a half years, even though the judge declared that making a false rape accusation was an ‘extremely serious’ matter.

In fact, it is hard to imagine a more serious, more damaging accusation that could be made against any man.

If it wasn’t for Holt’s boyfriend, that homeless man could well have been convicted, lost his liberty for a jail term, and his good name for life on the basis of a bare-faced lie.

Cases like this may be rare, but they happen, and they are a cautionary brake on trends like ‘#IBelieveHer’.

False rape accusations should be harshly punished, both in the interests of those wrongly accused and those who were genuinely raped.

After all, if a jury knows that an accuser could face serious consequences for making a false claim, they would surely be more likely to find her credible.

As well as facing all the indignities of such a process, an accuser would hardly risk a prison sentence out of vengeance or embarrassment.

Rapists deserve the harshest of punishments, and few would shed a tear if O’Dea’s jailers threw away the key of his cell. And that’s the very reason why false accusers should face a spell behind bars themselves.