A SCREAMING INJUSTICE
Did a woman QC cynically exploit the anonymity given to rape victims to cover up her drunken adulterous tryst at Waterloo station – while her lover was named and shamed?
Rape is an appalling crime because it is an intimate violation. Your body is your most precious possession. and no one but you can give permission for that intensely personal contact.
For too long though, rape was seen as shaming the victim as well as the attacker. Therefore in British law we have a humane, necessary provision.
In sexual assault cases the victim is never named, unless for reasons of campaigning she renounces her anonymity, like the courageous Jill Saward, victim of the ealing vicarage rape who died earlier this year.
Most victims are glad of the anonymity. It’s a precious, unassailable right. Which makes it all the more shocking and degrading — to the law and to us all — that a woman barrister has seemingly cynically exploited this civil liberty to cover, as it were, her own backside.
I am referring, of course, to the seedy case of the drunken lawyers engaged in a sex act at Waterloo station, which this week took an even more outrageous turn.
To recap the bald facts of the case: two middle-aged lawyers, both considerably the worse for drink, concluded a lunch session in august 2015 by getting up against a wall at Waterloo station, in the rush hour, in what was politely described as an ‘intimate clinch’.
The woman’s knickers were round her ankles: the embrace lasted a considerable time, witnessed by several passers-by and then by the police.
Both were arrested and locked up for the night, and admitted ‘outraging public decency’. They were both given a caution, which means that the suspect has admitted a criminal offence and accepted a formal warning.
We are told that the woman took legal advice (presumably from a lawyer more sober than herself) before signing it.
However, her male partner didn’t accept the caution, feeling what he did wasn’t that serious.
He
WaS prepared to go to court to defend himself: a situation that would, of course, have seen the woman named as a partner in this outrage of decency.
Six weeks later, she declared that the caution was invalid and claimed that actually it was she who had been the victim of a sexual assault.
Thus at one breathtaking stroke, she won lifetime anonymity, and left this man to face a very serious criminal charge on his own. He was investigated for eight months before police decided not to prosecute due to lack of evidence.
While neither individual emerges from this tawdry tale with any dignity, questions are being asked about whether she made the allegation in order to get anonymity.
If so, one can only wonder at the conscience of a woman who, in a bid to save her legal skin, can bring such a hard-won human liberty — a rape victim’s right to anonymity only became law in 1976 — into such utter disrepute. What sort of woman, too, having engaged in a consensual act, stands by to watch the man take all the punishment that comes with publicity?
Life will never be the same again for the foolish married father of three. His wife and family, too, have to live with the ignominy, while she, the accuser, not only remains anonymous for life but, in an extraordinary development this week, had her criminal record cleared.
But never mind the legalities. What we have to face is the other shocking fact about this case: that this drunken woman who cared little for public decency is a QC.
a Queen’s Counsel! a senior barrister: highly educated, a leader in the profession which we trust to prosecute or defend ordinary citizens in the greatest crises of their lives.
She is not some daft drunk teenager from a problem home, overcome with lust outside a nightclub at 2am. Indeed, if she was, I doubt that she would get far with her foxy manoeuvre — admitting willingness in a police station and then waiting six weeks to announce that the encounter was an assault.
There is a price to pay for education, status and professional respectability. at the most basic level, it means that if you are going to engage in impetuous sex, you damn well pay for a hotel room. You don’t clutter up rush-hour railway stations with your knickerless wriggling.
Both partners, with their massive legal brains, should have worked that out.
Yet there is a broader theme here — a depressing shift in social mores that particularly affects the middle-aged middle classes. and the consumption of alcohol is a considerable part of it.
We are increasingly told that youngsters in their teens and 20s now drink less than any other age group — and that it is their 40 and 50-plus counterparts who are drinking more.
a recent UK study found that a quarter of middle-aged women are drinking three times more than the recommended guidelines of 14 units a week.
Yes, the vintages may be better, the wine-bar banquettes a lot more comfortable than stickyfloored clubs, but the accept- ability of regularly getting completely blotto is now firmly established. What better way to celebrate the end of a high-flying working week than several bottles at lunch followed by, in the case of the Waterloo Two, a lifetime of regret? We will never know whether there was ever any genuine romantic attachment between the libidinous lawyers.
BUT
even if there were once a sober spark, it’s all a far cry from Brief encounter. at least the mid-life lovers played by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in the classic Forties film managed to express their illicit yearnings on nothing stronger than a stale railway scone and a pot of tea.
There is something rather pathetic in supposedly serious people with serious jobs feeling they can’t unwind without first giving their central nervous system a comprehensive hammering with alcohol.
Similarly, it can be nothing short of excruciating — as the rush-hour commuters at Waterloo station that fateful day would no doubt attest — to watch the middle- aged try too hard to regain their youth without any of the real joys of being young.
This insidious drinking culture is depressing; but so too is the idea — also borrowed from youngsters who don’t yet know any better — that casual sex means nothing.
You’d think two adults used to courtroom tales might have picked up a few pointers on the way. You’d also think two lawyers whose lifework is dealing in the truth and nothing but the truth would hold honesty, both in their professional and in their domestic lives, in high regard.
as modern morality tales go, it’s a pretty bleak one.
But for all the disgraceful antics of that drunken august afternoon, far, far worse is when a cunning lawyer degrades a cornerstone of British justice to get herself out of trouble, if indeed that is the case.
It damages the legal profession. It darkens the landscape for the genuine victims of rape for whom anonymity is often a crucial lifeline in creating a future for themselves.
and, perhaps most damningly of all, it also gives a boost to the dangerous, deadly, angry male idea that sneaky things like that are just what women do.