Drink but stay safe from rape, warns judge

A RETIRING judge has warned drunken women that they will be a target for rapists and must “protect themselves”.

Lindsey Kushner QC, 64, warned that young women’s “disinhibited behaviour” could put them in danger.

She spoke out as she jailed factory worker Ricardo Rodriguez-Fortes-Gomes, 19, for six years at Manchester Crown Court after he raped a woman, 18, whom he and a friend met in a Burger King restaurant in the city centre in July last year. The girl had been drinking lager and vodka and inhaling the party drug amyl nitrite.

The attack on a canal bank was interrupted by a witness, who took camera footage from his bedroom window and called the police after he was woken by the victim’s pleas during the late-night assault.

Judge Kushner said judges had often been criticised for putting emphasis on “what girls should and shouldn’t do”. But she said it would be “remiss” of her if she did not mention one or two things.

“How I see it is burglars are out there and nobody says burglars are OK, but we do say ‘please don’t leave your back door open at night, take steps to protect yourselves’,” she said.

“Girls are perfectly entitled to drink themselves into the ground” but needed to be aware that “people who are potential defendants to rape, gravitate towards girls who have been drinking. It should not be like that but it does happen and we see it time and time again.”

She said men do it because “a girl who is drunk is more likely to agree” and are “less likely to fight a man with evil intentions off ”. The judge added that women were less likely to report an attack if they were drunk because they may not remember exactly what had happened.

Judge Kushner qualified as a barrister in 1974 and became a recorder in 1993 before being appointed a senior circuit judge in 2002.