IT’S A MAN’S WORLD WHERE WOMEN IN COURT ARE STILL SEEN AND NOT HEARD

THERE is this much in common between Wednesday’s verdict in the Belfast rape case and the #MeToo movement: both have divided society into two antagonistic mobs. Admittedly, there is almost nothing that happens nowadays that doesn’t divide society into two antagonistic mobs but there’s a timing here that’s really instructive.

After all four defendants in the rugby rape trial were acquitted, thousands of people carrying ‘I believe her’ placards attended rallies all over the country in support of the complainant. At the same time two sports clubs were having to disassociate themselves from tweets by players castigating the complainant, calling her a slut and urging the newspapers to ‘destroy’ her.

Meanwhile writs have begun fluttering about north of the border as Paddy Jackson’s lawyers threaten to sue everybody who publishes unfavourable comments about the judgment, including Labour senator Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.

Almost immediately after the verdict, debate reached such a state of vituperative intensity that it was as if due process was neither here nor there. It was as if the judicial system was a mere sideshow in the far more important court of public opinion. On one side are those who believe her, on the other side are those who believe them and nothing can be done to unite them.

So too with #MeToo – an ongoing kangaroo court about which attitudes are now so deeply divided as to threaten to undo any good that might have come of it. #MeToo began as a well-intentioned and overdue cultural reckoning. It was a campaign to believe women and to listen to them, and to try to alleviate some of the toxic shame that victims of sexual violence can experience.

But the movement soon expanded beyond recognition to include any and every kind of sexual misconduct.

It began to demonise any man who ever made an ill-judged pass at a woman and to describe as a ‘survivor’ any woman who ever had her knee touched by a perv.

Cue more vituperative intensity. On one side are those who think it’s important to preserve a moral distinction between harassment and assault or risk trivialising serious sexual offences.

On the other side are those who think anything other than zero tolerance is aiding and abetting ‘rape culture’. And nothing can be done to unite them.

But that is where the similarities between these two matters end. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from this depressing nine-week trial in Belfast, it’s that there’s an unfathomable distance between the emerging culture around sexual mores and the law as it is applied.

That such a case – not just the verdict but the entire trial – has happened at such a moment and in such a milieu is beyond cognitive dissonance. The contrast between the ‘Believe All Women’ zeitgeist and the chilly incredulity of the courtroom could not be more stark.

Here we are congratulating ourselves on embracing so many new norms. Here we are thinking the pendulum of tolerance regarding sexual misconduct is swinging in the right direction. Meanwhile the courts are trundling on as they’ve always done and women who accuse men of rape end up on trial themselves, just as they’ve always done.

The young woman in Belfast spent eight days in the witness box, giving testimony from behind a curtain. She could not see the defendants or the public gallery but everyone could see her via video-link. One by one the defendants’ lawyers – all men – cross-examined her, picking holes in her story, accusing her of inconsistency, passing her underwear around, asking her why she didn’t just keep her mouth closed. Even if the verdict had gone her way, this was a cruel and unusual punishment for the crime of alleging a crime.

And here’s what we learned, long before the jury returned its ‘not guilty’ verdict. We learned, from the defendants’ messages, that there’s still a cohort, at least, of young men who refer to women as ‘sluts’ and ‘brasses’ and ‘loose’, and who boast about ‘spit-roasting them’.

We learned, from Stuart Olding’s lawyer, Frank O’Donoghue, that ‘middle-class girls’ won’t tolerate rape, although what working-class girls will and won’t tolerate was not teased out in court. We learned that when a woman says ‘what happened last night was not consensual’, she may not be believed.

In fact we learned – although we should have already known this – that all the careful guidance that you might issue to young people about consent, matters nothing in the end, because what it boils down to in court is the word of a woman against the word of a man – or four men and their counsel, in this case.

Universities have been diligent in encouraging students to understand the issue of consent on campus, while the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre is among the organisations broadcasting the ‘simple as tea’ video, in which sexual consent is compared to making someone a cup of tea and then being so good as to not insist they drink it.

These measures aim to teach young people about respect. That they can say no whenever they want, or yes whenever they want. That they can change their minds from yes to no whenever they want.

But should we really be telling them this? In view of what we’ve learned from this case, shouldn’t we actually be telling them that there’s strong evidence to suggest nothing at all has changed, that the world is very much the same as it ever was, with one standard of sexual behaviour for men and another for women – ‘sluts’ versus ‘legends’?

The chasm between the aspirational ideals of ‘#MeToo’ and the vulgarity of the real world show that, by the time people get to university, it’s too late to start teaching them respect. The time to teach men that it’s wrong to treat women like meat is before they become men at all.

Irish Rugby begins coaching youngsters from the age of five. The following is a line from the organisation’s code of conduct: ‘Respect your opponent. Treat all players as you would like to be treated. Do not “bully” or take advantage of any player.’

Consider how much good might come of a simple rewrite: ‘Respect people. Treat all people as you would like to be treated. Do not “bully” or take advantage of any person.’