Rape and the men whose lives are wrecked by lies
A CONTROVERSIAL new book argues that feminism has meant men are secondclass citizens. Yesterday, we told how men are treated unfairly in marriage. Today, in the final extract, the book urges an end to the system which leaves a man accused of rape bearing
Now if there’s one area of modern manhood that demands a serious rethink by those who run our country —– above even health, fatherhood and male suicide, which remain fiercely frontline issues — it’s the human right to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Currently, under British legislation, any man can be accused of rape and named, even before the police bring charges.
This might be acceptable if every allegation were legitimate, but, sadly, they are not. Hence my fervent belief that preconviction anonymity is crucial for preserving the credibility of our justice system.
The stories of men who’ve been falsely accused make harrowing reading.
In June 2014 trainee barrister Rhiannon Brooker — yes, a legal professional — was jailed for three years after falsely accusing her former boyfriend Paul Fensome of rape and assault. He was held in custody for 36 days, including time on a secure wing after rumours that he was a paedophile. He has since received £38,000 in compensation.
In April 2012 Kirsty Sowden, a former John Lewis shop assistant, was jailed for crying rape over a fully consensual encounter with a man she’d met online. He was arrested at his workplace and detained in a cell, wasting 376 hours of police time.
The reason? She felt guilty for cheating on her long-term boyfriend.
Shortly after this, 20- year- old York student Hannah Byron was spared jail after falsely accusing her ex-boyfriend of rape in revenge for breaking up with her.
Capping them all, 22-year-old Elizabeth Jones of Southampton was jailed in 2013 after a decade-long string of false allegations — but only after making her 11th completely untrue accusation of rape. Her final victim was targeted because she ‘didn’t like him’.
Despite these cases there’s a belief that men deserve the stain of rape stigma, guilty or not, simply because they are male.
Julie Bindel, feminist writer and co-founder of the group Justice For women, once said that ‘a fair number of celebrities . . . have been accused of rape in the past and do not seem to have suffered longer-term. To say that an accusation ruins lives is perhaps a sweeping generalisation’.
Likewise, writing in the New Statesman, the social commentator willard Foxton sneered that ‘ the fashionable thing to do on being cleared of rape these days is to walk free from the courtroom or police station and loudly issue a public statement calling for those accused of rape to be granted anonymity by the courts because of your “ordeal” ’.
Perhaps these two should speak to Reg Traviss, the former boyfriend of the late Amy winehouse, who suffered a fictitious claim of rape in December 2012. He was acquitted, but only after his character had been publicly assassinated.
Southwark Crown Court in London heard that his accuser was ‘so drunk she couldn’t stand up or walk’. CCTV footage secured by Traviss’s brother (not the police) proved otherwise.
Then there’s Peter Bacon. In 2009, a jury cleared him of rape in just 45 minutes after he had been falsely accused by a woman with whom he had a one-night stand. The nightmare was so bad he changed his name and left the country. And yet, in spite of all this, nothing has been learned.
oxford University students are some of the most privileged young people in Britain. But Ben Sullivan, president of the oxford Union debating society, didn’t enjoy any exemption when he was arrested at 6am one day in May last year and detained in a police cell.
For months he endured public suspicion before police confirmed he wouldn’t face a single charge. Yet he still had to pay £15,000 in legal fees and have his life marred.
Sarah Pine, vice president for women at oxford University’s student union, spearheaded a campaign against Sullivan, even before the accusations were fully considered by police. She called on scheduled guest speakers to boycott his debates and for him to resign.
Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble, the U.S. political analyst Norman Finkelstein and even David Mepham, UK Director of Human Rights watch, agreed to her request. only Jennifer Perry, an expert on the internet and cyber-crime, resisted — and later spoke of how she felt ‘threatened’ and ‘intimidated’ by Pine’s gender-driven agenda.
At the time Pine said: ‘This is not about denying the legal process of being innocent until proven guilty . . . In any other profession if someone was arrested for rape and attempted rape, they would stand down while the investigation was ongoing.’
After his ordeal, Sullivan told reporters: ‘In cases like mine, everyone should have the right to anonymity. The police and Crown Prosecution Service should then be able to go to a judge and ask for the anonymity to be waived, if they need it.’
originally, the law agreed. In 1976, the Labour government introduced rape trial anonymity for both the alleged victim and the accused. But in 1988, guidelines were relaxed to help police investigations.
At the time, the way information was disseminated was far less powerful than now. There were no gossip websites, no mobile phones with cameras, no social networking sites.
Today, the landscape is different. And — once again — the law should change to reflect this, because a not guilty verdict is no longer enough to repair the damage caused by weeks of daily speculation and viral gossip across the globe.
Labour peer Lord Corbett, who introduced the 1976 law, argued this until his death in 2012. ‘Rape is a uniquely serious offence,’ he said in 2002. ‘Acquittal is not enough to clear a man in the eyes of his family, community or workplace . . .’
Maura McGowan, deputy High Court judge and chairman of the Bar Council, agrees. ‘Until they [defendants] have been proven to have done something as awful as this [a sex crime], there is a strong argument in cases of this sort — because they carry such stigma — to maintain the defendant’s anonymity until he is convicted,’ she told the BBC’s Radio 5 Live.
Take, finally, the case of Linsey Attridge. To stop her boyfriend leav- ing her, the 31-year-old claimed two men broke into her home and committed rape while he was away playing football. She then spent three days trawling social networking sites to find users she could ‘identify’ as responsible. The men she chose were detained by police.
Two months later, Attridge confessed that it was a lie — but only received 200 hours of unpaid community service as punishment.
Not one rape charity has ever come forward to denounce the culture of false allegations — which surely betrays the real victims of rape more than pre-conviction anonymity ever could.
Sadly, it’s not just the women who falsely claim to be victims of rape who breach our trust, but women in positions of power, too.
In 2010, an official inquiry report led by Baroness Stern — a prison reform campaigner — ordered Har- riet Harman to stop misleading the public about rape statistics. For years she’d been pumping out misinformation that only 6 per cent of rapists are brought to justice, but the 6 per cent figure relates to reported cases.
The conviction rate for those actually charged with rape is nearly two out of three.
A few weeks after Ben Sullivan’s charges were dropped, I bumped into him in Central London — minutes after stumbling across MP Nigel Evans (who was similarly accused — then acquitted — of rape. At the end of his trial in April last year, the former Commons Deputy Speaker spoke of his ‘11 months of hell’ after a jury took less than six hours to acquit him of sex offences against seven men.)
I wonder if women like Harman or Bindel have ever seen men so ashen, so exhausted and so utterly violated by a system that’s shaped by radical Marxist-based theories from the Seventies. I doubt it.
Mutual anonymity would serve everybody, helping victims as well as conserving fair trials. It would deter anyone from making false claims out of spite and, conversely, could make testifying easier for those who have come f orward. Identifying the accused often inadvertently identifies the victim, which adds immense pressure for them.
This i s also the view of the majority. In a poll on the Guardian website, 71 per cent of readers supported pre-conviction anonymity. A similar survey by Mailonline showed 67 per cent of readers feel the same.
The consensus is clear: in a world of grey areas, consent is always black and white — but the protection of anonymity must be too.
There’s a feeling that, guilty or not,
we deserve it Anonymity helps the accused — and the victims