Daily Mail, 6 June 2005

Question: when is it assumed that a person is guilty until proven innocent? Answer: when a man is accused by a woman of rape.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has ordered a top-level inquiry into the growing discrepancy between the number of rapes that are alleged to have taken place and the number of convictions that result.

Although the rate of reported rapes is now at the all-time high of almost 12,000 per year, only one rape complaint in 18 results in a criminal conviction. Sir Ian, who 20 years ago wrote what one police source has called the definitive book on rape investigation, seems to think this means that more than 11,000 guilty men are going free each year.

Rape is a terrible crime that is rightly considered only one notch down from murder. The violation of a woman’s body merits the utmost severity from the law. If rapes were systematically taking place and not being dealt with, that would indeed be a serious cause for concern.

But it is instead Sir Ian’s approach that should cause concern. For the evidence suggests that, far from the police failing to deal appropriately with an epidemic of rape, they are having to cope with an epidemic of spurious accusations.

Apparently, Sir Ian is particularly worried by the growing number of rape claims which the police classify as ‘no-crimes’ warranting no further action. A key factor is said to be the rising number of women drinking themselves into a stupor and then claiming they have been raped. Because they cannot remember what has happened to them, they are often told that their complaint is impossible to follow up.

As a result, Sir Ian seems to think that something is wrong with the system. But how can such a complaint be followed up if the woman can’t remember what actually happened? She may have been raped — or she may have made the first advances herself. If she was so far gone that she can’t remember, why should anyone take seriously her claim that she was raped?

A new Home Office study has identified a group of predatory men sexually assaulting drunken women in the knowledge that any allegations would be impossible to follow up. While it is obviously true that in some cases a woman is so drunk that her capacity to consent to sex is impaired, so too is her capacity to remember what took place.

Clearly, in some such cases sexual assaults do actually happen. The problem, however, remains the absence of any reliable evidence, without which a fair trial is impossible. But instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that something is wrong with a woman’s complaint in such circumstances, Sir Ian’s response is that something is wrong with police procedures instead.

This is because he assumes that whatever a woman says about violence by men must be true. Sir Ian’s initiative reflects nothing other than the politically correct obsession with proving that men are intrinsically violent and predatory and women are always their victims.

This obsession has captured both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, whose ‘hate crimes’ unit recently produced posters offensively suggesting that men reading them might be contemplating violence against women — ignoring the fact that domestic violence is equally committed by women — and warning that they would be pursued even if the woman did not make a statement.

In fact, in case after case women have made false allegations of rape, sheltering behind the shield of anonymity to destroy the reputations and lives of innocent men.

Leslie Warren spent two years in jail for raping an ex-girlfriend. Last March his conviction was quashed after the court heard that a detective had failed to pass on information about false allegations the woman had made against other men. She later admitted she had lied.

In 1993, student Austen Donnellan was cleared of date rape after the jury heard that his accuser had been so drunk that she could hardly walk. In 2002, rape charges against Andrew Bond were dropped after CCTV footage was discovered which showed his accuser fabricating evidence against him.

Worst of all, in 1996 Stephen McLaughlin was accused of rape by a former girlfriend. She later admitted that she had made up the story and was prosecuted. But 18 months later, having never recovered from the shock of the accusation, Mr McLaughlin drove into a forest and gassed himself to death.

Yet despite a disturbingly long list of false accusations by women, the Home Office continues to promote an utterly skewed picture of a sexually predatory male population. Its absurd claim that one woman in 20 between the ages of 16 and 59 has been raped is drawn from self-completion questionnaires, which begs the enormous question of whether what respondents say on such forms is actually true.

It has also redefined rape to be far broader than most people would accept, including being ’forced to have sexual intercourse against your will’ which can boil down to merely ‘having sex when I wasn’t very keen on the idea’.

The reason so many more rapes are being reported is surely because of the huge campaign by the Home Office to persuade women that male violence against them is routine. And the reason there are fewer convictions is because of the casualisation of sex, in which women get themselves into situations which they may later regret.

The vast majority of rape allegations nowadays are made against lovers or casual partners. In these highly ambiguous circumstances, police officer and juries very reasonably conclude that what actually took place is impossible for anyone else to judge.

Of course, there are bound to be some cases where a rape has indeed taken place but the evidence isn’t available to support a prosecution. This is undoubtedly highly unsatisfactory. But this occurs over the whole range of crimes, and yet there are no Home Office campaigns to boost their rates of conviction.

Justice requires that if there is no evidence there can’t be any prosecution. What must not happen is for the system to be rigged to lower the bar for such a prosecution to succeed. That would be a gross abuse and perversion of justice.

It is therefore shocking that Britain’s most senior policeman appears to be proposing precisely such a course of action. It is reported that the police are preparing to change their policies to require less evidence that a rape has been committed. When the Home Office says jump, the police puppet dangling on the end of its strings duly jumps. Never mind the evidence — just feel those convictions.

And to cap it all, just look at who Sir Ian has put in charge of his review —Brian Paddick, the officer who used Brixton for his catastrophic ‘blind eye to cannabis’ experiment and who was suspended in a scandal over a gay lover who was on bail — but who, by wrapping himself in the mantle of a gay martyr, ensured that instead of being transferred to traffic duties he was promoted instead to the rank of Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

Instead of being the thin blue line against disorder, our utterly pc police have turned into the enforcers of a system which has convicted an entire sex and now seeks to stitch it up by suborning justice itself.

Posted by melanie at June 6, 2005