Once again, I am astonished by the way in which patently flawed research is accepted as authoritative simply because it corresponds with a prevailing prejudice. Research commissioned by the Home Office says rape attacks are going up but convictions are going down. As the Telegraph reported:

'Researchers blamed a "culture of scepticism" towards rape victims among police and prosecutors that had led to a loss of confidence in the system.'

BBC Radio News this morning reported this as the Home Office 'admitting' that rapes were going up while convictions came down. But this is to assume that all claims of rape mean that a rape has actually taken place. It is to assume that rape claims made by women are all true -- a wholly prejudiced assumption that all men accused of rape are guilty unless proved innocent, which has led the government to rig rape trials to achieve more convictions. And which is the department which has led this witch-hunt against men in rape trials? Why, none other than the very same Home Office that commissioned this particular piece of research.

The researchers seem to believe that the 'culture of scepticism' is misplaced. They presumably think this because they believe that all women who cry rape are telling the truth. But how do they know? And why -- if they have actually talked to the police and prosecuting authorities -- do they dismiss their 'scepticism' with such contumely? For although it is undeniably true that such a culture of scepticism certainly exists among police, lawyers and others who routinely deal with such allegations, this is because there are ample grounds for such scepticism. Indeed, there is a view that the majority of rape claims are false.

This view is not plucked out of their air. It arises from incidents where the claim is demonstrably false. Like, for example, the incident where a woman claimed she was sexually attacked in a subway, but the CCTV showed this was utnrue; or where a man was prosecuted (and aquitted) for rape even though the girl had sent him a text message saying her allegation was untrue and she would withdraw it; or where a girl who was being arrested claimed that a police officer had sexually attacked her even though he was observed at all times while he was with her and seen to have done nothing at all; or where DNA evidence shows trhe rape claim to have been false; and on and on.

The police, lobotomised by political correctness and terrified of becoming the object of a witch-hunt, do not generally take action against these women. Instead they pass the buck to the courts. Many men are aquitted becasue they should never have been prosecuted in the first palce. The political climate, in which the government has said in effect over and over again that all male rape defendants are guilty, that any woman who claims rape is telling the truth and that therefore the rate of convictions has to be gerrymandered upwards in a perversion of justice that has - staggeringly -- passed almost without remark, provides a positive encouragement for malevolence and attention seeking, not to mention a more profound confusion about the rules of the dating game and the role of the law in punishing a man for an unsatisfactory sexual encounter.

And before any brainwashed zombie starts screaming that I am trivialising rape, it is this very situation which is doing so. Rape is a terrible crime. And it happens. But its seriousness is grotesquely undermined by this farce which, by exaggerating its incidence and substituting persecution for prosecution, is bringing the very notion of sexual violence against women -- not to mention the law itself -- into disrepute.