We hear endless complaints about misogyny, but actually misandry rules. Or if not exactly misandry, a profound misunderstanding of masculinity:
Boys and men are increasingly blamed and belittled. Girls meanwhile have been doing better and better at school and university, making the most of positive discrimination; whereas boys have begun to underperform in most things, except in breaking the law.
The stereotypes of the co-operative, hardworking and sociable girl compared with the disaffected, lazy and antisocial boy truly exist across society. Testosterone has become a vulgar term of abuse. The reasons are legion but the result is the same; this is a bad time to he a boy.
An absolutely typical example of this uncritical misandry was to be found last week in the home secretary’s new white paper on sex offences. It is true that many laws on sex crimes badly need revision and David Blunkett has proposed many very sensible and welcome changes.
But so great has been his determination to convict more date rapists, presumably to please our powerful feminist lobby, that he is prepared to violate two of the most sacred principles of English criminal law: the burden of proof and the presumption of innocence. So powerful is our public obsession with rape and date rape that most critics have said very little about Blunkett’s rape of justice.
Under current law if a man accused of rape can convince a jury that he honestly believed his alleged victim had given consent; no matter how unreasonable his belief might have been, he will be acquitted. It is therefore very hard to convict in such cases, and, according to the white paper, that explains why conviction rates for rape are indeed very low – only 7% of reported cases. That is why Blunkett proposes to move the goalposts of justice.
The two central principles of criminal justice in this country have been the presumption of innocence and the requirement of proof “beyond reasonable doubt”. The burden of proof, in every way, is upon the prosecution. Traditionally, as everyone knows, it has been felt that it is far better that the guilty should go free than that the innocent should be convicted – doubt should go in favour of the accused.
With rape this belief and these principles seem to be losing their ancient power. The white paper, in its attempts to get more convictions for date rape or acquaintance rape, is undermining the assumption of innocence and suggesting a new test of “reasonableness”:
The white paper proposes that if the prosecution can show there is a reasonable doubt that an alleged victim did consent to sex, and that the alleged rapist did not take reasonable steps to make sure he had obtained consent, he’ s guilty of rape.
The law will list circumstances in which it would be presumed that there could not have been consent, such as when a woman was frightened, or unconscious through drink, drugs or sleep.
So, though the prosecution will have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that sex took place, in some of these listed circumstances, the defendant would then have to prove his innocence by persuading the jury, on the balance of probabilities, that the victim did indeed consent. So he will be presumed guilty, it seems to me, until he can prove himself innocent, and under the most imponderable of circumstances.
It is true that rape is a particularly horrible offence, second only in its most flagrant forms to murder. But there are degrees of rape, and it is sometimes genuinely difficult to distinguish between them. For many years now there has been a strange sort of hysteria about it.
I was woken up to this by a women’s magazine investigation of rape about 20 years ago, following a big survey of readers. The writer pointed out with furious indignation that a great many unhappy women had written in, after reading the series, to say that they hadn’t realised until then that they had been raped. Call me conventional, but I think rape is the kind of thing you would notice, at least if you were awake.
I was shocked by another, more recent case of two students who got very drunk and collapsed into his bed in his room. “Penetration took place,” as the men in wigs say, and the next morning the girl was friendly not only to him but to some of his friends who turned up, and she stayed around cheerfully for a couple of hours.
Only much later, after conversations with others, did she cry rape. The boy was convicted. So was poor notorious Angus Diggle; who went to jail for a four-minute fumble with a girl who took off her clothes in front of him, having come to his room to spend the night after a dance. Although he stopped touching her almost as soon as she protested, he was found guilty of attempted rape.
Guilty only of attempted consensual sex, I should say, and foolishnenss and bad manners; her presence and her behaviour suggested consent, and when she protested he stopped almost at once.
Sex is full of ambiguities. Human relationships are full of vengefulness and lies, as well as love and tenderness. Some people are blinded by silly political agendas, or the bad advice of foolish friends.
On the wilder shores of sex, among the S&M and bondage “community”, some people love precisely that “force or, fear of force” that Blunkett would make a presumption of guilt (or at least a `presumption of lack of consent?”) in the courts.
Hasn’t, Blunkett listened to Mozart’s famous seduction scene in Don Giovanni, when the woman sings “vorrei e non vorrei” or “yes and no all at once”? Why should men always be blamed for these ambiguities of human nature?”
Rape is a dreadful violation, date rape may sometimes hardly deserve the name and there is a spectrum of crimes in between. But no crime is bad enough, and men simply are not nasty enough, to justify undermining the most important principles of criminal law.
New laws like this will only increase the misunderstanding between the sexes, and the growing resentment men feel against women.