Some attitudes to rape in a recent poll have been branded as outrageous. Is this reaction reasonable, asks John Waters
ALMOST EVERYONE would agree that rape, when it occurs, is a serious and despicable crime, to be met with the full rigour of the law. But fair-minded people would also agree that, precisely because rape is such a serious and despicable crime, we should not assume that such a crime has occurred because an allegation has been made.
Thus, there is something semantically suspect about the persistent claims by groups campaigning on this issue that what they precipitately call rapes are a) not being reported and b) when reported, are not culminating in convictions.
Legally, many allegations of rape can be formally deemed rapes only when convictions have been obtained. Insisting that charges be proved beyond reasonable doubt is not "blaming the victim". It is called due process.
Moreover, reason suggests a gradation of alleged rapes, ranging from violent assault at knifepoint to disputed recollections of alcohol-saturated encounters between people who have been alone together. Such observations provoke extreme reactions in certain quarters.
But this, nonetheless, is the context in which we should properly see this week's widely-publicised exercise in campaigning journalism on public attitudes to rape.
"Rape: Our Blame Culture" was the headline on Wednesday's report of a national opinion poll by the Irish Examiner/Red C which found that significant minorities of respondents had suggested that women might bear some responsibility for their being raped - for example, by wearing revealing clothes, consuming alcohol or drugs, or walking through dangerous areas.
Wednesday's Irish Examiner editorial, "We must stop blaming the victims", referred to "neanderthal beliefs", pretty much anticipating the subsequent consensus of media discussions about what the survey appeared to indicate.
But is this reasonable? Does the word "blame" in this context carry the same meaning as "responsibility"? The pollsters, not the respondents, chose the language, and the language of the rape issue is loaded and ideologically booby-trapped.
If you ask someone whether a person who ventures into a dangerous situation bears some responsibility if something bad befalls them, can you call this blaming the victim? Could such a view not simply reflect a belief that people should not take unnecessary risks?
If the Examiner poll had asked respondents whether they believed that the culpability of an assailant is reduced by the actions, dress or sexual history of a victim, I think it is reasonable to anticipate that close to 100 per cent would have vehemently rejected such a notion.
The issue of what constitutes responsible behaviour is complex. Does any parent of a teenage girl or young woman seriously believe that the way his/her daughter dresses is utterly irrelevant to the question of her safety in a public place? To advise that women should dress prudently, mindful of the evil that may lurk around the corner, is not neanderthal. It is sensible.
About one in 12 alleged rapes is reported to the Garda, and less than 10 per cent of allegations result in convictions. These figures are broadly similar to the UK where, interestingly, one of the problems is that the definition of rape has been massively extended in response to relentless lobbying by rape crisis activists. The result has been a conflation of concepts to the point where every episode in which a woman says she did not consent to sex is accorded the same - enormous - degree of gravity.
However, the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, by reversing the onus of proof to require the accused to show that consent had not been withheld, had the opposite effect to that intended. Juries have since shown a marked reluctance to treat an incident in which there is a dispute between two people on the question of consent in the same way as a case in which a woman is attacked at knifepoint and brutally assaulted.
The Red C survey found that significant proportions of respondents under various demographic headings felt that a woman who had consumed drugs or alcohol might bear some responsibility in the event of being raped. This, too, has been presented as outrageous.
But, again, it depends on how you define rape. A woman who says she did not consent to sex, say the lobbyists, has been raped. But, because a woman cannot remember saying either Yes or No does not mean that she did not give, or appear to give, her consent to sexual intercourse.
Activists disingenuously seek to depict all such cases as episodes of a man having sex with the prone body of a woman in an alcoholic stupor. But someone in an alcoholic blackout, who will subsequently be unable to remember anything of what is happening, will often appear to be functioning normally, conversing and interacting in a manner that renders tomorrow's amnesia impossible to anticipate.
Is consent to be a matter of reasonable understanding or retrospective deliberation by one party to the encounter? It is ludicrous enough for a woman to sober up and say that, although she cannot remember a thing, she is not the kind of person who would have consented to sex.
For this to be the approach of the legal system is surely unconscionable.