Sex Law Reform

In 2002, there were 12,000 rapes recorded by the police in the UK; in 2021, that number had risen to over 70,000. This isn’t because there were necessarily more sexual assaults occurring, but the scope of what sexual assault actually is had been massively expanded, and there were numerous, repeated public appeals for people to ‘Come forward’ with their complaints.

The 2003 criminal justice act added one new law for every day the New Labour government was in power, and also ensured the 1994 repealing of mandatory corroboration meant evidence for rape charges was even less necessary. Keir Starmer as Director of Public Prosecutions designed the ‘Believe the Victims’ policy in around 2010, ending he said/she said trials by effectively making them ‘She said’.

In the US, the unregulated Title IX directive means that complaints of sexual assault on a university campus could be immediately investigated by police, as opposed to by internal boards. This quickly became a push for a new generation of academic activists to call for ‘Enthusiastic Consent’ to be a necessity for consensual consent to take place.

Football players and history students were losing their futures on a regular basis, demonised in the media as examples of rape culture, the seedy end of the patriarchy gone wrong, and of course toxic masculinity. Social media, on a concurrent, physical circulation-decimating rise, enabled every citizen to have an opinion on Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Savile, Bill Cosby, Michel Jackson, Paul Weller, John Leslie, Pete Townshend, Gerard Depardieu, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, R Kelly, Marilyn Manson, Harvey Weinstein and Alec Salmond, while legacy media made social mincemeat — to the extent they were still read — of insufficiently risk-averse men lower down the food chain.

Violent sexual attacks on women by unknown men are vanishingly rare and getting rarer (see Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling) but those that do occasionally occur are magnified into seeming like a social contagion by societies’ innate heuristic bias. This is a trick of the politicisation of the media — sex sells, violence sells, and putting a picture of a pretty female next to a salacious story of an evil-minded attacker boosts the profits these media companies need in order to please their shareholders.

Increasingly trials are pre-biased, with neutral jury members being hard to find — for the OJ Simpson trial, as one high profile example, everyone knew, everyone had watched, and everyone had an opinion. The question is not should there be such a thing as trial by media — almost all sensible minded people say no — but what to do about the trials by media that are already occurring daily. You don’t need to be afraid of something to not realise that that of which you are afraid has already happened.

Ex Victims Commissioner Dame Vera Baird would regularly bemoan the fact that plummeting guilty verdicts meant that the traditionally serious crime of rape had been effectively ‘Decriminalised’, without ever acknowledging the obvious fact that it was the likes of her polemicising with Rape Crisis — once a support group, like Mermaids or Stonewall, but increasingly a misandrist hate organisation — that had brought this supposed decriminalisation to pass. If every imperfect sexual encounter is turned into a form of rape, this will have a diluting effect which will go on to understandably enrage the genuine victims of such attacks.

At the same time there are the transatlantic Mothers of the Accused, including partners, siblings and friends, themselves outraged that these ‘She said’ cases have imprisoned their loved ones for something like a mutually regretted one-night stand, years prior. People who proclaim themselves to be radical power feminists — once inspired by the progressive left but now of all political colours and present in both sexes — have gone from being race and gender critical theory students to being in positions at the top of media, government and academic organisations, and are pushing the diversity/sexual assault agenda as if all their very identities depended on it.

On the occasions that a complainant has been found to have lied about being raped, she is regularly labelled a one off; as according to Keir Starmer’s disgraced successor Alison Saunders, ‘Why would any woman lie about being raped?’. £22,000 compensation reward for coming forward and the sympathy of your social network in a society that increasingly rewards self-proclaimed victimhood, juxtaposed with the fact that the media messaging is that you hold no responsibility for your own actions and that all men are essentially predators, might help.

Sir Cliff Richard, Paul Gambaccini and Harvey Proctor MP’s campaign for anonymity for the accused before charge is helpful, but it doesn’t help the fact that a target-obsessed police force, turned inside out by ‘Woke’ issues and flip-flopped by one Home Secretary after another has already done the damage by investigating claims by the clearly mentally unwell/mendacious.

One third of British men have a criminal record, so how any of them pass a DBS check without lying or suspicious comment is a mystery. Testosterone has become a prohibited substance, its natural occurrence criminalised, and culture and the law become fully misandrist.

It is in this context and against this background that I put forward the following ideas for Sex Law Reform to protect against innocent men being accused or convicted for sexual offences that did not occur by calling for:

-Police/CPS targets for successful (guilty verdict) outcomes to be dropped.

-Conflict resolution used as a first remedy by investigating authorities (before arrest).

-Juries to be sex-balanced and required to individually explain their decisions.

-The definition of rape be returned to an intentional act of explicit force or violence.

-The compensation incentive be replaced by free counselling.

-Having a criminal record become a protected characteristic in law.

-The Colleges of Policing and Journalism to be compelled to cease using the word ‘Victim’ before verdict is announced.

-Where a defendant pleads not guilty, this be substantially reflected in media reports.

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