“Don’t Look Over There, Just Look Here!”

Joanna Bourke (author of Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present) on how bringing back some common sense into rape complaints would be a disaster of Biblical proportions:

On 2 February, the CPS published a review of the Rape and Serious Sexual Offences Unit (Rasso). It is damning. They found that the Rasso is not even following its own victim guidelines in a third of cases. Young witnesses are being let down: they are even being interviewed without intermediaries. Of course, Rasso professionals are doing their best, but caseloads have grown dramatically in the past few years and, despite the distressful nature of the job, there are inadequate support mechanisms in place to help them cope with the pressure. The report concluded that the “level of care for victims and witnesses fell well short of what is expected”. Such public admissions of the failure to deal with sexual violence against children as well as adults comes at a time when Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe announced that detectives might no longer be required to automatically believe people who claim to have been sexually assaulted or raped.

Hmmm, so the adoption of the bonkers feminist viewpoint that ‘women and children don’t lie about rape’ has dramatically increased the number of cases referred to the police and CPS, and (despite them all being sainted public sector workers struggling to cope with the dreaded Toree Cutz) they are cutting corners to cope.

But we mustn’t stop and take a look and say ‘Wait, this isn’t working’ at any stage..?

It is worth reminding ourselves that, contrary to the notion that men are at risk of being falsely accused, it is significantly more common for actual rapists to get away with their actions.

Is it? How’s that measured, then? How are you accounting for numbers of guilty men ‘getting away with it’ to balance against cases like these?

Or are you doing the usual lazy feminist trick of assuming that acquittals and discontinued cases are all actually guilty?