Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Galloway is right about rape: the law is crazy
George Galloway – and I'm no fan – is right on the issue of crazy rape law. It's idiotic to extend the notion of the determination of consent to the point of absurdity. There has to be some limit before getting to the point that no component of sexual activity can escape the requirement of a signed consent form, thus making sexual activity impracticable.
If consent is not in doubt when two people go to bed and have sex, then any further sex whilst still in that bed and in the same time-frame hardly can be deemed to be lacking consent. On the contrary, some explicit clear signal of non-consent should be required from one of the parties to negate this presumption.
So it is not material that Assange's sexual partner was asleep on the occasion of the additional sex. Of course, in the absence of the context of clear prior consent, then no woman can possibly give consent when she's asleep, and that indeed would be an instance of rape. That is an entirely different scenario to that in the Assange case.
The case that should have exercised everyone is that of the footballer who was witnessed to take back to a hotel room a girl so inebriated she couldn't even stand up. The footballer was not convicted of rape because the jury decided that consent had been obtained beforehand – there is no other basis on which they could have delivered a 'not guilty verdict. How they managed this given what must have been in the judge's directions is a mystery, and it was to say the least a big assumption. The suspicion is that it was made for PC reasons -- the footballer was of an ethnic minority. [The footballer invited another footballer to join 'the party', and famously he WAS convicted on the basis of having sex with a woman deemed to have been in no position to be able to give consent -- because she was earlier too inebriated to even stand up -- but then he was NOT of an ethnic minority.] Journalists avoided commenting on the let-off likewise for PC-fascist reasons.
The problem with the ridiculous sex laws in the UK (as other places in the PC-fascist West) is the junking of due legal process to presume the male is somehow guilty unless this can be disproved. The law is supposed to work the other way round.
In rape cases, the male has to show that he took steps to ascertain consent, and because of this inversion of the law any man in effect is assumed likely to be breaking the law when he has sex, and can be made subject to a show trial where the onus is on HIM to prove otherwise; not on the Crown to determine guilt -- never mind 'beyond reasonable doubt'.
It is not the likes of Galloway who are the gross sexists, but commentators who have denounced his criticism of the rape laws.
As for the US politician making the claim that women possess mechanisms to prevent pregnancy after rape: evidence shows the very opposite. By great contrast, his silly, indeed scientifically illiterate claims are rightly attacked, being pure imagination in the service of an ideological anti-abortion stance; which in any case does not hold water given the decisive evidence against the existence of the supposed 'post-abortion' syndrome.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 10:10 pm 
