There are a lot of really disturbing things in the Washington Post piece (which I really recommend to anyone who can stand to read it). But this was especially stomach-churning:

Kerim Fuad, a barrister who has defended more than 100 men accused of rape, including the defendant in the Davies case, said most of the time the defendant and the accuser know each other and the jury must decide whom to believe.

Fuad declined to speak about specific cases, but he said he has been surprised by some “not guilty” verdicts. He said jurors have been shown compelling evidence—such as blood at the scene or internal injury to the woman—and still not returned a guilty verdict.

Even the fucking defense attorney cannot believe these guys are getting free. And what fucked up idea of sex must these jurors have to think that blood and internal injuries are part of consensual sex.

The article suggests attitudes toward rape among some members of the british population of the kind that are seen only among republican legislators and judges on this side of the pond. Pretty clearly along the lines that men should only be convicted of rape if the woman was “nice” and they were really mean about it.

But what’s particularly weird for me is that at the same time they’re working on laws whereby both computer-generated and hand-drawn depictions of underage sex will be unlawful to possess. Displacement much?

Having a nominally Left government in power that tends increasingly to usurp the positions of the Right does result in some seemingly disparate policies at times.

I really couldn’t say what makes Britain so much worse on this than America. We have a lower crime-rate than the US in pretty much every department and I’d be hard pressed to say that women’s rights are lessed advanced. Extremely generous abortion time-limits and all that.

There’s always the drinking culture to look for blame in, mind. British youth spends so much time getting sloshed off its head that I wouldn’t be surprised if rapes were much harder to successfully prosecute, which it undoubtedly is when drink is involved.

It may be that the British have not revised their misogynistic notions about women, especially the idea that women are not to be trusted in matters of sex. It used to be that way in the U.S. and not so long ago that authorities assumed that women were alleging rape that had not really taken place. This is a tough one that needs some serious research.

At least you were blogging about a secret power cabal and not an ugly scarf and some donuts! The disparity in the rate and conviction rate of rape in two fairly similar cultures are really disturbing. It sounds like there are some fundamental differences in how juries regard “acquaintance rape,” and are still stuck in some old way of thinking (that used to also be really common in the US) that it’s not really possible. I’m glad you blogged about this—the problem with American feminism is half-solved. I guess I will continue to maintain the other half by writing another post about video games and horrible science reporting now.

This may be chicken egg thing but quite a while, as in back in 90s maybe event the 80s the UK established a defense “I really thought she wanted it”. One example was where the husband told a mate that his wife like men to use force and pretended to object and resist as part of the game. (Yeah he was giving his mate permission to rape his wife.)  I don’t know to what extent this legal gem is a cause of the difference and to what extent it is a result. Probably both: I would guess attitude had something do with this becoming law in the first place, but that once it was in place it had a multiplier effect: seeing this defense work help extend the boundaries of what was socially acceptable.

I think the drinking’s probably got something to do with it - drinking to excess is treated as normal, and so the “we were both plastered, yer honour, and I thought she meant yes” defence probably gets the jury’s sympathy in a lot more cases.
Particularly, there’s more of a double standard about drinking in the US than the UK. Getting pissed and vomiting in gutters is all a healthy part of growing up for a lad; beer-swilling foulmouthed “ladettes” are ruining our city centres with their shrieking and sluttitude.

Here’s an example. Men are actually arrested for being drunk and disorderly four times more often than women, but you’d never guess it from this article or the thousands like it.

oops - I mistyped: in my experience there’s more of a double standard in the UK.

I’ve lived in Canada the US and Britain (Scotland specifically, and I understand there are significant cultural differences between Scotland and England… and Wales for that matter… but I digress) and I found the level of misogyny deemed acceptable in social interactions, advertising, television etc. was by far the highest in Britain of anywhere I have lived, and Britain is the only place I’ve lived where I have experienced a high degree of street harassment.

I’d say that a lot of it is down to a combination of how acceptable casual misogyny is there and how normal binge drinking is.  I don’t recall the statistics now but isn’t alcohol consumption by the aggressor highly correlated with rape? The amount of binge drinking that goes on there is actually quite horrifying, and as MissPrism said, a jury would be quite likely to accept the “I was sloshed” excuse, because most members of the jury had probably spent quite a bit of time binge drinking themselves.

Interestingly enough england has very strict laws on drinking and driving and people are extremely careful not to be caught with the slightest amount of alcohol if they are going to drive (local pubs help people drink and walk, which is a good thing). I wonder if they changed the laws to make “having sex while drunk” illegal if it would work as well for the “I was too drunk to know what I was doing defence.”

aimai

This article by Amanda is absolutely shocking. First of all the title, which suggests rape in the UK is almost legal when it is not. Secondly she links to an article which claims “rapists are better off dead”, in contravention to the UK position on capital punishment, and subsequently blames multiculturalism for the crimes.

But worst, Amanda is completely ignoring the control group - the US, which has the highest rate of reported rapes in the world. MASA estimate there are 139000 rapes every year in the US, vs. the BBCs estimate of 47000 in the UK. MASA statistics show a reported rape rate in the US 13 times higher than in the UK. Gee you US feminists are really smokin’ aren’t you?

A little balance in this sort of reporting might go a long way. And not linking unquestioningly to a pro-death penalty, anti-multicultural report might help. Oh, and down the bottom this “red alerts” mob point out that continued US “liberal” policies towards crime might leave you with the same problems as the UK. Given you have 13 times the rate of rape, and 20 times the murder rate, you can only hope, eh?

There are some factual unknowns that could really change this question.  Leaving aside the question of the culture of drinking or misogyny in Britain, which I am unqualified to answer, it’s important to ask whether we are comparing apples to apples.

1. Is the legal definition of rape the same in Britain and (most of the 50) United States? If they more often call it “rape” and we more often call it “sexual assault” then we’re not even comparing conviction rates properly.

2. Do the instructions to the jury tend to be the same? There’s a lot of leeway there.

3. England is tinier and much more homogenous than the US (and no, I’m not saying it is tiny or homogenous—just *in comparison*). How much of this comparison might evaporate if you were comparing, say, England to Louisana? Or Idaho?

4. How much discretion do British prosecutors get about whether to bring a case, compared to American prosecutors? If they have to bring most cases, but American prosecutors can pick and choose, then I would want to take a hard look at whether American DAs are refusing to prosecute a higher number of cases (the ones where they aren’t sure they can get a conviction), and that’s why their conviction rate is higher.

NONE of this is intended in any way to minimize the terrible human cost of rape and sexual assault. I just worry about making cultural comparisons when we’re not actually sure that we’re comparing the same thing.

regarding 2., Witt, I think the US and the UK have completely different legal systems, right? So that’s an important point.

regarding 3., the UK is not at all homogeneous and and I doubt very much that in comparison to Louisiana or Idaho the UK is at all racially similar. Unless you consider large numbers of poor muslims, hindu/sikh South Asians of every class (including Lords), multitudes of Eastern Europeans, Romani, Caribbeans, black Africans of many generations or new arrivals, Western Europeans, South Africans, Antipodeans and every variety and colour of British Isles heritage to be “homogeneous”. In fact, were you to go to a pub (as I just did an hour ago) here, and watch the Irish hustler and his Latvian victim (and his Russian girlfriend, from Italy), the Irish and London working class and their dog discussing vehicle licensing (well, the dog wasn’t), and the lager louts watching the rugby, you would be very very hard pressed to identify the “homogeneity” of which you speak.  In fact, given the rugby teams represent 5 or 8 nations (and rugby is the sport of the “homogeneous” upper classes here), it really is pissing in the wind to try and pin down the UK’s level of racial homogeneity.

Regarding 4, Britain has a similar legal system to Australia (where I am from), where the prosecutor is not required to bring a case if there is not a reasonable prospect of conviction. So every one of those rape cases without “evidence” (i.e. any case where the woman didn’t go straight to the police for the requisite tests) is going to potentially fall into this category. I don’t know if this answers your point or not (or even if it’s true), but then I’m not the one venturing to suggest that the UK should introduce the death penalty and deport its foreigners - I leave that for the esteemed “red alerts” site.

But worst, Amanda is completely ignoring the control group - the US, which has the highest rate of reported rapes in the world.  MASA estimate there are 139000 rapes every year in the US, vs. the BBCs estimate of 47000 in the UK.

Gee, a country with a population of 350 million people has more rapes than a country with 60 million people?  What a shocker.

Not to mention that we’re discussing conviction rates right now.  If you’re going to claim that the UK is better than the US in that regard, you’ll need to point us to a statistic that shows fewer than 1 in 5 rape cases in the US ending in a conviction.  Otherwise, you’ve changed the subject, haven’t you?

And according to “red alerts”, the US has a 13% conviction rate. Twice the conviction rate, 13 times the rape rate (according to MASA). I think the maths of that is not encouraging. Of course, upon noting that the conviction rate in the US is only twice that of the UK, “red alerts” engages in the excellent level of social critique one expects of a website which supports the death penalty. They say the rates

seem low since every day there are literally hundreds of stories of some pervert getting sent to the joint

sterling stuff, eh?

And yes, the prevalence of a crime is important when discussing the clear-up rate. For better or worse, one expects a relationship between the two, since high prevalence crimes may incur more effort, or may represent a problem the police cannot control. But triumphal reporting of cross-national differences in conviction rates, ignoring cross-national differences in incidence rates, looks a lot like embarrassing nationalism to me. Or ignorance.

Flashheart, using the figures you give above:

US: 139000 rapes in 350 million people = 0.4 rapes per thousand people per year
UK: 47000 rapes in 60 million people = 0.8 rapes per thousand people per year.

How did you calculate that “thirteen times higher in the US” figure?

And Amanda’s not being triumphal. She’s noting, correctly, that rape conviction rates in the UK are shamefully low, and she’s asking her readers if they have any ideas as to why. What cause would you put it down to?

and I misread the MASA stats. That 139000 was an estimate of the actual number of rapes in NY. The US number is estimated at 650000 - vs. the BBC’s estimate for the UK of 47000. As a proportion of estimated rape numbers, the US and UK’s conviction rates come out similar (2% vs. 1.3%). Funny how “red alerts” didn’t mention that. I suppose it wouldn’t support their death penalty narrative…

I’d add that both of those figures look absurdly low to me. Perhaps those are the conviction rates?

OK, using your new figure of 650,000 gives 1.8 per thousand people per year in the US, or about four and a half times the UK rate from your figures. I still don’t get where “thirteen times higher” comes from.

MissPrism, see my post just above about the figures.

I wouldn’t put the low conviction rate down to any cause without some kind of understanding of the legal system - it could be a matter of differences in the charging and judicial process, for example. However, the BBC report on the topic has the police suggesting it is a failure of police process, and cites the police as introducing new systems to move towards a less judgemental evidence-collecting process. That seems the most likely explanation - in Australia it certainly seems like the police are usually the biggest single barrier to effective policing of a problem, and once you get them to support a process they can change crime rates very effectively.

I think drinking could have something to do with it, in that if a lot of rapes occur when both people involved are hideously drunk, women may not feel that they have the ability to bring a charge - they may doubt their own judgement of the events, they may feel the police won’t believe them (this is a strong narrative in every country, after all) or they may not remember events clearly, or they may think they deserved it. I wouldn’t want to make any strong claims about that though because I don’t know enough about English drinking culture and the media here are full of piss and wind when it comes to talking about English youth culture. In my opinion these things are mostly determined by structural factors, and the obvious one is the police.

MissPrism, the site I am using is here. The home office gives the figure of women raped in the last year (from a population survey) at 61000, which broadly supports the BBC’s estimate. The home office reports the number of reported rapes last year at 13000, or 22 per 100,000, which is very different to the figures MASA gives. The Washington post reports the current figure for the US at about 30 per 100000, suggesting a 50% higher rate of rape in the US, but a 100% higher rate of conviction. Going on reported figures and conviction rates, the differences are hardly worth reporting home about and easily explained by systemic factors which may or may not represent sexism. MASA must want to exaggerate US culpability, while “red alerts” want to exaggerate European degeneracy. The Home Office, on the other hand, probably want to exaggerate police efficiency (and indeed they claim there is no difference between 2006/07 rates and 2005/06 rates).

Rape and sexual assault are two of the areas where rampant misogyny is still considered A-OK in this country.  See the comments to the BBC article on exactly this topic from a year ago as representative evidence:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6314445.stm

(the gist - “OMG WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ??!!Eleventyone!!)

Some reforms are being put in place - different definitions of consent, defendant unable to cross-examine the complainant, etc.  But these are never going to work until the public perception of 90% of accusers as revenge-driven harpies is addressed.

I’m less-inclined to think that an increase in ‘binge-drinking’ (I hatehatehate the term with a passion, because it’s so overused) is responsible for the shitty conviction rate.  Rather, more women are coming forward to report rape, as a result of better awareness of their rights as full human beings, but the resistance of our rather reactionary culture (particularly the police and the legal profession) means that there are no more convictions than there were 20-30 years ago.

Please don’t think that there are no British feminists fighting the good fight.

I don’t think most rapists calculate their odds of going to jail before raping, which are still low no matter what since most women don’t report.

I can’t speak on the politics in the UK, because I don’t know, but in the US, I think that the primary reason rape rates have gone down is public awareness and a real shift in ideas about consent. 

Well, I think you can’t have one without the other. That is to say, the shift in understanding consent leads to a higher rate of conviction, and the greater conviction rates help to reinforce that shift. I feel the legal system has a lot of push on our social attitudes.

I don’t know about the politics, but there is an important legal difference between rape in the US and in the UK.

In the UK and in most jurisdictions in the US, mistake of fact is a defense to rape.  It negates the mens rea of the offense. (Mens rea, or “guilty mind”, is an important of most crimes. To make a long story short, the reason for this is that we should not punish someone for committing a crime unless they intended to commit a crime.)

The difference between the US and the UK is that in the US, only a reasonable mistake of fact is a defense. This is an objective standard based on a reasonable person in the defendant’s position. (In some US jurisdictions, mistake of fact is no defense.) In the UK, any mistake of fact can be a defense. This is a subjective standard based on the defendant’s own views, reasonable or not.  What this means is that it is easier to convict for rape in the US because the prosecutor does not have to prove that the defendant himself knew the woman was not consenting. He only has to prove that a reasonable person in the defendant’s position would have known the woman was not consenting.

There are also other rape reforms that have been enacted in the US, that may not have been enacted in the UK.  At common law, rape required force or threat of force by the rapist. If the woman did not resist, a defense attorney could argue that there was no force involved. This has been changed in most US jurisdictions so that force is not an element of rape, just that the sexual contact was non-consensual. Also, while a traditional anti-rape rallying cry is “no means no”, some states take it even further to where “the absence of yes means no.” In these jurisdictions, sexual contact without affirmative consent is rape. There are also rape shield laws where the victim’s sexual history with persons other than the defendant is inadmissible at trial as irrelevant. I do not know how many of these legal reforms have been enacted in the UK.

My understanding is that at common law, rape was a very specific crime that dealt with vaginal intercourse alone.  Everything else was sodomy.

“Sexual assault” (or criminal sexual misconduct, as they call it here) combines the two common law crimes into a single offense.

Thanks, wayward. That info seems really relevant.

I always thought that the Grease line was being somewhat metaphorical, with the fight being not so much against her will as against the “good girls don’t” meme surely in her head.

But my reaction, in itself, is evidence of feminism being successful. You know something is working when people look back in disbelief on how things used to be.

“The difference between the US and the UK is that in the US, only a reasonable mistake of fact is a defense. This is an objective standard based on a reasonable person in the defendant’s position. (In some US jurisdictions, mistake of fact is no defense.) In the UK, any mistake of fact can be a defense.”

Yeesh.  That’s a *huge* difference.  Among other things, that difference helps criminals who were drunk out of their minds a great deal in the UK, and none at all in the US (because a reasonable person would not be drunk out of their mind).  “Well, he thought the bank had asked to have its money taken away by force; I know that doesn’t seem reasonable, but that’s what he thought while he was drunk, so he’s innocent of bank robbery.”

That should frankly be fixed in the UK.  It creates a massive loophole for very unreasonable people; in the US, you have to actually plead insanity (which leads to being committed in an institution, usually) if you want to claim that you shouldn’t be punished because you had wildly unreasonable ideas which led to you committing crimes.

I understand your clarification Amanda. I was just reacting to the title, which is very definitely not easy on the eye, and that loathsome “red alerts” site you linked to.

I would add to englishwoman’s comments by saying I think a lot of this conviction rate could be due to police procedure (as the police have identified). And I think in Australia at least sexual history was still relevant very recently (when I left Oz 2 years ago) and defense lawyers run hard on that (it is their job to protect their client, so they use any chance they can get). The law in Australia has been changing fast and not always for the better in response to some very public gang-rape cases and I imagine it will be changed in the UK too (Australia and the UK often take ideas from each others’ legal systems).

By “not always for the better” I am thinking of one particular change which pertains to Amanda’s theory about whether or not rapists choose their crime to fit the punishment. I think date rapists almost certainly don’t, but some of the more serial and serious rapists probably do. In Australia the law was changed to make the minimum punishment for aggravated rape in company (violent gang rape) worse than the punishment for murder. Within months of the change there was a case where a gang ring-leader urged his colleagues to kill their victim, because they would be better risking a murder charge and preventing her giving evidence. Fortunately for the woman, his fellows refused. So while most rapists may not desist from the crime on the basis of a serious threat of punishment, they may escalate it if all the punishments are equivalent.

It seems like with this particular crime, small legal changes can have big effects.

Also Amanda, I think that Washington Post story you link to with the rapidly declining rape rates has got to be wrong. <a >This blog</a> (which I know nothing about) suggests rape in the US has declined by perhaps 25% over the last 10 years, and is the same now as in the 70s. It cites a US government reporting body, and the fitted trend there suggests that rape in the US has declined in ways very similar to all other forms of violent crime (the source they cite can be used to check that). So maybe it represents something other than a single influence of any one movement. I don’t know how the Washington Post interpreted US rape stats as dropping from 300 per 100,000 to 40 per 100,000 in 30 years. Perhaps they are merging the categories of “rape, forcible” from Dept of Justice figures with “sexual assault”?

Note from the graphs in the link that the UK’s rate has skyrocketed in that 30 years, similar to the way that US rates did in the 50s and 60s. To me this suggests a rapid change in the willingness of UK women to report rape, and a failure of the police culture to catch up with that change. Which would be why the conviction rate has been dropping every year. Sweden has experienced similar increases over time, and the more interesting question is why the US’s rates increased and peaked 20 years earlier. Perhaps consciousness-raising worked!

I’m also curious about the role played by the judge’s instructions.  Stories of wizened old farts on the bench issuing glowing commendations of accused rapists have been cropping up for years.  I remember reading them back in the 1970s when I was an adolescent in the UK.  I also remember that from time to time these stirred a strong reaction in the media, to the point when one paper published a “rogue’s gallery” of judges whose records were particularly bad with regard to rape cases.  I no longer live in the UK and cannot comment further about what the current situation is like, but it depresses me no end to think that barely any progress has been made in reforming the attitudes of judges.

The lowering rates of conviction are directly due to more women feeling comfortable about reporting (the conviction numbers have remained static, while the numbers reported got higher and higher).  The police have got better dealing with rape victims reporting crime, but difficulties in bringing these cases to court is keeping the conviction rate low.

Unfortunately the UK courts are pretty damn backwards and as a rule of thumb the only people who can get a reliable conviction are underage girls, severely physically attacked and prostitutes (the first because they get covered under statory rape laws, the second under assualt laws) Prosititutes interestingly have a higher than average chance of getting their rapist convicted because the jury sees their evidence as more reliable (they spend most of their working live consenting to sex, they wouldn’t complain without good reason).

On the plus side, we have some of the best laws in the world. In particular, consent must be explicit and given when not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. (I.e. one’s partner must say “yes”, failure to say “no” is not sufficient), it is illegal to bring up sexual history etc. If the courts would actually follow the sodding laws instead of going off on complete nonsense like “well, she looked like she was older than 12 so it’s okay to have raped her”, “she suffered from depression once 20 years back, so maybe she was hallucinating” and my personal favourite “maybe she wanted to have sex with a complete stranger who trapped her in an alley and knocked her teeth out”. I’ve seen cases where the jury convicted the man of assualt and kidnapping, but wouldn’t convict on rape because he might have believed she really consented. After kidnapping and attacking her.

On the other plus side, the governement are doing a lot to find out where the system is breaking down and fix it. See http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/hors293.pdf and ,

http://search.homeoffice.gov.uk/search?q=rape&btnG=Search&entqr=0&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date:D:L:d1&ud=1&client=rds&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=rds&site=RDS