Is rape a legal term or is it just a matter of opinion?
Rod Liddle asks why such a small percentage of people accused of this terrible crime are convicted — and why the police issue so many cautions Of all the people in the country against whom this government bears a politically motivated grudge, the least deserving of our sympathy are (as the BBC might call them) Britain’s community of rapists. Most decent people and probably even a majority of indecent people would concur with the assertion that rape is a vile and wicked crime which deserves a lengthy spell in prison. That the government — and an increasingly partisan police force — has made it an intensely political crime should not, of course, deflect us from believing that the act of rape is vile and wicked. But when it begins to change the definition of rape and insists that the public and our law courts are wrong when they fail to convict alleged rapists, then it is surely time to peer a little more closely at what is going on.
As I’ve mentioned here before, both the government and the single-issue pressure groups remain convinced that when it comes to rape, the public — and in particular juries — have got it all wrong. There needs to be a programme of reeducation, they insist. On an almost weekly basis we are bombarded with figures which, we are told, support this thesis. I am not aware of weekly bulletins about armed robbery, burglary, jaywalking or the injudicious dropping of litter — but then rape has become a very political crime, perhaps more political than any other, except for the incitement of racial hatred (with which it shares many similarities, of which more later).
The latest figures produced to shock us all show that the number of people (almost exclusively men) cautioned for rape, rather than prosecuted, has risen by a staggering 50 per cent over the last ten years. At the same time, the number of convictions for rape as a percentage of reported offences has now reached an all-time low of just 5.6 per cent. As you might imagine, this produced a dissonant fugue of concerted screeching from both the authorities and the quasi-authorities, the pressure groups. For example, Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, called ‘for all rapists to face lengthy jail terms’, although she failed to make clear if she meant after a court case, or in lieu of one.
Certainly it seems strange that the police should merely caution someone for rape. You do not very often hear of people being cautioned for murder, after all. ‘Right, me old beauty, you’re bang to rights stabbing that man to death is a serious offence. Now, sign this form, off you go and don’t do it again.’ So have the police got it wrong?
I am not so sure. In raw numbers, the increase over the stated period is from 19 cautions to a total of 40 in 2004, which is slightly less dramatic than those angry headlines suggest. Nor has the proportion of cautions as a percentage of reported rapes risen (which, you might argue, is the significant figure).
Two facts which are quite unequivocal are these: first, many more people are convicted for rape today than was the case ten, 15 or 20 years ago. Second, a far smaller percentage of people accused of rape are convicted today than was the case ten, 15 or 20 years ago. These two apparently paradoxical figures point to two things: far more ‘rapes’ are reported today than before and far more men are banged up as a result; on the other hand, more ‘rapes’ fail to make it to the courts.
The latest figures I have to hand from the Home Office show a steady rise in people convicted of rape from 1985 (450 convicted) to 1999 (631 convicted) and a much steeper rise in the number of offences reported (1,842 in 1985 to 7,809 in 1999).
Now, look at those figures again. Why is it that the number of ‘rapes’ has risen more than fourfold in the 14 years from 1985 to 1999? Is it likely that we have, as a nation, been gripped by sexual dysfunction and are now attacking women at a rate of 400 per cent higher than we were half a generation past? Or is it more likely that incidents which, for one reason or another, may lead women to complain of rape today would not have led them to do so back in 1985?
Further, what about cautions? In official terms, a police caution is given where an offence is admitted and there is a good chance of a successful conviction were the judicial process to be applied. In practice, the opposite is true: the police offer a caution in serious offences where there isn’t a hope in hell of a successful conviction and the perpetrator signs a piece of paper admitting guilt only to keep himself out of the nick.
Might it not be the case that more rapes are reported these days because the police and pressure groups and successive governments have clamoured for more women to report alleged cases of rape? And that while this has had the beneficial effect of seeing more rapists convicted by a jury and jailed each year, it has also seen a large rise in the number of allegations that are — well, how can we put it — not quite rape, as seen by the police and the general public. They are instead either wholly mischievous or, more likely, exist in a shadowy borderland where conviction would be very difficult to prove?
Our current government is, right now, attempting to expunge that shadowy borderland. The 2003 Sexual Offences Act placed the onus upon the defendant to prove that consent had been acquired from the complainant — which is as close as it gets to an explicit removal of the venerable old canon ‘innocent until proven guilty’.
Now the government is turning its attention to consent acquired while the plaintiff was under the influence of alcohol. Perhaps it would be a good thing, the Solicitor-General Mike O’Brien has averred, if consent given when the complainant has had a few drinks should not be considered consent at all; it should, instead, be considered rape. So now we have the prospect of our law courts insisting that, on the one hand, people have a responsibility not to get drop-dead drunk and that this therefore should never be considered a mitigating circumstance when a crime has been committed, and on the other that drunkenness confers upon an individual a complete lack of responsibility for her actions. In other words, it is a nonsense, a non sequitur, and both morally and (I would have thought) legally iniquitous.
Recently the police have been addressing the low conviction rates for rape and, having interviewed a number of people who brought complaints of rape before them, decided to change their terminology. This is where that similarity with the police approach to inciting racial hatred comes in: if you remember, these days people become victims of a racist crime if the victim simply deems it to have been racially motivated, wholly regardless of the evidence to hand. No racial epithet needs to be uttered; the only evidence needed resides in the mind of the supposed victim. Well, henceforth, people registering an offence of rape will not be referred to as ‘complainants’ but as ‘victims’ — i.e., the guilt will, in future, be assumed.
Of course, all this — and you can call it a levelling of the playing field or a moving of the goalposts, whichever footballing metaphor best suits your predisposition — is of no use when the defendant is in court and the British public, in the form of the jury, decides that there is not enough evidence to convict. Which is why we have seen a concerted attack upon the public, too, of late. You will remember the Amnesty International poll which revealed that almost 40 per cent of the public believed that women were at least partly responsible, in some circumstances, for sexual offences perpetrated against them. It was assumed, as a given, that this tranche of the public were not merely wholly wrong but actually complicit in the act of rape themselves.
The question you are left with, looking at all these figures is: who is right about rape? The government and the pressure groups — or the public and the courts?
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