Another voice
Perishing members
Auberon Waugh
The best news of last week was the demise of Jack Ashley's Bill giving the Crown the right to appeal against whatever it regarded as a lenient sentence for rape or sexual assault. Not only was the principle of the Bill repulsive — and this alone would have justified its humiliating defeat — but its application to the field of sexual offences was particularly incongruous, As Mr Nicholas Fairbairn, the flamboyant Member for Kinross, pointed out in opposing the Bill, rape and sexual offences are the only crimes which have been consistently falling for the last ten years, yet they are the only crimes which excite Labour MPs to ask for greater sentences.
This reduction in the number of sexual offences committed has continued despite the recently-imposed rule that a complainant shall have her identity protected while the victim of her complaint must see his name and photograph splashed all over the newspapers with any revolting details of his alleged offence — even when he is later found innocent. Nor is a female's sexual or emotional history allowed to be taken into account when considering the plausibility of her story. Soon, I suspect, she will not even have to submit to a medical examination. At the time I demonstrated, in company with a few other wise men, how these measures created an.open invitation not only for hysterical, jilted or otherwise unsatisfied women to use the courts for their own private vendettas, but also for unscrupulous women to blackmail any unfortunate men who fell into their clutches. And when the Criminal Compensation Board fixed the tariff for a proven rape at £1,000 to the injured party, one marvelled at the honesty of British prostitutes and escort agents, as they are now called, who continue to ply their trade at £20 a time (Arabs £30 extra).
But despite the official incitement to malicious or vexatious prosecution, the reported incidence of rape and sexual assault continues to fall. Perhaps the grotesque suggestion that wives should be able to prosecute . their husbands for demanding intercourse when the wife does not wish it will do something to swell these sagging statistics, but I begin to doubt it. Whole ranges of new sexual offences may be created — inadequate attention to foreplay, insufficient post-coital discussion — but I can't help feeling that Ole number of prosecutions will continue to shrink, since they are part of the general phenomenon of declining sexual activity.
Whether this phenomenon is worldwide, or confined to the advanced industrial nations, or confined to the British Isles, is something which remains to be established
— I am off to France this week, and hope to report from there. But evidence that it applies in this country is everywhere, and not only in the declining numbers of sexual offences. The Stationery Office's survey Population Trends No. 8 shows that the birthrate fell so sharply again last year that the surplus of deaths over births doubled. Fewer and fewer people are bothering to get married — weddings dropped by 25,500, while divorces have shown the sort of rise one normally associates only with unemployment or the price of coffee. Fifteen years ago there was one divorce for every twelve marriages; last year there was one divorce for every 2.8 marriages. The most elementary graph will show that people who married last year are more likely than not to divorce, and that divorces will outnumber marriages very soon.
So the final projection must be for an ageing population of sexually inert single people, whether unmarried or divorced, whose few remaining acts of conception — something caught from the unisex public lavatory seats of the future, no doubt — are invariably terminated by abortion. Of course, one can see a few advantages to this — 'Children are such sticky things,' as Georgie Pillson remarks in Queen Lucia, 'specially after tea' — and it would obviously be unfair to blame it all on Mr Jack Ashley who, I have been told, is rather hard of hearing. Even Mr Nicholas Fairbairn — whom I do not think I have ever met, although he sounds a thoroughly good egg — shows sign of waning sexual activity. In Who's Who for 1974 he listed among his recreations 'making love'. The year after, they were merely described as 'creative' — a reference, I suppose, to his painting. This year they are given as 'bunking and debunking'. I am not surely exactly what is involved in the new recreation of 'bunking and debunking' but begin to fear that it may fall short of actual penetratio ad vaginam.
In fact, the extent to which such remaining sexual activity is nearly all in the imagi
nation could scarcely be better illustrated than by the way in which the House of Commons is held up in the vulgar press as a hotbed of illicit sex. Anybody who has been there will know that they are all much too drunk for anything of that sort. There is a lot of dirty talk in the bars, smoking rooms and cafeterias, but nothing actually ever happens. To speak of marriages being broken there through pressure of work is, of course, even more absurd. Members of Parliament who divorce are merely conforming to the national pattern.
If I am right when I say that most sexual activity in this country now takes place in the imagination then it follows that most accused rapists must be innocent. Equally obviously, not all are innocent and I can imagine that it must be a highly disagreeable thing to be raped, one which might well have harmful long-term effects. It is perfectly reasonable that the law should seek to protect women from such an experience, as it has always done in every civilised community. But there are a number of equally unpleasant experiences against which the law provides no protection. A few years ago, 1 stubbed my big toe very nastily against some hard object or other. The pain was excruciating, lasted a long time, and might well have had deleterious long-term effects if I had been a more sensitive soul.
Obviously, the law can only provide a remedy where suffering (or long-term psychological trauma, or both) is caused — by the malice or negligence of another. It cannot heed the enormously greater part of humanity's suffering, as represented by my big toe, which is caused either by one's own error of judgment or by circumstances outside one's control. Of all the suffering around us in this vale of tears, I should not imagine that one thousandth part of one thousandth part is caused by rape. Of all crimes to which mankind is tempted, it is the one least likely to be influenced by the chances of acquittal or by the prospect of a heavier or lighter sentence or conviction unless, perhaps, we were to return to mutilation and the death penalty. So the question is bound to arise, as Mr Fairbairn raised it, why are MPs so excited about rape?
'But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh upon a women to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
'And if thy right eye offend thee pluck it out and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.' (Matthew v.28-29) A weakness in this doctrine, it always seems to me, is that if one is going to be had for adultery when one is only thinking about it, one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a goat. Let us thank heavens that these frustrated politicians, half-stunned by drink as they are, have returned to brooding wistfully over their perished members. Once they had set themselves on the course of revenge, there is no knowing where it would have ended.
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