If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many allegations of serious sexual assaults including rape, and so few convictions, read this and stop wondering.
The following is extracted from the Sun newspaper’s Dear Deidre column, April 30, 2012 (available from NewsUK):
I’M 18 and I think I was raped – but I’m too scared to do anything about it.
I left the pub pretty drunk with some friends the other night and we went back to a guy’s flat for more drinks.
I passed out on the sofa but when I woke up the next day, I was in his bed and no one else was there.
...I think I was sexually assaulted.
No matter how drunk I was, there is no way I would consent to sex with this guy but he knows my friends. I’m scared to leave the house or tell the police.
You take a statement, arrange for her to be examined, her clothing is retained, then you and a fellow detective call at the apartment of the man we shall call the alleged rapist, and what do you do when you get there and he answers the door, arrest him?
What do you do if he says they had sex but that she consented? Or if he says he can’t remember either, adding that he wouldn’t have had sex with a strange woman knowingly, so if they did get it on, she must have forced herself on him when he was too drunk to resist, know or care?
If this woman had gone to an hotel with Ched Evans and another soccer player, and there were independent witnesses as there were in that case who testified to her distressed state, then you would certainly make an arrest, but should the police make an arrest much less bring charges on the word of a young woman who by her own admission gets too blathered to remember if she’s had sex or not?
Most false allegations of rape are not that unclear, and recently there have been plenty.
Last year, Cumbrian police had their hands full with a series of sex attacks, so when 20 year old student Chloe Fox reported that she too had been raped – waylaid in the street and dragged into an alley in the small hours – they took her seriously.
For any young woman to make a false allegation of rape under those circumstances is not merely stupid, it is evil. The only thing that would have been worse is if she had pointed the finger at a particular individual instead of a mysterious stranger. Not only did she waste 650 hours of police time – during which they could have caught a real rapist or some other dangerous criminal before he struck again – but she could have seriously undermined the investigation, perhaps leading detectives down the wrong path for weeks or months.
Fortunately for her, this not so foxy young thing was let off with a slap on the wrist so she can continue her journalism course at the University of Cumbria. Heck, maybe she’ll complete it in time to write a sympathetic report for her fellow rape liar Laura Johnson when she is sentenced for her part in the riots last August. Or maybe should could get a job with that paragon of virtue the Guardian and cover the execution of rape liar/convicted murderess Linda Carty later this year?
Kirsty Snowden is a genuinely foxy lady, self-confessed bondage princess Kirsty is the sort of girl most men wouldn’t take home to meet mother, but apparently older men of a certain type had no qualms about taking her to their own homes. After a session with one of them, she told Gravesend police she’d been raped. Two men were arrested, including the one who had entertained her. Fortunately for him, the investigating plod appear to have become a bit suspicious when it transpired he had met her through a dating website for what are euphemistically called swingers.
Now, Kirsty has had her horizons broadened with a different kind of bondage, at Maidstone Crown Court, Judge Philip Statman sentenced her to 14 months in jug.
Although marital rape is a fairly recent development in English law, when a husband and wife have become estranged, the issue of conjugal rights has always been dead in the water.
As marriages go, the union of Paul and Kelly-Ann Ferguson was short lived. In April last year, an attempt was made to repair this broken romance. It ended with her accusing him of taking her by force. It may be that it is not only women who have that at times miraculous sixth sense, because he videoed her giggling and laughing on his mobile phone. Her version had him violating her and then throwing her out and telling her never to darken his doorstep again.
She was given a nine month sentence at Aylesbury Crown Court, but it is chilling to think what would have been the result if he hadn’t filmed her frolicks, and it had come down to his word against hers – the frightened little woman against the Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde ex-husband. Who would the jury have believed? After all, everyone knows women never lie about rape. Ask Pipps Taylor.
Finally, we return to Cumbria where a genuine sex attacker is on the loose. As the reader may have noticed, there is a saucer flap on at the moment: one person reports seeing a flying saucer, and everybody is seeing them. Something of that nature appears to have happened in Carlisle, because a second woman has ended up in court after making a false rape allegation. Takara Jane Harding was condemned by the officer in charge of the investigation who said her lies had led to a climate of fear in the city. He might have added suspicion as well as yet more wasted police time.
Unlike flying saucers, rapes are never fun. If a rape is genuine, there is a real victim, often with secondary injuries from the assault, and what is often worse, permanent psychological damage: post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, a lifelong suspicion of men...But gratuitously false reports have victims too, the most usual being other police investigations, because precious time and resources are diverted to wild goose chases that leaves other, perhaps even more dangerous criminals at large. And not infrequently an innocent man is left sitting in a police cell for hours or sometimes in a prison cell for considerably longer, his reputation forever destroyed even if he is eventually cleared – no smoke without fire.
Men who rape women and girls deserve everything they get, and women who cry wolf deserve the condemnation of the criminal justice system, men, and most of all, of other women.
[The above op-ed was first published May 2, 2012, not May 1 as indicated here. The Kelly-Ann Ferguson case was initially reported erroneously as being heard at Amersham Crown Court. Ths has now been corrected. The Ched Evans conviction was quashed on appeal; he was cleared at a retrial.]
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