By VennerRoad, 2nd Dec 2017
The controversy over A Complaint Of Rape was just as heated last year when another documentary with that title was screened. I remember seeing if not the whole then part of the first documentary at the time. It was controversial because using a fly-on-the-wall technique, it showed three detectives from Thames Valley Police questioning a young woman who claimed to have been gang-raped by three men, and it caused outrage because of what has been called a culture of disbelief.
Adding to this public outrage was an unrelated incident. At Ipswich Crown Court, thirteen days before it was screened, businessman John Allen was convicted of the rape of a teenage hitchhiker. He had pleaded not guilty, but after the victim broke down in court he changed his plea. In sentencing him, Judge Bertrand Richards said the girl had been “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence.” Then instead of handing down a sentence of seven or perhaps ten years, he fined Allen £2,000.
This sentence was not unique. Researching in the local studies section of Beckenham Library awhile back, I found two cases that were equally outrageous, one more so. In its March 6, 1970 issue, page 8, the Beckenham Journal AND KENTISH TIMES reported that a 57 year old surveyor who had outraged a 14 year old babysitter on December 27, 1969, was fined £200 with costs after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex. From the information therein it is difficult to understand why the prosecution accepted a plea of not guilty to rape.
Even more outrageous was the report in the July 17, 1970 issue, page 8. A 68 year old man with previous convictions for sex offences against young boys was given an 18 month sentence at the Central Criminal Court for the rape of a 4 year old girl in the local park. He received a total of 3 years. In 1970, rape meant rape, and with such a young child there can be no issue of either consent or ambiguity. In view of his antecedents, a life sentence would surely have been warranted.
Feminists portray this sort of ludicrous under-sentencing as part of our mythical rape culture; in reality it indicates that judges don’t live in the same world as the rest of us. Thankfully, such absurd sentences appear now to be a thing of the past, but sentencing is not the issue in the two documentaries under discussion here, the issue is methodology, more specifically, how should the police investigate rape?
In spite of the claims of the usual suspects, there is no one size fits all approach to allegations of rape. Some claimants are extremely credible, others not so. An elderly woman who claims to have been violated in her own home is as credible as victims come, especially as such victims generally report promptly, and there is likely to be an abundance of physical evidence. A young woman who claims to have been raped three days or three months ago while she was drunk, or thinks she may have been raped...are the police to devote precious time and resources to such an investigation? Apparently, they are.
Such was not the case in 1981, when the woman in the 1982 documentary appears to have made her allegation. One would have expected this documentary to be available on-line, especially considering the changes in methodology it is said to have led to, but it is nowhere to be found, even clips of it. There is a very good, or alternatively very bad, reason for this.
With some difficulty I managed to contact one of the men behind it. When he realised where I was coming from, he stopped replying to my e-mails. The best I could find were two mentions in the local press. The Reading Chronicle for January 29 reported that officers at Woodley Police Station were considering legal action against both the film-makers and the press. More tellingly, a letter from Mrs O’Rourke, a local resident, was published in the same issue. She pointed out that this rape allegation was not typical – then maybe, but nowadays, anything goes – and “I believe that there had been no rape in the legal sense”. The woman had had sex with three men voluntarily, and “it was not until she faced the understandable wrath of her boyfriend, that she made a complaint”.
There is a parallel here with the 2009 Hofstra University case, and quite a few others in which women have group sex then feel dirty, used, abused, ashamed, afterwards. As well they might.
I should also point out that at that time, a man arrested on suspicion of rape, or any serious offence, might find himself treated much more harshly. This was before the Police And Criminal Evidence Act, 1984 when the verballing up of suspects and on occasion brutality were far from unknown. The 1970s in particular saw a number of high profile cases in which shabby police tactics resulted in terrible miscarriages of justice.
Leaving that aside, this 1982 documentary is inherently dishonest. The reason it has not been uploaded to YouTube or some other video site is clearly because this woman was lying, and to reveal that would undermine the ludicrous narratives that are currently being peddled about rape, and indeed which have been pushed by the feminist movement since at least the early 1970s.
The complainant in the 2016 Bedford case.
On the other hand, the 2016 documentary is honest, but the people involved, one female detective in particular, are deceiving themselves. On July 31, 2015, a teenager attended Bedford Hospital claiming to have been raped. She was from Spain, and spoke limited English. She had red marks on both her arms and her neck, so although her story sounded slightly implausible, the fact that she had visible injuries and had reported promptly, made her a credible victim.
The police were called, and obviously they believed her to be credible. The suspect was arrested two days later – on my birthday, as it happens – and although we were not told his name and were not given a clear view of him, he looked like the kind of bloke who might have raped a young woman when he was drunk.
However, the CCTV told an entirely different story; this girl had obviously lied through her teeth about being in effect kidnapped by this man. She had not embellished her story, but had lied, period. The police were clearly disappointed, but their hope was renewed when an independent witness was located. He was a German tourist who had stayed at the same hotel. His English was either very poor or non-existent, but he told detectives he had heard the girl shouting, an angry shout rather than a frightened one.
It soon became clear what had really happened. This girl had gone with a strange man in a strange country, a man twice her age, explicitly to have sex. It was a sordid encounter; there is no need to relate the details here, but the man she accused had drunk nine pints, and was unable to perform. Clearly she felt dirty, probably disappointed as well, and decided to exact revenge on him. Whatever the Crown Prosecution Service thought, they realised this was a non-case, and the charges were dropped.
One would have thought the police would have accepted this, but one woman detective insisted on alluding to her as “the victim”, and having also drunk the Kool-Aid, the press officer for Bedfordshire Police took umbrage with the suggestion thie non-victim was lying:
“No one has been prosecuted in relation to making a false allegation in respect of this case.
The fact that no charges were brought does also not make it a false allegation.
Please do not refer to Bedfordshire Police in this article as we will not attest to it being a false allegation, this is defamatory of the person who made the report.”
Okay, it was the New York Police Department who investigated, how’s that? Sorry, Victoria, but the only person who was defamed here was the man falsely accused of rape.
We have seen with both the ludicrous VIP paedophile ring witch-hunt and the disgraceful Operation Yewtree just how far the British police are now willing to go in order to convict the innocent in their bowing and scraping to legal dominance feminism. It is time for them to stop “listening and believing” and return to the traditional method of investigating crimes, following the evidence wherever it may lead, and trusting no one. No one and nothing, including the absurd, self-serving statistics about both the prevalance of rape and the infrequency of false allegations.
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