By VennerRoad, 17th Sep 2016
We hear much about so-called rape myths nowadays, but most of them are not myths at all.
One of the biggest myths promoted by feminists and their fellow travellers is that rape is a vastly under-reported crime. In her worthless polemic The Equality Illusion, feminist Kat Banyard claims that “at least” 100,000 women are raped in the UK every year. Similar figures are often quoted for the USA and elsewhere. Although it was far from the first such “study”, The Scope Of Rape by Mary Koss and others (April 1987) would lead the American public and the world to believe that one woman in four of college age had suffered rape. Sometimes this number is rendered as one in five, but on at least one occasion the attorney Gloria Allred has claimed that one woman in three will be raped in her lifetime. What are we to make of this?
The Koss study focused on college women, which begs the question would any mother allow her daughter to attend university if this were indeed the case? There are now more women graduating from university than men. A brief critique of this study can be found on the International False Rape Timeline, but the bottom line is that surveys of this kind tell us little or nothing. The most accurate surveys are those conducted on the eve of an election, but the two most recent substantial surveys in the UK were both wrong. It was widely expected that the BREXIT lobby would be defeated, yet in spite of a massive Government-inspired propaganda campaign against it, the nation voted narrowly to leave the European Union. The polls for the last general election were wildly inaccurate, everyone, including then Prime Minister David Cameron, was surprised by the number of seats lost by the Labour Party.
Finally, a 2001 survey claimed that around one million Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens.
Because the figure of 100,000 annual rape victims appears in at least one British Government publication, Kat Banyard and her ilk have the temerity to claim it is an official statistic, but although some rapes do unquestionably go unreported, this figure belongs on the same planet as the alien abduction survey.
Another myth or rather a misrepresentation is that the conviction rate for rape in the UK is “only” 6%. Robert Whiston has demolished this claim.
Coupled with the myth of under-reporting, it is used by activists to argue for the continued rape of due process, ie bringing more prosecutions for rape and other sexual offences while at the same time making it easier to convict, regardless of the evidence or lack thereof. Although juries can be duped by dishonest prosecutors as in for example some of the recent celebrity witch-hunt cases, by and large they are not stupid. If the evidence is weak or non-existent, they will usually acquit. The Mark Pearson case is perhaps the height of this folly, it was frightening not only that this prosecution was brought but that it took the jury ninety minutes rather than ninety seconds to acquit him.
Morgan Triplett - who staged her own rape.
When the phrase “most women” is used below, it should be taken to mean “most reasonably intelligent, educated women” – a benchmark equivalent to the archaic legal phrase “the man on the Clapham omnibus”.
The legal authorities have bought into these feminist rape myths to a large degree. In the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service issued a document that is full of them. (The following quotes from this are verbatim). According to the CPS, myth number one is:
Rape Occurs Between Strangers in Dark Alleys
we are led to believe this myth:
implies that home is safe;
implies that rape can be prevented by avoiding certain places and therefore blames the victim;
assumes a particular victim profile and therefore stigmatises him or her; and
entrenches racial and class prejudices.
This is too absurd to comment on, but we will all the same. In the first place, most genuine rapes occur between strangers or two people who hardly know each other. We can all be poor judges of character, but most women don’t allow themselves to be alone with men they don’t trust.
The home is, or should be, a relatively safe place, but women can be raped by strangers in their own homes.
How does this blame the victim by suggesting that certain places be avoided? The legal authorities in the UK and elsewhere often issue warnings to their citizens not to travel to certain countries. Does this amount to blaming say a medical professional or charity worker who is killed in a terrorist attack? Most parents teach their young daughters - and sons - to avoid certain places, not to talk to strangers, etc.
And what has this so-called myth to do with entrenching racial or class prejudices?
Myth number two is said to be:
Women Provoke Rape By The Way They Dress or Act
The Taliban and the Saudis may believe this, but does anyone in the West buy into it? It is though a fact that some women who dress and/or act in a certain fashion are inviting men – not necessarily all men – to approach them for sex, the most obvious being prostitutes. Sex aside, people signal their willingness to engage others in many ways. A woman who smiles at a man in a bar might reasonably be assumed to be willing to engage him in light conversation; if she does so and changes her mind, she will make that obvious too, and if he is not interested, so will he.
Myth number three is unquestionably the big one:
Women Who Drink Alcohol or Use Drugs Are Asking to Be Raped
It is so because a substantial number of rape prosecutions result from women claiming they were too drunk to consent. Two recent cases from the United States illustrate graphically that women can indeed be too drunk to consent to sex. Brock Turner was found having sex with a comatose woman. He was very drunk himself, which was probably the only thing that saved him from a heavy sentence. He has now become the much wanted poster boy for the phony campus rape epidemic: white and fairly privileged.
The Vanderbilt University case was far worse. Here, Brandon Vandenburg plied the victim with drink until she was literally unconscious, then he and his chums systematically violated her, a crime that clearly warrants a heavy sentence. Most allegations of alcohol-induced rape are nothing like so clearcut. A woman who goes to a man’s room, gets drunk with him and ends up in bed with him then regrets it the next morning or even months later has not been raped, she has made a bad decision.
Pointing this out does not attempt to excuse rape and ‘blame the victim’ because there is no victim to re-victimise and stigmatise.
As Nigella Lawson observed in 1993 after the acquittal of Austen Donnellan:
“Rape is a terrible thing. That is beyond debate. But to wake up and find yourself in bed with someone, when sober you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole, is not such a big deal. We’ve all been there, honey. It’s called student life.”
The authorities appear to have learned nothing since then, indeed in the UK and especially the United States it has become positively dangerous for a male student to have sex with a female student after she has consumed any quantity of alcohol.
An aside here, back in the 1960s there used to be a joke about a woman who could not submit to her husband unless she got drunk first, and with older couples it was the man who would have to get drunk before he could perform his husbandly duties.
Before moving on to myth number five, this quote from an American academic website is a gem:
“What if both people are drunk? Are they both assaulting each other?”
First, if both people are drunk and they have sex and neither feels that they have been violated (feeling violated is not the same as feeling regret or embarrassment), then no crime has been committed. However, if someone does feel violated, then the culpable party is the one who actively engaged in sexual behavior or advanced the situation towards and through penetrative sex.”
How absurd is this? What if they both feel violated?
Myth number five is said to be:
If She Didn’t Scream, Fight or Get Injured, It Wasn’t Rape
which is said to disbelieve and re-traumatise the victim, invalidate her experience, and discourage her from seeking help.
Surely the best way to seek help is to scream or fight, perhaps both? We are told too that “victims in rape situations are often legitimately afraid of being killed or seriously injured and so co-operate with the rapist to save their lives”.
Granted there are situations in which a woman will cooperate with her attacker. To take just one example, when Jannie Ligons was orally raped by serial sexual predator Daniel Holtzclaw, she was legitimately afraid he might shoot her. That didn’t stop her reporting him as soon as practicable. Holtzclaw had gotten away with it for so long because he targeted genuinely vulnerable women who did not report him, but when his lust got the better of him and he attacked an average woman, his goose was cooked. Most delayed allegations of rape are not that clearcut.
Most rapes do not occur in life or death situations, and while some women may freeze momentarily, most fight their attackers. On the other hand, a woman who is attacked by an armed stranger in her own home is in a terrible dilemma. Most burglars go out of their way to avoid any sort of contact with a householder because they realise this aggravates the offence and will result in a heavier sentence if they are brought to book. But a man who breaks into a woman’s home to rape her, who knows what he might do? Under such circumstances a woman is justified in using lethal force, and indeed this has happened, especially in the United States. Most women do fight or at least resist their attackers, and this leaves physical evidence. Where there is no such physical evidence, it is legitimate for the police and for the defence at trial to ask why it does not exist.
If we are to avoid disbelieving and re-traumatising the victim, we might just as well abandon criminal trials for rape, and convict an accused just because she says she was raped. This is what radical feminists want, as is evinced by their believe her hashtag and similar nonsense.
Myth number six is said to be:
You Can Tell if She’s ‘Really’ Been Raped by How She Acts
which:
disbelieves and re-traumatises the victim;
invalidates the victims experience and individuality; and
discourages him or her from seeking help.
We are then told
reactions to rape are highly varied and individual; and
many women experience a form of shock after a rape that leaves them emotionally numb or flat - and apparently calm.
If the claim that it is possible to tell if a victim has been raped from her behaviour is indeed a myth, then it is one that cuts both ways. As pointed out in a previous article on the fallacious rape trauma syndrome, it is not possible to make a diagnosis of rape from symptoms, emotions or later acts. But, and this is a very big but, if a woman reports the offence promptly and has injuries, DNA evidence on her person, etc, she is a credible victim indeed.
Even then it is possible that she made the whole thing up, like airhead Morgan Triplett who hired a man to physically assault her in return for sex, or Alison Welfare who systematically framed her former lover for an imaginary rape, but physical evidence coupled with prompt reporting should always be taken seriously in the absence of compelling reasons to over-ride them.
While allowance should be made for some delay, hours, perhaps even a full day, a woman who claims to have been raped a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, should have little credibility in the absence of strong corroboration. The reasons for this should be obvious, indeed the law recognises this in other areas. Consider the case of Alexander Economou who was discussed previously.
He was accused of drugging and raping his non-victim on December 20, 2012, but his accuser did not go to the police until January 4, 2013. In spite of the delay, and because of his determination, he was able to fish out evidence that proved she had lied. Now imagine she had delayed for a year, perhaps two years, the exculpatory CCTV evidence may well have been destroyed. We are now back to she said/he said, who would the jury have believed? Let’s rephrase that, would you believe the man in the business suit who made a bland denial, or the poor, frail creature who was so terrified of him she had to testify from behind a screen, snivelling into her handkerchief about how he had destroyed her life and given her nightmares ever since?
Although he was not accused of actual rape, Jian Ghomeshi would have suffered a similar fate but for his keeping decade old e-mails because with him it would have been not she said/he said but she said/she said/she said/he said.
As things turned out, he did not have to take the stand to refute the three women who manufactured lies about him a decade and more after he had rejected their sexual advances. Diana Davison has discussed this case in depth, having recently obtained the transcript of the Ghomeshi trial.
Myth number seven reads:
Women Cry Rape When They Regret Having Sex or Want Revenge
which
reinforces stereotypes of the ‘vindictive woman’;
reinforces stereotypes of women as untruthful;
re-victimises and stigmatises the victim; and
undermines her support for seeking justice
All stereotypes are grounded in fact. The reality is that women can be vindictive and untruthful just as much as men. Again, questioning a woman’s veracity when she makes an allegation of rape does not re-victimise or stigmatise the victim if she is not really a victim. This is why we have due process. Nor does it undermine her obtaining justice. In support of this so-called myth we are told:
Between January 2011 and May 2012, the DPP required CPS areas to refer to him all cases involving an allegedly false allegation of rape and/or domestic violence. During that time, there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape but only 35 for making false allegations of rape.
We are not told how many of those 5,651 rape prosecutions resulted in conviction, but according to the CPS (page 45 of this document), in 2011-12 – a one year period – there were 2,414 convictions for rape, and 1,450 prosecutions which are alluded to as unsuccessful, although it remains to be seen if a not guilty verdict can be called unsuccessful if the accused was in fact totally innocent.
As for the 35 prosecutions for making false allegations, this does not include reports that are no-crimed, ie allegations which the police deem to be unworthy of pursuit or even unworthy of belief. As one American lawman said earlier this year:
“...the majority of our rapes that are called in are actually consensual sex”.
Such candour is discouraged in the UK, but we can point to a few allegations in the allotted time frame that although not prosecuted were nonetheless false.
January 30, 2011: Susan Bradley at Sheffield: £80 fixed penalty notice.
May 4, 2011: False report at Fairford Leys, Aylesbury.
July 1, 2011: A teenage girl in Greater Manchester: fixed penalty notice.
August 9, 2011: Ipswich early morning, false report by an unnamed woman.
September 24, 2011: St Austell, Cornwall, false report, fixed penalty notice.
November 25, 2011: A 14 year old girl at Leeds who has “now been referred to specialists through the Safeguarding Unit in Leeds where she is receiving support.”
February 11, 2012: A 16 year old girl at Farnworth, fixed penalty notice.
And we haven’t mentioned the false rape allegations that accompany bogus asylum claims, the false claims and hoaxes called in to rape crisis centres, nor the latest trend - outing celebrities great and small on social media. Then of course there are the ones that are not reported by the national, local or even the alternative media.
The myth that false allegations of rape are rare has even found its way into case law. Consider the following extract from a Canadian judgment which is crammed with feminist propaganda:
Our Court has rejected the notion that complainants in sexual assault cases have a higher tendency than other complainants to fabricate stories based on “ulterior motives” and are therefore less worthy of belief. Neither the law, nor judicial experience, nor social science research supports this generalization. (See Seaboyer, supra, at pp. 652 and 690, per L’Heureux-Dubé J., dissenting in part; R. v. W. (R.), 1992 CanLII 56 (SCC), 2 S.C.R. 122, at p. 134; R. v. François, 1994 CanLII 52 (SCC), 2 S.C.R. 827; W. (G.), supra; A. McGillivray, “R. v. Bauder: Seductive Children, Safe Rapists, and Other Justice Tales” (1998), 25 Man. L.J. 359, at p. 381; M. Burt, “Rape Myths and Acquaintance Rape”, in A. Parrot and L. Bechhofer, eds., Acquaintance Rape: The Hidden Crime (1991), 26, at p. 28; L. Holmstrom and A. Burgess, The Victim of Rape: Institutional Reactions (1983), at pp. 174-79.)
Myth number eight reads:
Only Gay Men Get Raped/Only Gay Men Rape Men
Is this even a myth? Has anyone ever seriously suggested that men, homosexual or other, are not sexually assaulted? The term rape for forced homosexual acts is a fairly new development, but homosexual rape is fairly rare. The main reason for this may be the extreme promiscuity of male homosexuals. Even when consenting homosexual acts were illegal, cottaging was a well-known phenomenon. Likewise so-called prison rape is largely a myth; while women are widely believed to fail to report rape out of shame, normally heterosexual men who have sex with other men often rationalise their temporary lapses into perversion by claiming they were raped. This detailed study from 2006 is far more reliable than the sort of guff churned out by the CPS.
This section on male rape has obviously been added to solicit male support for the continued erosion of due process.
Myth 9 says:
Prostitutes Cannot be Raped
Again, does anyone really believe that? There is though the issue of credibility; this is something feminists don’t like to discuss, but it is a fact is it not that some people are more credible than others? A prostitute who claims to have been raped has less credibility than a nun, unless the name of the latter happens to be Sister Mary Turcotte who claimed to have been attacked, choked and raped in New York City on January 22, 2011.
Myth number ten reads (quoted verbatim):
If the victim didnt complain immediately it wasnt rape
to assert otherwise:
disbelieves and re-traumatises the victim;
invalidates the experience of the victim; and
discourages him or her from seeking help.
But only if the victim is really a victim. We have already covered the subject of contumelious delay.
Finally, we should mention the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale; the last four listed herein are anything but myths. We needn’t bother with the rest. If you want to know why this garbage is being peddled to students, to the general public, even to academics, law enforcement and politicians, you have the answer already, it is to totally destroy due process, to make it possible for any demented, malicious or simply evil female to point her finger at a man and claim he raped her, yesterday, last year, a decade or more ago.
And for that man to be arrested, dragged into court, and convicted on no evidence whatsoever, without even the right to confront his accuser. If you think that sounds absurd, think again, the International False Rape Timeline contains the names of man men whose lives have been so destroyed. In short, feminism has done for alleged rapists what Salem did for witches.
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