By VennerRoad, 8th Nov 2016
The pressure group Women Against Rape claims the UK police are assisting rapists. How much truth is there in this?
Lisa Longstaff of Woman Against Rape
The police and the entire legal establishment, it would appear. So how much truth is there in Women Against Rape’s claims? The answer is not a lot. While individual police officers do sometimes make errors of judgment, their assertions that “The police often do not collect all the evidence or lose or misinterpret it” or that “The Crown Prosecution Service routinely turn down strong cases and often prosecute rape incompetently and negligently” have no basis in fact.
Indeed, not only are ludicrously weak cases prosecuted – such as that of Mark Pearson – but police officers are regularly held to account for errors of judgment, and on occasion, when these errors are wilful, they face prosecution. To take just one example, in December 2013, Essex Police detective Hannah Notley was given a four month prison sentence for dropping a rape case on her own initiative, failing to inform her superiors, and lying to the complainant.
One way in which police officers are said to assist rapists is by prosecuting false rape accusers!
Indeed, Women Against Rape have a page on their website devoted to false accusers, whom they say should not be prosecuted because such prosecutions are not in the public interest. As was pointed out in an earlier article, if women who wilfully falsely accuse men of rape are not penalised, we will be flooded with false allegations, even more so than we are at present.
On the same page, the reader is informed that false allegations of rape are extremely rare – they are certainly not; that 90% of rapes are never reported – how does anyone know? And that the conviction rate is far too low. No it is not.
There is a great deal more whining and wailing in that vein, but the most shocking claims on this page are that three proven false accusers were in fact innocent. The cases of Layla Ibrahim and Gail Sherwood were discussed in a previous article, but here is what they say about a false accuser identified only as JD who was given a two year sentence for perverting the course of justice:
“She had called the police during a row with boyfriend at her home. Police found her concussed and injured. They questioned her for two days without sleep. Eventually she named her boyfriend, who she had fought with that night. Next day she realised it was a flashback to a rape six months earlier committed by a different man. JD told the police that she had made a mistake and the accused was released after just a few hours.”
From the information given here, this woman can be identified as Jennifer Day; in dismissing her appeal against sentence, the Court Of Appeal made the following findings of fact:
“On 9 January 2009 Mr Saxby was arrested. When interviewed he denied raping her. He told police that they were in a relationship together. He had visited her house on the day of the alleged rape and had spent a long time knocking, telephoning and trying to attract her attention. When she eventually opened the door they had had a row and he left without entering the property...the police had received information from a neighbour of the appellant who confirmed exactly what Andrew Saxby had said, in particular that he had never entered the house...one of the officers received information to the effect that the appellant had previously made a false allegation.
It appears that in 2003 she had reported to the police an alleged assault by an unknown male. In 2007 she had made a virtually identical allegation to another male with whom she had been associating simultaneously with her association with Andrew Saxby. She had also told that man that she was suffering from a brain tumour when in fact she had merely had an appointment for a brain scan.”
What are we to make of this, and of the claim that Jennifer Day was questioned for two days without sleep? Since the 1984 Police And Criminal Evidence Act, the police have not been able to take liberties of that nature with ordinary suspects. They have to be careful even in terrorist cases because a confession extracted under duress can be ruled inadmissible. The simple fact is that Women Against Rape – or someone associated with this group – made up these claims. They lied. Jennifer Day is a serial false accuser, and like so many women who falsely report rape, not right in the head. Her injuries may have been accidental but were probably self-inflicted.
For whatever reason, the number of these dangerous female sociopaths is increasing. To take just one more example, in 2006, Emma Saxon falsely accused a former boyfriend of rape; she was given a fixed penalty notice. In 2010, she made another false rape allegation against a man with whom she had agreed to meet for sex. When Martin Blood had second thoughts, she cried rape. That lie earned her an eight month sentence, and no sooner had she been released from prison than she set fire to her apartment thereby endangering not only her own life but those of other residents. These are the sort of demented harridans Women Against Rape say should be given a free pass to falsely accuse men of rape left, right and centre.
The Women Against Rape website contains a great deal more nonsense, one piece of which will suffice to debunk here:
“WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women.”
So you did that all by yourselves, did you ladies?
Rape in marriage is one of the most controversial subjects peddled by the sisterhood, and as usual most of what they claim about it is simply untrue. It has never been legal for a man to rape his wife in England, but the issue is not a simple one. In days of yore, a married woman was indeed regarded as the property of her husband, but only in the same way that today an underage girl is the property of her parents. A man was legally responsible for providing for his wife, and could even be held liable for her debts.
In 1974, two years before the formation of Women Against Rape, a man named O’Brien was convicted of raping his wife after she was granted a decree nisi. In the 1947 case of Holborn v Holborn, a wife was granted a divorce because of excessive demands of sex from her husband. The case law is much older than that; as two feminist academics conceded with uncharacteristic candour in 1991: “Marriage law has never required a wife to unconditionally consent to her husband’s demands for sexual intercourse.”
It remains to be seen if Women Against Rape will ever exhibit such honesty, but what does not remain to be seen is that if such organisations do any good at all, that is far outweighed by the damage they do in bending the ears of politicians and other social policy makers to their lies, and arguably even worse, encouraging demented or simply evil women to reinterpret their sexual encounters – be they consensual or imaginary – as rape, and thereby ensnaring countless innocent men.
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