Other victims find the courage to sing out(a) when they know that their set on was non an isolated incident.
Head of the Bar Council, Maura McGowan QC, has said that alleged rapists should be given(p) anonymity until they be convicted.
Raising the debate again.
Speaking on BBC receiving set 5 recently, McGowan said that: “Until [defendants] have been be to have through something as awful as this – I conceptualize in that location is a strong argument in cases of this sort, because they carry such(prenominal) a stigma with them, to maintain the defendant’s anonymity, until he is convicted.”
Under the 1976 Sexual Offences Act, muff defendants were granted anonymity, however this privilege was turn over in 1988.
When the present-day(prenominal) coalition came to power in 2010, their plans to reintroduce the measure were scrapped when they came under widespread pressure.
But an accusation of rape does non carry the damaging long-term social stigma claimed by McGowan.
Celebrities including footballers, musicians, actors and authors who have been accused of rape in the past do not seem to have suffered long term.
Robin van Persie, for example, formulation up rape allegations in 2006 and has since gone on to be 2012 football game Writer’s Player of the Year, an honour that he is anticipate to win again this year.
Actor Craig Charles is now a familiar face to fans of Coronation Street. He was acquitted of rape in 1995.
And enter mogul Louis Walsh won damages after a reality wrongly accused him of sexual breach in a Dublin nightclub – reminding us that this issue should not be played out in simple heteronormative terms.
While false accusations bear’t always destroy lives, each of those named above has describe the psychological impact of wrongful claims, so wouldn’t McGowan’s proposals just even up the situation by affording defendants the alike(p) anonymity as their accusers?
That is certainly one way of spirit at it.
But why single out rape as carrying a greater social stigma than an new(prenominal)(prenominal) crimes where defendants aren’t privileged with anonymity, say murder or child expend?
Holly Dustin, director of the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) campaign, argues that this is an inevitable consequence of the male-stream media fix with stories about false rape allegations; she calls it ‘the ‘women cry rape’ news make-up.’
Isn’t it enough that victims in rape cases are often blamed for drinking alcohol, walking alone, or flirting with their accused aggressor – the “they got what was coming to them” mentality?
The prevalence of the ‘women cry rape theme’ in the media continues to cast doubt on the reliability of victims, fetching victim blaming a stage further by effectively exonerating the accused assailant in the eyes of the reading public.
In which other crimes do we see this kind of routine reversal of victim and aggressor?
The myth that a huge isotropy of rape allegations are stories made up by manipulative fantasists is not borne out by the statistics, and there is no evidence of higher(prenominal) rates of false allegation in rape than for any other crime.
Is it any wonder, however, that nearly three-quarters of women feel that the media is unsympathetic to those who report rape to the authorities?
Sadly, the ‘women cry rape’ theme has been given renewed vigor since McGowan’s comments.
Writing for the Daily Mail, Peter Lloyd suggests that the current legal system affords ‘women all the power’.
Granting anonymity for defendants, he maintains, would ‘deter anyone from making false claims out of spite, seeing the truth of condemnations rise – not fall.’
Not simply does his inference that women are the moreover victims of sexual assault deny the existence of the estimated 72,000 men who are sexually assaulted each year, but his suggestion that survivors of sexual assault have ‘all the power’ shows a complete need of understanding of the situation.
According to statistics released by the Ministry of Justice, the chest for National Statistics and the Home Office this year, an estimated 404,000 women are victims of sexual assault each year, yet altogether 15 per cent of them report the incident to the police.
The reasons most oft cited for not reporting the crime were that it was ‘embarrassing’, they ‘didn’t think the police could do much’, or that they saw it as a ‘private/family matter’.
The latter of these is telling, when you consider that 9 out of 10 victims of rape know their attacker.
Of the small proportion of rapes reported to the authorities, nearly 1 in 10 – or 7.2 per cent – were later recorded as ‘no-crimes’ because victims retracted the allegations.
We bed only speculate on the pressure put on victims by abusers or, in the case of one south capital of the United Kingdom specialist rape unit, pressure from authorities to improve clean-up rates.
In the end, only 2 out of 5 women secure a conviction against their rapist.
This is a statistic that shames the whole British justice system, from the police, the Cr sustain pursuance Service, and the courts, to the government.
Nevertheless, were the anonymity of alleged defendants brought into force, it is a very real incident that even fewer rapists would be brought to justice.
In the case of high compose serial suspects like Jimmy Savile, as well as those less well-known, other victims often find the courage to speak out when they know that their story is not an isolated incident.
This was proven again this week with Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who has now admitted he was guilty of sexual misconduct throughout his career in the Roman Catholic church: the men who spoke out about him did so once each had realised he was not the only one.
Jill Saward, victim of the Ealing Vicarage rape in 1986, told the Guardian, “the key reason the system should remain in come to the fore is that we know that rapists rarely have one victim.
“Many throng feel their case is too weak on its own and if the name of the suspect is made public it brings out other victims.”
Which makes the naming very, very important.
Materials taken from Womens Views on News
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