BOYS WILL BE BOYS

Binge-drink women may lose right to claim rape (Frances Gibb, London Times, November, 25th, 2005)

Women who are raped while drunk face losing the chance to bring their attackers to justice after a legal ruling on the eve of new licensing laws.

A High Court judge yesterday threw out the case of a student who claimed that she was raped while drunk and unconscious on the basis that “drunken consent is still consent”.

The judgment came hours before the sweeping relaxation of Britain licensing laws which introduces 24-hour drinking in pubs for the first time.

The change prompted police and doctors to warn that Britain was facing an explosion of binge drinking.

The prosecution in the rape case had said it could not go on after the woman admitted that she could not remember whether she gave consent or not or whether sex had taken place. The jury at Swansea Crown Court was told: “Drunken consent is still consent.”

The judge agreed, instructing the jury to return a verdict of not guilty “even if you don’t agree”.

The drama student was allegedly raped by another student, who was working as a security guard, while she claimed she was unconscious through drink in a corridor outside her flat in a university’s hall of residence.

She told the jury that she had no recollection of events but insisted that she would not have agreed to sex with the man.

“If I had wanted to sleep with him I would have taken the few steps to my bedroom,” she said.

The problem with modern rape laws, like sexual harassment laws, is not the tiresome male whine about how one-sided they are–-they exist to protect women, not men–-but that they hinge entirely on the subjective feelings of the woman and ignore, indeed reject, any objective context that would imply normal (or even predictable) standards of behaviour against which the credibility of the parties might be measured. Just as our sexual harassment laws assume that office affairs and sexual innuendo are perfectly acceptable and nobody’s business if both parties are on board, so this case seems to suggest that lots of co-eds might choose to get blotto and then have sex with strange security guards while lying comatose in a residence hallway–-who’s to say and what business is it of yours, buddy? As Tom Wolfe understood well, the feminist-libertarians who fought so hard and so successfully for the right to behave badly took on the timeless reality of human sexuality and have left behind a long trail of pathetic victims of criminal jerks like this guy.