Every 34 minutes a rape is reported to the police in the United Kingdom. Thousands more victims do not come forward.
Yet three-quarters of local authorities have no services for rape victims and only one in twenty rapes reported to the police leads to a conviction. This failure to bring rapists to justice amounts to a near licence to rape.
Women are being failed by the criminal justice system, and left with nowhere to turn for support.
It's chilling to see that this is happening. It's an issue for everyone to grapple with. Too often we bring our own preconceptions about the causes of rape, policemen and women, jurors, judges and lawyers. It is these preconceptions that are doing the damage.
Somehow there needs to be a paradigm shift in attitudes. Something profound needs to happen to our thinking, like we did with drink driving, like we did with same sex marriages, like we did with smoking. We need a shift in attitudes to rape. Too often people think that women who get drunk, wear revealing clothing bring a rape "on themselves". This attitude needs confronting, dismantling and turning into something positive. Also too often people think that accusations are malicious or to cover an infidelity.
For more information on this issue and to see where I got my stats from head over to http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/ or http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10220
I certainly take your points , although it does'nt help the situation that there are known cases of women having admitted to having made false accusations , sometimes sooner , sometimes later , and sometimes only after proof emerges that the accused man could'nt have done it , i.e if cctv pictures are found showing that he was elsewhere when the rape was alleged to occur .
I know that's quite rare , but being falsely accused could potentially happen to almost any man who's ever been alone with a woman , and I seem to read of such a case about once a month .
There should be no effective 'licence to rape' , or any 'licence' for any woman to 'get back at' any man for whatever by falsely accusing him , knowing that the police have to take her seriously .
When , as is usually the case , there are no witnesses , of course the case against the accused has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt , as unpleasant as that no doubt is for the victim , as the only other alternative is to assume that all women tell the whole truth the whole time , and find all alleged rapists guilty and lock them up , why bother with a trial ,
though tell me if you disagree , ~ Martin .