Crime and Punishment



Carol Sarler writing in The Times talks some much needed sense about rape and the silly row which blew up over Richard Dawkins' comments about there being different degrees of serious of this terrible crime, just as there are with many other serious offences.  

Now I would actually support much stiffer sentences for many sex offenders because I think there's good evidence to suggest that these people are hopeless recidivists who will offend again and again, if given half a chance.

But that's a different argument of course and one that's directed at the most violent and serial offenders. 


Admit it: some rapes are worse than others

By Carol Sarler - The Times

Men are getting away with sexual assault as our laws ignore obvious differences in severity

Richard Dawkins has enjoyed a glorious week. First, he said the unsayable by suggesting that not all rape is equally bad: “Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse.” Next, he pre-empted naysayers with the insult: “If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.” Then, all he had to do was sit back and wait for the headlines, the fury and the outrage that, predictably speedily, followed. The professionally provocative professor must have thought he’d died and gone to the heaven in which he does not believe.

It is a pity, however, that the pantomime has succeeded in obscuring the fact that what Dawkins had to say was true. He affected surprise at the “absolutist terms” used by his opponents, even though these noisy voices have dominated the rape debate for decades. The childlike simplicity of “no means no” has sought, successfully, to equate the stranger-in-the-bushes-wielding-knife sexual attack with an unpleasant breakdown of communication between two equally inebriated adults, even though — and I write as a survivor of both — they are so obviously different.

The stranger case involves premeditation, arming oneself and clarity of thought at the moment of attack; none of those applies to the social occasion gone so hideously askew, and if there really are people who refuse to differentiate between the two, we can but pray they never sit in judgment on a killing.

The greater pity, though, is that it is exactly the same voices who refuse to accept any kind of gradation in rape who also most loudly bemoan the rape conviction rate — currently about 6 per cent of incidents reported — without seeing that this small figure is, to a very great extent, a consequence of their vocal presence and their lobbying.

It is not 6 per cent because 94 per cent of the accused men walk free from a court; it is 6 per cent because most cases never get to court in the first place. Our strangers-in-bushes, once arrested, do get tried and convicted as they always have — more easily now than ever, courtesy of advances in forensic evidence, including the potential to match DNA.

These days, however, most incidents fall into the category of what Dawkins called “date rape”; an event where there are no witnesses and where forensic investigation is unnecessary because the fact that intercourse took place is rarely denied. The issue is simply one of consent — he-said-she-said. The Crown Prosecution Service is less concerned about whether an arresting officer — or even the CPS itself — believes a woman than about whether a jury will believe her. Time and again it is forced to conclude that a jury will not.

Juries are not entirely stupid. There but for fortune, the man in the dock could be them, their son, their brother. Yes, he did something stupid. Yes, a rap on the knuckles — a few months behind bars, perhaps, to teach him a lesson — but they simply do not have the stomach to send a young man to prison for a minimum of five years, followed by a lifetime on the sex offenders’ register, forever branded a rapist. Thus, pragmatically, the CPS does not even give them the chance to exercise their will. Or their won’t.

There is, if only the shriller among the sisterhood would listen, a solution. In Canada, in much of Australia and even in parts of the usually punishment-hungry United States, the word “rape” is now abandoned in criminal terminology. It has been replaced with less emotive and clearly gradated charges; sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault with a weapon and criminal sexual conduct among them. The ensuing flexibility allows police, prosecutors, juries, judges — and, by extension, sentencing — to reflect degrees of severity of misdeed.

These are civilised countries with civilising intent, and it cannot be beyond the wit of our legal establishment at least to examine their reforms and their subsequent results. Certainly in Canada it was demonstrable that convictions for various, albeit varied, sexual crimes did increase after the abolition of the charge of rape — even if the sentences then handed down were not harsh enough to please the sensibilities of some of the most vehement activists within their feminist movement.

For ourselves, in deciding whether we might follow the Canadian lead, we have only to choose: is justice better served by sticking blindly to slogans, banners and simplistic principle — or by bringing more bad men to book, with punishments that properly fit their crimes?

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