Context and Crime
Janice Turner gets to grips with a difficult subject with this piece in The Times about consent and rape, but in doing so she also nails a few issues to do with this Ched Evans case which is all over the news headlines just now, as the former footballer seeks to resume his playing career.
I suppose the first thing to say about Ched Evans is that a man who has been convicted of rape and denied the right of appeal, was nonetheless released halfway through his five year jail sentence, despite protesting his innocence and showing no remorse for his crime.
But Janice Turner also sets out the background to this terrible event which involved a trap, with a friend of the footballer going out to 'procure' a drunken young girl for sex whom Ched Evans then joined along with another two 'low lives' who were there to film the proceedings, uninvited and unknown to the young woman, of course, who was by that time completely vulnerable and powerless.
So the whole business was an ugly, premeditated affair and the only thing I find surprising is that Clayton McDonald wasn't convicted as well, although that may be down to the lack of DNA evidence rather than anything else.
But in any event Ched Evans should be thoroughly ashamed of his behaviour and if you ask me, his girlfriend needs her head examined for standing 'loyally' by her man.
By Janice Turner - The Times
Unless we teach boys and girls exactly what consent entails our soaring rape figures are going to get worse
Ched Evans said he could have had any woman he wanted. “Footballers are rich, they have money,” he told police. “That’s what girls like.” And yet wealth and prestige didn’t get him laid in Rhyl that night. Rather Evans relied upon his friend Clayton McDonald to procure a stumbling 19-year-old lone drunk in a kebab shop. McDonald took the girl to a hotel and was already having sex when Evans arrived and joined in. Two of his mates came along to film it.
It is a sordid affair, made messier by apparently capricious trial verdicts. The woman, who woke alone, naked and confused the next morning, claimed she was raped by both men since she was too intoxicated to give consent. Yet the jury acquitted McDonald while Evans received a five-year sentence.
And thus the Evans case became a bile-bank for misogynist anger, giving rise to some of the ugliest behaviour ever witnessed online. The victim was named, berated as a drunken slag and hounded out of town.
Later, for saying that Evans should be allowed to resume his football career since the assault was “not violent”, Judy Finnigan and her daughter were threatened with rape by — bizarrely — supporters of his victim.
Yet the rape statistics published this week, just before Evans was released yesterday, having served half his sentence, are a timely warning against simplistic assumptions. That rapists are either lurking strangers in alleyways with knives (what Whoopi Goldberg termed “rape-rape”) or little more than lousy dates was refuted by Professor Liz Kelly, an expert in sexual violence. The most vicious rapes, she said, are often committed by former partners. And predatory men have numerous modi operandi. McDonald and Evans had previously shared women they’d picked up. The cheap hotel room booked in advance, McDonald’s text to Evans that he’d got a girl, Evans’s hurried back-stairs exit, all had a swaggering, practised air.
The guy who deliberately gets a woman drunk or abuses her vulnerable state is a timeless figure. It was known as “taking advantage” back when women kept silent because they feared being blamed and shamed. The increased rape rate — up to 60 a day — is in part because women who once took a shower, dried their tears, called a friend and put the hideous business down to experience, are now filing reports.
Are such rapes less traumatic? Unlike Ken Clarke, George Galloway or the supporters of Julian Assange, I would not tell a woman that being sexually assaulted by a man you trusted ranks lower in the rape league table.
That consent must now be conscious; that if you penetrate a sleeping, comatose, drunken woman it amounts to rape is a major step forward. But what the Evans case and the furore surrounding it demonstrates is how little consent is truly understood.
A criminal law solicitor friend who often defends men accused of rape told me of a client who had been smoking skunk with a teenager in her bedroom. They started kissing, then, with no further ado, he had sex with her. Later, she filed a rape complaint. How did he know she’d given consent, my friend asked? The man looked baffled. Well, they’d been kissing, of course. It hadn’t crossed his mind that any indication of enthusiasm or further permission was required between the first act and the last.
And change to legal definitions of consent have not been accompanied by a sexual education programme to inform young men that what may occur drunkenly after the pub is not just sleazebag behaviour but a serious crime. Meanwhile many have absorbed the cold mechanical script of internet porn in which women are rough-housed and up for anything.
As the mother of sons, my heart is not only with female victims, but with young men who might come round, hung over, to accusations that will ruin their lives. As my 16-year-old said, reading the paper yesterday morning: “What if you were both drunk?” Indeed.
And herein lies a vast grey area. A former circuit judge, Mary Jane Mowat, was pilloried for saying that rape conviction rates would not improve until women stopped “getting so drunk”. But it was an observation not a moral point: juries rarely convict if the victim was blasted because they can’t trust her testimony.
Of course we could load responsibility on to women as usual: don’t make yourself vulnerable, don’t walk home drunk, maybe it’s best you don’t go out at all. Or we could start talking to young men. During the drunken frenzy of freshers’ week at Cambridge University, every first year attends a “consent workshop”. Students of both sexes discuss where lines might be drawn. Can consent be non-verbal? Is it best to ask if you’re not sure?
This Cambridge innovation has been widely mocked but why not give young people a few signposts as they fumble through the sexual maze. Certainly these discussions should be had in schools and I wonder why football clubs do not sit down their brilliant, cocky, ridiculously rich young players and apprise them, if not how to be decent men, at least of the law.
As to whether Ched Evans should play again, the rehabilitation of offenders seems a principle too precious to break over some grubby footballer. And besides, every Saturday Evans will face a stadium of chanting opposition fans, who will never let him forget his shame.
Unless we teach boys and girls exactly what consent entails our soaring rape figures are going to get worse
Ched Evans said he could have had any woman he wanted. “Footballers are rich, they have money,” he told police. “That’s what girls like.” And yet wealth and prestige didn’t get him laid in Rhyl that night. Rather Evans relied upon his friend Clayton McDonald to procure a stumbling 19-year-old lone drunk in a kebab shop. McDonald took the girl to a hotel and was already having sex when Evans arrived and joined in. Two of his mates came along to film it.
It is a sordid affair, made messier by apparently capricious trial verdicts. The woman, who woke alone, naked and confused the next morning, claimed she was raped by both men since she was too intoxicated to give consent. Yet the jury acquitted McDonald while Evans received a five-year sentence.
And thus the Evans case became a bile-bank for misogynist anger, giving rise to some of the ugliest behaviour ever witnessed online. The victim was named, berated as a drunken slag and hounded out of town.
Later, for saying that Evans should be allowed to resume his football career since the assault was “not violent”, Judy Finnigan and her daughter were threatened with rape by — bizarrely — supporters of his victim.
Yet the rape statistics published this week, just before Evans was released yesterday, having served half his sentence, are a timely warning against simplistic assumptions. That rapists are either lurking strangers in alleyways with knives (what Whoopi Goldberg termed “rape-rape”) or little more than lousy dates was refuted by Professor Liz Kelly, an expert in sexual violence. The most vicious rapes, she said, are often committed by former partners. And predatory men have numerous modi operandi. McDonald and Evans had previously shared women they’d picked up. The cheap hotel room booked in advance, McDonald’s text to Evans that he’d got a girl, Evans’s hurried back-stairs exit, all had a swaggering, practised air.
The guy who deliberately gets a woman drunk or abuses her vulnerable state is a timeless figure. It was known as “taking advantage” back when women kept silent because they feared being blamed and shamed. The increased rape rate — up to 60 a day — is in part because women who once took a shower, dried their tears, called a friend and put the hideous business down to experience, are now filing reports.
Are such rapes less traumatic? Unlike Ken Clarke, George Galloway or the supporters of Julian Assange, I would not tell a woman that being sexually assaulted by a man you trusted ranks lower in the rape league table.
That consent must now be conscious; that if you penetrate a sleeping, comatose, drunken woman it amounts to rape is a major step forward. But what the Evans case and the furore surrounding it demonstrates is how little consent is truly understood.
A criminal law solicitor friend who often defends men accused of rape told me of a client who had been smoking skunk with a teenager in her bedroom. They started kissing, then, with no further ado, he had sex with her. Later, she filed a rape complaint. How did he know she’d given consent, my friend asked? The man looked baffled. Well, they’d been kissing, of course. It hadn’t crossed his mind that any indication of enthusiasm or further permission was required between the first act and the last.
And change to legal definitions of consent have not been accompanied by a sexual education programme to inform young men that what may occur drunkenly after the pub is not just sleazebag behaviour but a serious crime. Meanwhile many have absorbed the cold mechanical script of internet porn in which women are rough-housed and up for anything.
As the mother of sons, my heart is not only with female victims, but with young men who might come round, hung over, to accusations that will ruin their lives. As my 16-year-old said, reading the paper yesterday morning: “What if you were both drunk?” Indeed.
And herein lies a vast grey area. A former circuit judge, Mary Jane Mowat, was pilloried for saying that rape conviction rates would not improve until women stopped “getting so drunk”. But it was an observation not a moral point: juries rarely convict if the victim was blasted because they can’t trust her testimony.
Of course we could load responsibility on to women as usual: don’t make yourself vulnerable, don’t walk home drunk, maybe it’s best you don’t go out at all. Or we could start talking to young men. During the drunken frenzy of freshers’ week at Cambridge University, every first year attends a “consent workshop”. Students of both sexes discuss where lines might be drawn. Can consent be non-verbal? Is it best to ask if you’re not sure?
This Cambridge innovation has been widely mocked but why not give young people a few signposts as they fumble through the sexual maze. Certainly these discussions should be had in schools and I wonder why football clubs do not sit down their brilliant, cocky, ridiculously rich young players and apprise them, if not how to be decent men, at least of the law.
As to whether Ched Evans should play again, the rehabilitation of offenders seems a principle too precious to break over some grubby footballer. And besides, every Saturday Evans will face a stadium of chanting opposition fans, who will never let him forget his shame.
