Misogyny, Rape and 'Slut Shaming' (2)
Jeremy Clarkson turns his wit to wayward prosecutors and miscarriages of justice around the world - before concluding that Cyprus is in a league all of its own.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news-review/carlos-ghosn-japan-is-a-bad-place-to-get-arrested-but-its-not-a-patch-on-cyprus-qwb5b7kdb
Carlos Ghosn: Japan is a bad place to get arrested, but it’s not a patch on Cyprus
By jeremy clarkson - The Sunday Times
The absconding of the Renault boss highlights accusations of prosecutorial zeal closer to home
When I heard that car industry boss Carlos Ghosn had been arrested, I assumed it was for green-lighting the dreary Nissan Juke. But no. It turned out that his alleged crimes had something to do with accountancy.
I don’t understand this sort of thing. When I visit my accountant and he is talking about pensions and tax, I know it’s important, so I fix him with a hard stare and concentrate like hell. But when he’s finished, none of it has gone in, because all I heard was a voice in my head saying: “Must listen.”
Anyway, Ghosn claimed that all the charges came about because it was felt in Tokyo he was letting the French arm of the company, Renault, trample all over the Japanese part, Nissan. As a motoring writer, I felt it was important to get up to speed, but after two minutes of reading, I felt the onset of sleep coursing through my head like a big warm blanket.
When I woke up, Ghosn was gone. Rumours suggested a team that included former Green Beret commandos dressed as Gregorian musicians had turned up at the place where he was under house arrest and smuggled him onto a bullet train, and then aboard a private jet inside some kind of musical instrument case. Yup. He’d scarpered. So, obviously, he was as guilty as hell of whatever it was he’s supposed to have done.
But then I learnt that in Japan, prosecutors have a 99.9% success rate. If I were facing those odds, I’d also want to be smuggled out of the country — in a matchbox if necessary. Of course, you expect to find weird justice in backward places, but Japan’s a surprise. And it’s not the only one.
In Armenia, they threatened to make a man sit on a bottle until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.
In Australia, Plod kept the recording devices off as they “interviewed” a suspect and then miraculously turned them on just before he owned up. The man was inside for 11 years before the authorities admitted they may have screwed up.
The Canadians have been busted for helping a witness with his mortgage payments. The Finns tried one woman twice for murdering her husband and got it wrong both times. The Icelandics have been known to keep suspects in solitary for more than 600 days.
Even the Germans can’t be trusted. In 2001, a man crashed his car into a river. His body was discovered after eight years of being nibbled by fish. There was no evidence that a crime had taken place, but even so, various members of his family were convicted of his killing.
And all of this brings me neatly to recent events in Cyprus. Now, I’ve had some experience with police in that part of the world. On a night out in Crete, my then girlfriend was touched by a young local man in a bar. When I asked him to stop, he and his friends took me outside, tied me into an interesting reef knot and then peed on me. When the police arrived, one of the locals punched me in the head, and after that I was arrested for “insulting the Greek flag”.
It was very poor policing, if I’m honest, but this rape business in Ayia Napa is on another level. Sure, when the case was first reported, I figured the police were on the right track. They imagined some silly woman had it away with a man she’d just met, his mates piled in, and the next day she dealt with the guilt by saying she’d been raped.
I wasn’t at all surprised that the Israelis involved in this incident were allowed to go home, and was actually quite glad that she’d been charged with causing a public mischief.
But then, interesting details started to emerge. The bruises on her body. The fact she hadn’t been allowed access to a lawyer. The extraordinary confession, which plainly hadn’t been written by anyone with English as a first language. “I discovered them recording me doing sexual intercourse.” Really?
Sure, the police in Ayia Napa must be heartily fed up with the annual arrival of several thousand puking, brawling sex enthusiasts, so it’s only natural they’ll have little sympathy when one of them cries rape. I get that. But what were the courts thinking of? In a civilised country such as Cyprus, it’s their job to take a cool, detached look at the evidence. And yet, somehow, they reckoned there was no reasonable doubt, found her guilty and gave her a four-month suspended prison sentence.
There are calls for tourists to boycott Cyprus and I hope they have the reach of a bittern’s boom. I hope every youngster thinks about the plight of that poor young woman and decides to go somewhere else. And I hope the police who conducted her interview are made to sit on very large bottles until they have finished writing out, a thousand times: “I must not fabricate statements.”
I have a similar problem with America. Last year, a woman called Anne Sacoolas left the US military base in Northamptonshire where her husband worked and drove on the wrong side of the road until her car hit a young biker called Harry Dunn. He was killed and she fled back to the States.
Harry’s devastated parents have been a model of dignity as they have pleaded with her to come back and face the music. But she has claimed diplomatic immunity and is apparently backed by the US authorities, who say that charging her is not a “helpful development”.
Her US lawyer has suggested that our legal system isn’t up to much, and you know that she has in mind the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. Yet America, remember, is a country that can’t even work out a humane way to execute criminals. Unless they are several thousand miles away, at an airport in Baghdad.
So let’s end on a lighter note by wondering if the people who helped Carlos Ghosn escape will one day become known as the Renault Five.
Misogyny, Rape and 'Slut Shaming' (09/01/20)
Here's one of the most powerful articles I read over the holiday period - an article on 'rape and social media' by Janice Turner in The Times.
A young woman was having sex with her boyfriend and was being filmed by his friends, without her knowledge, before the gang of young men burst into their hotel room uninvited, by the girlfriend at least.
What happened next is in dispute, but the claim that the young woman suddenly agreed to have wild group sex with a group of complete strangers sounds like a male porn fantasy.
Yet the Cypriot authorities turned on the young woman who withdrew her initial allegation of rape after an eight hour interrogation while unrepresented and without the support of a lawyer or her own family.
Meanwhile some of the young men outed her as a 'slut' on social media and posted the secret 'sex tape' online before family members finally celebrated their return to Israel with chants of "The Brit is a whore".
I suppose it sounds rather trite to say "I know who I believe", but in the face of such appalling misogyny I think it's important for people to speak out and I'm sure I would be saying the same thing, if I were the father of boy children rather than girls.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/claim-rape-and-a-social-media-assault-begins-q3rwvchg0
Claim rape and a social media assault begins
By janice turner - The Times
As the Cyprus case shows, women who pursue justice risk exposure and vilification — it’s no wonder many drop charges
Just a few clicks and you see it all. Newspapers may have scruples about identifying gang-raped teenage girls but angry men on social media don’t. They’ve published her name, gleefully harvested her cheery Instagram selfies. A video of her having sex with her boyfriend, filmed secretly by her alleged assailants, just before they piled into the Cyprus hotel room, was posted on porn sites.
Through this rich plethora of material the girl’s body, morals and sexual prowess are luridly debated. Twitter shrugs, happy to host her public shaming. Eventually the porn sites removed the sex footage, not to spare her further humiliation — who cares about that? — but because some of the 12 Israeli boys she accused of rape were under 17, the Cypriot age of consent. Which means the mob now calls her “paedophile” as well as “slut”.
What should we say to a 19-year-old girl, A levels passed, a university place bagged, who is beautiful, adventurous, looking for a summer of meeting boys, parties and fun? That if something goes wrong you may be utterly ruined. The Ayia Napa case is an object lesson in how rape victims face not just the old horrors of a callous judicial process but a new one too: the prospect of global, indelible shame.
Moreover, for all our mighty #IBelieveHer feminist campaigns, this girl probably faces more disbelief than a generation ago when few would think a well-brought-up young woman would happily allow a dozen men to take their turn. But now “gang-bang” is a much-searched porn category: images resembling her ordeal are watched by guys who are led to believe this is a normal sexual rite of passage — and that girls love it.
Once, self-respecting parents wouldn’t greet as homecoming heroes sons who, even if they fell short of rape, had collaborated in a squalid, hateful act. Nobody disputes that four lots of DNA were found on her body, along with internal injuries and scratches on her thighs. Nor that outside the hotel these little princes bragged they were going to “do orgies” with the “English girl”. Or that they filmed her having sex with their friend without consent (not even a crime in Cyprus).
“Are you not ashamed?” asked a female Israeli journalist. But the boys and their male relatives popped champagne, let off a confetti cannon and kept chanting: “The Brit is a whore.”
We should warn young women too that their bodies and lives may be mere collateral in bigger power plays. In Hollywood women were silenced with cash for non-disclosure agreements to save studio moguls. In Cyprus, politicians weren’t going to let one silly British girl spoil relations with Israel, which not only uses the island, its only friendly regional neighbour, as a playground for its youth but is a key defence and trade partner.
On Thursday the Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu met the Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades to sign off the $6 billion EastMed gas pipeline project. You don’t have to be a tin-foil hat conspiracist to think it unlikely Cyprus would imperil this deal by having 12 young Israeli men, some reportedly from high-born political families, stuck indefinitely in its jails.
By then it was their accuser who was in prison. The police, having taken her initial statement in July — that the gang burst in, that one sat on her shoulders so she couldn’t even count how many raped her, all affirmed by doctors — recalled her to the station. There they questioned her for eight hours until in desperation at 1.30am she allowed a “confession” to be dictated: she’d consented to everything, she said, fabricated the rape as revenge for the illicit filming. It wasn’t enough the Israelis were free: the girl must be punished, charged with “public mischief” and after four weeks already on remand in a Cypriot prison is now facing a jail term.
It is a truly monstrous case, more redolent of “honour” punishments handed out to raped girls in Afghanistan than to a holidaymaker in an EU nation. By refusing to hear rape evidence, the judge Michalis Papathanasiou employed all the logic of a witch trial. If her lawyers could not prove the attack was real, how could they clear her of making it up?
Now there are demands for a presidential pardon. But to accept absolution for a crime means first admitting your guilt. The girl is relinquishing her university place, reconsidering her chosen career since it is incompatible with a criminal conviction; she’s suffering from PTSD and “hypersomnia”, sleeping 20 hours a day. If the verdict is appealed against in the Cyprus Supreme Court or taken as far as the European Court of Human Rights it will prolong her ordeal for months, maybe years. All this for reporting a gang-rape.
While we denounce Cypriot courts, let’s not pretend our system delivers justice for sex offence victims. Here, too, women may be interviewed by police for hours without legal counsel. Nor does the victim always have a lawyer representing her interests in court. Although the number of reported rapes has increased, fewer than half now result in charges. In 2018-19 there were 1,925 convictions for rape or a lesser sexual offence, down from 2,635 in the previous period. The justice system and police are impossibly stretched now mobile phone information must be tirelessly searched and disclosed, while many women, fearful for their privacy, drop charges.
Pursue justice and you risk vicious online exposure and vilification from your rapist’s friends. The young woman who the footballer Ched Evans was convicted of raping, before being acquitted at a retrial, fled to Australia. The stakes for rape victims who refuse to stay silent, as a broken 19-year-old in Ayia Napa knows, have never been higher.
