Held Publicly To Account

Melanie Phillips writes:

If women were held publicly to account for the claims they make, the number of those false accusations would undoubtedly drop.

What has happened over recent years is that, because of the feminist hysteria over rape, the bar above which men have to prove their innocence has been raised, while the bar against women making false allegations has been lowered.

Rape has been redefined from a crime in which someone is forced to have sex against their will to cover a wide variety of non-violent sexual encounters.

Thus a woman is encouraged to claim she has been raped when, for example, with the benefit of hindsight, she may become aggrieved about what she voluntarily allowed to happen, particularly when she was rather the worse for wear.

The specific offence of rape only serves to keep on the streets people who should certainly be taken out of circulation. Instead, we need to replace the offences of rape, serious sexual assault and indecent assault with an aggravating circumstance to the ordinary categories of assault, enabling the maximum, and therefore also the minimum, sentences to be doubled, since every offence should carry a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or 15 years for life. That way, those poor women with broken bones and worse, whose assailants were never convicted of anything, really would have received justice.

Meanwhile, the offence of perjury was not designed solely for faded politicians who had taken money off newspapers or had threatened to do so. A few prosecutions for it and for attempting to pervert the course of justice would not go amiss. Within a context in which the essentials of liberty - the right to silence, the right to trial by jury, no conviction on anonymous evidence alone, no conviction by majority verdict, and so on - had been restored.