Moral Responsibility

Spiked does invaluable work against wars, against attacks on civil liberties, against neo-Malthusianism, against undemocratic European federalism, and against attempts to revive fear of the Yellow Peril, among other maladies of the present age. It also gives a platform to the mad, the bad and the sad. Barbara Hewson is at it again. She runs the risk of becoming unemployable: what would it say about any defendant, that he had engaged her services?

Just as there must be no reversal of the burden of proof or abolition of the right to conduct one’s own defence in rape cases, changes frequently demanded by certain campaigners, so there must be no extension of anonymity to adult defendants. Rather, there should be no anonymity for adult accusers, either. We either have an open system of justice, or we do not. On this, spiked, including Hewson, is entirely correct.

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 sentences to be doubled. That way, those poor women with broken bones and worse, whose assailants were never convicted of anything, really would have received justice.

But can anyone explain to me how the conviction rate for rape is demonstrably wrong? What, exactly, would be the correct rate? And why, exactly? That a woman has had a most unpleasant experience of this kind, the far greater likelihood of which is a direct consequence of the unquestionable Sexual Revolution, does not necessarily mean that she has experienced the offence of rape as the law defines it.

Either that, or the real scandal is that there are so few prosecutions for what is clearly very widespread perjury, attempting to pervert the course of justice, and making false statements to the Police. Not that those two possibilities are mutually exclusive.

As for Hewson's repeated calls to lower the age of consent to 13, they are an invitation to make it a criminal offence for any person to engage in any sexual act with or upon anyone under the age of 18 who was more than two (or possibly three) years younger than himself, or to incite any such person to commit any such act with or upon him or any third party anywhere in the world.

The maximum sentence would be imprisonment for twice the difference in age, or for life where that difference was five years or more. The victims of these crimes, probably most of them, would be Thatcher competent, there being no excuse for blaming Mrs Gillick who opposed it rather than Mrs Thatcher who imposed it. That would be a very good and welcome reason to revisit Thatcher competence.

In which vein, the very warmest of commendations to those seeking to outlaw prostitution in France. There as here, by all means let it be made a criminal offence for anyone above the age of consent, raised to 18, to buy sex. And, with exactly equal sentencing, for anyone above the age of consent, raised to 18, to sell sex.

Are women morally and intellectually equal to men, or not?