Page 29 - The Staunch Test

THE STAUNCH TEST

No, just a woman, alone, deciding it’s not worth reporting, she’d rather just try
and forget, or in tears at a police station, begging to be believed while officers
judge what she was wearing, whether she’d been drinking, trawling her phone
to assess her social media and sexual history and the many ways she asked for
it. All the while, openly or subconsciously blaming her.

In contrast, the accused is often seen as just an ordinary guy who has maybe
convinced himself sex was consensual or is amazed and hurt that the woman
seems to regret sleeping with him. He may indeed be a rapist who fears for his
reputation far more than for his victim’s trauma, who will do or say anything to get
out of the mess he finds himself in. Perhaps he needn’t worry, since only 3% of
reported rapes end in prosecution in the UK, and 1.4% in conviction. It’s almost
worth the risk at those odds. Those are great odds. As the Victims’ Commissioner
for England and Wales Dame Vera Baird QC said in her Annual Report (2019/20), the
level of prosecutions has got so low that “what we are witnessing is the de-
criminalisation of rape.”

For those cases that do make it to court, once again, it is the woman who’s on
trial. It is her reputation that will be torn apart, not his. And for the jury, the
clean-cut man in the dock bears no resemblance to the men they’ve seen on TV
or in films doing awful things to women. Which leads us to one of the most
damaging factors in the lack of justice for women. The existence and power of
rape myths.

9. What are rape myths?

Rape myths are wrongly held beliefs and internalised ideas of who rapes and
who gets raped, and in what kind of circumstances. In a 2019 UK study
commissioned by the End Violence Against Women coalition, it was found that
an alarming number of people couldn’t correctly say what rape is, or understand

the concept and boundaries of consent. A third of respondents didn’t think it
was rape if there was no violence. In fact, freezing or going limp when attacked
is a common and instinctive response, called tonic immobility — though rarely
one we see on screen. One Scandinavian study found that 70% of rape victims
reported this happening to them, yet still women are doubted because they
didn’t fight or run. The general public, (among them potential jurors, of course)
were also confused about consent, changes of mind, marital rape, and whether
it is OK to have sex with a woman who is asleep or unconscious. (Spoiler, it isn’t).