Rape Anonymity Proposal Dropped

*Note: this post is going to be more direct and less exploratory than I intended for this blog overall. I will resume normal service soon, but I really do have to say this.*

You may not have heard, but a few days ago the proposal for rape charge anonymity was dropped by the Ministry for Justice.

Now, this is a very touchy subject, and I was not planning on talking about it for a while, but circumstances are what they are and it seems foolish not to talk about this one at the present time.

Rape is a horrific crime - I'm not going to say otherwise, and I doubt anyone else will. We should do all that we can in order to help victims of rape, and to take those who commit it to justice.

However, there is a serious problem when it comes to being accused of rape: in the eyes of society, you are not innocent until proven guilty. Once your name is publicised, you are guilty and you will not get that stain off, no matter what the courts may prove. It doesn't matter if you are acquitted, because once the suggestion is out there, you are highly unlikely to escape it. "No smoke without fire" is not a truism, but it is the unfortunate motto that the court of popular opinion carries.

Now, before I go on, I would like to make an important point. One of the primary arguments the opposition to the proposal have used, as stated in the above article, is that

"People are no more likely to be falsely accused of rape than of other crimes. Why this attempt to further discredit and discriminate against rape survivors?"

Well, here's the thing: in the public eye, rape is trumped only by paedophilia. No other crime accusation is going to cost you as much as that of rape, as I will go into below. And no other crime accusation is taken by the public on face value as much as rape; and even if one is (say, there is a high-profile murder and everyone 'knows' who did it) but then they are exonerated, everyone knows. It is trumpeted loudly, top headline on the evening news, front page in the newspapers. When one is accused of rape and it appears in your local paper, you bet it's on the front page - and it might even make the nationals. When you are exonerated? Chances are it will be buried in the middle of the local, and not make the nationals at all - nobody hears about it. And even when they do... no smoke without fire... he just got away with it...

I said no crime other than paedophilia is more reviled than rape, and I mean it. Even murderers may get excused by the public due to their motives. They may get excused to a degree by judges depending on their motives. There's even a subset of people who will send them love letters and proposals of marriage - to the extent that men as despicable as Charles Manson find themselves with fans and would-be lovers.

And, of course, there's always Lorena Bobbit. You tell me that wasn't as bad as rape and I'll show you an idiot. And she made it onto the chat-show circuit.

So, an accusation of rape sticks. Well, how bad can that be? Without going into too much detail, false rape accusations can and do lead to men losing their jobs, their friends, their families, their homes and even committing suicide. This happens more often than you would be comfortable knowing. And the kicker, the real twist of the knife, is that because rape accusers are kept anonymous no matter the outcome of the charge... they are able to do it again! There is such the thing as the 'serial rape accuser', and because she is kept anonymous even after her accusation is proved false, it means that not only does she usually go unpunished, it also means that juries in later rape cases cannot take her history of false accusation into account. That, at least, may be changing.

There are numerous arguments that groups protesting the proposal have brought forwards. I do not believe any of them justify preventing anonymity:

1) Anonymity will stop victims from reporting rape.

Anonymity for accused rapists under 18 exists, and that doesn't seem to have stopped anyone from reporting, charging and trying them. Even without that, there is actually no logic to this statement - there is no evidence whatsoever that anonymity will stop people reporting.

2) Anonymity will stop other victims of that particular rapist from coming forwards.

Whatever happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'? This is based on the presumption that one accused is already guilty. If he (or she) is convicted, and his (or her) name is released, other victims who want to come forward can do - safe in the knowledge that they will be fully believed and the rapist won't be free to come after them or anything similar - and the new evidence can be used to re-try and extend the sentence.

3) Anonymity promotes the idea that the victim is lying.

How? This one I really don't understand - protection of one person's identity does not imply guilt of the other in any sane person's mind.

4) False rape claims only make up a small proportion of all claims.

So??? Is it now ok to reverse Blackstone's formulation so that now it is "better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty goes free"?

Besides that, we really don't know how many rape accusations are false. In looking at various articles published on Sunday, I came across the figures of 2%, 9% and 10%. But other studies put it as high as 50%. HALF!!! The truth is, we just don't know.

5) Why should men accused of rape have special protection over those accused of other crimes?

Because rape is not like other crimes, and has far more potential to damage and destroy lives of those implicated. There is a reason the (alleged) victim is kept anonymous - because it is not akin to other crimes, and we all know it.

6) Women don't lie.

Seriously, I have encountered this one. Women don't lie, and especially don't lie about rape. This story, of a woman crying rape on a complete stranger who wouldn't buy her a beer, begs to differ.

The simple fact is that rape is a special case, and needs to be regarded as such. I have never seen a convincing argument against anonymity for the accused, whilst I have seen very convincing arguments for it's necessity - and I promise you, I'm only scratching the surface here. The implications of this proposal being dropped disturb me greatly. The new government has set a precedent, and not a good one - when faced with a very vocal but ultimately insubstantial opposition, they have backed down. Any progress for the issues I talk about here is now going to be that much harder to achieve.

There's a great deal of information, statistics and news stories to be found at The False Rape Society's blog. I strongly urge you to have a look.

Gender roles and the Patriarchy

I've spent the last few days looking over my list of topics, trying to find a place to begin. It's been a tough process, to be honest with you. Do I want to start off with something light, so we can begin at a gentle stroll? Do I want to start with one mother of a topic, to really get things going? Or do I opt for something more in the middle – something to get people's attention, but probably unlikely to cause anyone offence.

Not an easy decision to make, I'm sure you can imagine. And as hour upon hour ticked by, with a self-imposed deadline of putting something – anything – up tonight, I started looking for something to give me a kick-start. Then I came upon Pelle Billing's latest post, and I made my decision:

Start out with a big one.

Gender roles and the Patriarchy. Even by just typing it I can feel people sharpening their knives behind my back, waiting for me to put one foot out of line...

This is a huge topic, and I'm aware you don't want to read a dissertation from me, so I'm going to keep this brief, and really just skim over it. Apologies if it feels rushed as a result, but if you want more there is a lot to be found on the sites linked on the right, and no doubt this will be returned to in future.

Here's the MRM interpretation of the Patriarchy in a nutshell:

Males and females evolved very differently. We know this. Males evolved to be physically strong and physically tough, with honed spatial-awareness and practical skills needed in order to successfully build tools and hunt prey. Females, meanwhile, evolved the interaction and nurturing skills necessary to work together in successfully raising young. These physical characteristics evolved hand-in-hand with behavioural characteristics – put simply, males head off to provide and protect, females stay to look after home and child.

Skip forward a few thousand years, and we have developed societies. We have towns, cities, countries. We have complex economies. We have complex social constructs. But we are still behaving in our gender roles: men are going out and working, and going to war, women staying at home and looking after the children, and waiting for the men to return.

And this is where feminism and the men's rights movement begin to part ideological ways.

The commonly accepted consequence of these roles is that women came out oppressed. They were not allowed to work, not given the vote, treated like property moving from father to husband and so on. Men held the power.

Well, the MRM has this to say: that is only half the story. Men were oppressed too.

Here's how it works. When we look at 'men' within the Patriarchy, we very often place all men together. 'Men' had power. 'Men' had the vote. 'Men' ruled everything. This is true, and cannot be argued with – depending on how you are using the word 'men'.

The simple and inescapable truth is that the vast, vast majority of men did not have any power. They did not have the vote. They did not have choice in their lives. They were ruled over by those same few men who ruled over women, and were not given any special privilege for being male. In fact, the lives they were forced into by their gender role could easily be considered a lot worse. Forced military conscription. Back-breaking, dangerous, labour-intensive jobs in mines, fields and factories, jobs which even if they did not kill you directly, would massively reduce your life expectancy. Being removed from your family the majority of the day, and having no choice in the matter: if you didn't go work, you would all starve, or you would be imprisoned for debt. This was the lot of the common man, one which seems to be often forgotten by those who will quickly and loudly shout “Patriarchy!” as an excuse or reason for some pretty unpleasant attitudes and behaviours. 'Men' did not hold power. A very few men did, and wielded it universally.

The big one that people like to pull out all the time is suffrage. Women didn't have the right to vote in the same way men did. Well, yes, this is true. But it is a difficult issue to talk about, and people will tend to talk about it in generalisations – I've even spoken to a few people who were under the impression that ALL men had the vote since, well, pretty much forever. However, this was not the case. The voting franchise was male, yes, but also incredibly exclusive, pertaining to land, class, property and so forth. Universal suffrage for men aged 21 and above in the UK was achieved in 1918.

You may recognise that date in relation to suffrage for a different reason: this was the same year that propertied women over the age of 30 were granted the vote. Ten years later universal suffrage for all women aged 21 and above was achieved.

Ten years difference, from when the common man was granted the vote, to when the common woman was. Yes, before that women did not have the vote, but then neither did most men. Voting up until then was a class and property issue, not a gender one. I am not going to claim that the issue of the vote is not one to remember at all, and yes there was that ten year disparity, but I think it is important that we keep in mind quite how complex it is in comparison to the 'men had vote, women did not' statements we hear repeated without thought. 'Men' did not – they were stuck doing what they had to do, without choice, as their gender role dictated.

So having made a point in my introduction of not using history as an excuse for actions in the present, why have I just gone through that? Because the history of the Patriarchy is far more complicated than we commonly make it out to be, and it is a result of gender roles.

Then things began to change. Feminism has done a marvellous job of deconstructing the female gender role. Women no longer have to follow their traditional gender role if they don't wish to. If they do, they can, but the choices they have laid before them in the western world are manifold, and are essentially only limited by what they want to do. Whatever choices a woman makes in her life (save those that are illegal, of course), they are choices that will generally be accepted by society at large – and rightly so. It is, after all, her choice.

Men, on the other hand, are still expected to follow their traditional gender role to the letter. We have to be protectors and providers, and if not, we are deemed weak, losers, deadbeat, worthless. Men in the US still have to sign up to the draft, facing a $250,000 penalty and 5 years in Federal Prison if they fail to do so. Stay-at-home dads, whilst becoming more acceptable, are still looked upon oddly by a great many people (I have read many accounts of fathers being shunned by all the mothers waiting on the playground for their kids to come out of school). We are still expected to follow the codes of chivalry; codes which, when thought about, reduce women to the level of a child in their perceived weakness.

And so here I find myself at a crossroads, wondering which way to go. You see, that last paragraph may make it sound like I don't want to work, that I'm just whining that I can't get away without doing it. It may sound like I just don't want to do things for other people – particularly women. Neither of these are true. I just think it's about time the male gender role was deconstructed in the same way the female has been. In a world that is changing rapidly, we seem to be standing still, watching it all fly by and leave us behind with a confused look on our collective face. And in particular, I am struck by a thought: chivalry (that is, the act of doing something for a woman, possibly to your own detriment, specifically because she is female) is surely antithetical to the idea of female emancipation and equality, isn't it? So what to do?

Well, I don't have the answers, and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts. As for myself, I'm wondering if it's time to start exercising true equality in inter-gender discourse (no doubt a notion which will crop up again and again) – not doing something for a woman specifically because she is a woman and I 'should', but because I believe it is the right thing to do. And sometimes, perhaps that right thing may be to not automatically do something for her. As I said in the comment I left on the aforementioned post:

“Seems to be that, if women are not going to act in a traditional gender role, there’s no reason that I should – and to do so would be limiting myself. The thinking process I’m going through on my day-to-day life in these interactions is ‘if she were a he, would I be doing this?’.”

I'm sure this idea is going to ruffle a few people's feathers, and if it does, please do let me know, and explain why.

Thanks for reading!

Introduction

Hello, greetings, welcome and thanks for coming here.

So, why am I here and what am I hoping to achieve with this blog? To be honest I'm not entirely sure. I can, though, explain why I have decided to set this up:

Over the last few months, I have been pulled into the world of the men's rights movement. The principle tenant of the MRM is that male gender-specific problems are woefully under-considered in modern society. They believe that feminism has pushed too far, and that men and boys are now getting a very raw deal as a result. They believe that the current situation is unfair, unethical, and ultimately dangerous.

And, in honesty, when you look at what they're talking about it's hard to disagree.

Now, I know some of you probably already think I'm full of it, and before I continue I would like to make a very important point: I do not think that men and only men are victims today. I know that women have gender-specific issues, and I completely agree that they need to be dealt with and resolved as best as possible. What does concern me, however, is how little men's issues are considered in comparison to women's issues. They do not make the news, do not fill opinion columns, do not make it onto talk shows – or, when they do, the defenders of men's rights are often talked to as if they are simply whining and ought to 'man up'. Comparative research and support funding for men's issues in relation to women's is so insignificant as to be at times practically zero. Often it feels that, if the genders were reversed, we'd be all over it in a heartbeat.

So I am going to be discussing the ideas of the men's rights movement on here. I believe that the dialogue really needs to be opened up, to become more public. I think, frankly, that far too many people are just not aware that these issues even exist to begin with. So yes, I will predominantly be talking about men's rights – though probably not exclusively.

So what will I actually be posting? Well, as I said I'm a bit new to all this, and I'm really trying to figure a lot out of it in my head – how it affects my life, what I can do, whether I agree with or believe some of what is found in the MRA (men's rights activists) blogs and forums. I'm trying to process it all, so in some ways this blog is ultimately like some big therapy session... how lucky for you all...

The upshot of that is that I'm not intending to be posting example after example of every incident that ever occurs. There are some very good fact-based blogs and sites out there already, and all I would be doing in that case is copying what they've said over again. I may (probably will) link to them, use them as a starting board, but really, this is about me trying to figure out where to go from here – how to become not an MRA, not a feminist, but what I would call a true Equalitarian. Essentially, I don't want to be telling anyone what to think, what to feel or how to behave. I want to discuss it with everyone else.

Probable upcoming topics will include (though not necessarily in this order):

• Marriage & divorce: should you protect yourself?
• Domestic Violence: where are the men's shelters?
• In a world where women work, is alimony outdated?
• Ribbons for prostate cancer
• Gender roles and the Patriarchy
• Men and mental health
• Anti-male feminists
• Anti-female MRAs
• Anonymity for those accused of rape
• Male vs female expendability
• Minister for Men – is it time?
• The continuing decline of boys in education
• Equality at work: boardrooms vs basements
• Misandry vs misogyny in modern society
• Let's talk toilet seats: the Sitzpinkler effect

Finally, one last thing, just to be clear: I am not here to play victim. I know I live a very fortunate, comfortable and privileged life. White, western, middle-class, educated, employed... I know that. That does not stop me being concerned when I look out into the world and see other people's lives being damaged unnecessarily. And when nobody else seems to be willing or able to raise these issues, to talk about them, to ask “why?”, then I feel like I have to. But I am not about to play victim here.

Please, if you do not agree with me, do not try to argue with me by pointing out how privileged my life is, nor by pointing to history. History cannot be used as an excuse for the sins of the present, and pointing out my privileges does not help those who do not share them. I want to discuss these issues rationally and logically from different people's perspectives – not play a never ending game of 'who has it worse'.

Thanks for reading and, if you're interested, please do keep an eye on things; hopefully we'll get something interesting going on here!