Was Bristol Palin raped?

The two versions aren't necessarily inconsistent. She may not remember losing her virginity but put two and two together from the physical evidence or may be going on what he told her. Both versions could be true.

Neither. She told US Weekly she got pissed and lost her virginity.

Later, in her book, she said she got drunk and woke up remembering nothing.

Pick a version and choose whether to believe/disbelieve if you want to. I choose to do neither.

Is there a victim? She has never claimed rape.

Why, has the victim been discredited in this case? Is there evidence of her lying about this sort of thing before?

I agree. Karma. However, that is not the case here.

As sunshine said upthread, in an adversarial system we are forced to chose between believing the victim or not. I'd tend to believe the victim unless she has been discredited because the evidence shows that victims rarely lie.

Quite Hully.

I'm hoping that posters on this board at least would at least accept that we know nothing about Bristol and Levi apart from her book plug and shouldn't therefore accuse anyone of anything.

You cant stop teens or people drinking too much in both genders. And drunk people will have sex. And most of te time its not rape.
Of course rape hapoens while pissed but most of the time its just how it is. Not rape. Ive seen blokes unable to rememebr or regretful too Have none of you been to festivals?

That's probably true SGM. I'm hoping that posters on this board at least would at least accept that just because a victim doesn't remember what happened due to Rohypnol, doesn't mean they weren't raped.

What should we do about all the women who were given Rohypnol and other date rape drugs? They don't remember what happened and whether they gave consent, but generally it is assumed that they didn't. Are there lots of innocent men in jail that should be freed?

But her version of events are that she can't remember, rather than she didn't consent. If I'm right, UK law is about too drunk to consent, not too drunk to remember consenting

One thing we could do is insist on anonymity of all accused people for all crimes (not just rape, because that implies that rape has more false allegations than other crimes, which isn't true and perpetuates other harmful rape myths).

I thought the law changed, you will have to forgive me if not because I don't live in the uk anymore so it's sometimes hard to keep track. I went by the rape crisis uk website where it specifically states the law as in my previous post.

Knackered and off to bed now but will catch up on the thread in the am, so not ignoring any further posts deliberately, it's late here

Yes, and I know that if I were in that position I would be bloody furious about it. But sadly we will never have a perfect system unless we change it so we have to choose between the lesser of two evils - damaging the reputation of a small number of men who are unjustly accused of rape, or brutalising a much larger number of victims by failing to believe them.

This is just speculating about something on very little facts. Why don't we just accept Bristol's version of events, and accept she wasn't raped?

"until he is proven guilty in law he has no punishment or restrictions placed on him"

That's not really true though is it sunshine? The allegation is enough to damage the accused - would you employ a childminder if you Googled his name and found he was accused of rape, even if it was never proved? The damage to the reputation seems like a punishment to me.

She hasn't accused him of rape.

Karma - I neither believe nor disbelieve. I simply don't know because I wasn't there. All I have to go on is a brief interview to plug her book.

I am just talking generally BTW, not specific to Bristol and Levi.

TheBossofMe

That's not quite right about UK law. The Court of Appeal famously stated in 2007 that a 'drunken consent is still consent'. The law requires that the victim have 'capacity to consent' - the court will look at all the relevant circumstances to find that out, and the jury will decide. You can still be pretty drunk, and have 'capacity'.

It's a bad law, but it is the law.

Trouble is if you say he's innocent you are by default accusing the victim of lying if she has named her rapist. The same applies vice versa. If we say she was raped, we are accusing Levi of being guilty. That's the problem with an adversarial system and there's no way round it unless we want to change the law (which might not be a bad thing).

Given that the incidence of false reporting of rape is no higher than for any other crime, I think we should err on the side of believing the victim, because to do otherwise risks victimising her all over again. It is quite possible to believe her without ruining the alleged rapists life, because until he is proven guilty in law he has no punishment or restrictions placed on him. Sadly, given that false reporting is only between 2 and 6 % (I think?) accusing someone unjustly is only going to apply in a very small number of cases.