Should the UK law on rape be changed?

I've made it about halfway through this thread before stuff got triggering for me prashad I've experienced what would fit your definition, and to be perfectly honest I really don't like the tone of your suggestion re: feminists should do X as some sort of PR excercise to appeal to men.

Fuck that noise, I don't particularly like the idea of my experience and those of men like me being used as yet another stick to beat women with, as that is exactly what would happen. Can you imagine how many men would use the "oh yeah I did't give my consent" argument to get out of things like child support?

Other than myself and one other bloke who confided in me because of what I experienced I can think of several more female friends who have been raped, so anecdotally I know where the bigger problem lies.

It sounds to me like you sense some of the inequalities women face, of which you broadly agree is a bad thing and have turned your thoughts to what feminism could do better, and you've hit on this as your entry point. DON'T.

This is a nuanced, layered and complex problem society has to unravel. If it was as simple as one man somewhere having a lightbulb moment making a suggestion and everything is sunshine and roses it really would have happened already.

If you want to loiter in a feminist space do so in the knowledge that the lived experiences are very different from what we have as men, so rather than ask the question of what women should do to make themselves better listened to, ask what can men can do to listen and empathise more. I hope you consider what I've said.

Viviennemary are you familiar with the Sexual Offences Act 2003
Because it seems pretty clear to me.

What about the 'underage' issue concerns you? what about the law would you like to clarify?

MyNameis post has got me thinking I wonder if what would be better rather then differing the individual acts so much to try and create scale within them is some way of placing a social context. This is really a rough thought and I know I haven;t thought about the all the consequences of what I'm saying. I sort of mean that for women that thier class as women should be taken into account because sexual violence against one women is a form of control and violence against all women. I might be suggesting creating and even more unequal justice system. Any thoughts ? Am I barkign up the wrong tree totally?

I think the law needs to be clarified. And what about underage sex. If a person cannot legally give consent to sex because they are under age, is it taken that no consent has been given so that is technically rape every time an underaged person has sex. This underaged issue really concerns me but not many people seem to be very bothered about it.

PS the thread title is "Should the UK law on rape be changed?". So quoting current UK legal definitions is 100% relevant.

However - I strongly feel that situations elsewhere in the world are also relevant when considering changing even just UK laws, because of the precedents and examples set, which may influence changes elsewhere (see people quoting US/Canada laws already above).

So making out there is no real difference between rape and any other sexual assault on women, or between rape and a woman sexually assaulting a man in this way, does not make sense to me when the reality lived by women (and men) in so many places is that there can be a massive difference - not necessarily of "better" or "worse" but in whether, why and how much it happens (for example, I'm pretty sure women sexually assaulting men through forced sex has never been used systematically as a weapon of war), in the immediate and longer-term effects already detailed, in how victims are treated by the law and by society, in how the attackers are treated/punished (or not)....

Right, now I am REALLY going to bed.

I just want to say I think this thread should stand, for all the important information and relevant points raised by respondents :)

AWhole thanks for clearing that up.
I'm in Australia and we have a couple different words for the same offense but the the states that use rape as the offense it includes penetration by anything, I'm in NSW and there is no rape only sexual assault but it can be added to such as grievous sexual assault.

I can't quite get over how horrific the words I'm using are "only sexual assault" I wish i had better language to discuss what I mean.

Actually that's quite interesting. The word 'rape' is so loaded, maybe there WOULD be more convictions if the crime was 'sexual assault'. The severity of it could then be reflected in the sentencing. Rape convictions are so low and there's little chance of them increasing, it might actually work ( since most people's view of 'real' rape is a stranger dragging a woman down a dark alley, whereas most rapes are committed by someone known to the victim )

I'm in the UK. But if we're going to talk worldwide then it is important to take into account the fact that rape is used as a weapon of war. Against women and girls by their aggressors. Women are deliberately violated, both as of violence (and to cause their death) and to impregnate them with their violators babies.

It really is not as simple as an unwanted sexual act - rape is predominantly an act of violence and aggression against women, and the weapon is a penis. it is important that is is defined in this way.

I think there's some confusion about terminology here. Some people (including maybe the OP) seem to think that "rape" basically means "the worst end of sexual assault". But legally, rape is a very specifically different crime from sexual assault. I'm not sure that it should be, but it is.

The point of the separate category of "rape" is that it's specifically about sexual penetration, rather than just sexual gratification generally. I think this has to do with the historical roots of rape being not so much a crime against the woman, but against the man who owned her. A type of property crime against the valuable commodity of female sexual propriety. If you rape somebody's daughter, you deprive them of the value of her potential marriageability. If you rape somebody's wife, you potentially make her pregnant and deprive them of certainty about their offspring. This is why nobody ever gave a shit if you raped someone who wasn't a looked after, protected daughter or wife. And it's why touching somebody sexually or flashing at them or whatever was never the same type of crime - none of those things lowered the property value of the woman suffering them.

If that's even a half-way accurate interpretation of history, I'd be interested to hear how people feel about the relevance of still having the separate categories now. Is somebody sticking their penis into somebody's vagina a specifically different type of crime to, say, getting off by rubbing it somewhere else on their body? Or is it just a more severe version of the same crime?

Logically, it would seem to me to make more sense just to have a single crime of sexual assault, and abolish rape as a legal term. I think this is what they do in Canada, and a few other places, isn't it? Intuitively though, that seems to lessen the severity of the crime. Rape is so much more powerful a word - even if the legal treatment and sentencing were the same, it would just feel like some of the outrage had been taken out of it.

The power of the word is probably why these kind of arguments come up. I suspect what the OP is really trying to say is that women forcing men to have intercourse with them is just AS BAD as men doing so to women, so it deserves the same word. I'm not sure whether it actually is though. That depends upon whether the specific fact of being penetrated takes it to a whole different level.

And y'know what, I'm inclined to sign off for the night by saying that when the men's rights folks have helped to tackle that little list of consequences above, I'll gladly consider any campaigning they want feminists to lend a hand with. I'll wait for the call.

Night, all...

There is actually an offence, 'assault by penetration', which includes penetration by things other than a penis for the poster up thread who wished this offence existed. It carries a similar sentence to that of rape.

Rape is an act of penetration - with a penis - and that act has further reaching affects on women. Pregnancy, actual bodily harm, higher likelihood of STDs.

And that's not even touching on the stigma attached to the victim by society: victim blaming, she was asking for it, wearing a short skirt and so on. Men do not live with that stigma - they are more likely to be believed, less likely to victim-blamed, asked what they were wearing what they were doing out aloe etc. They are physically stronger than women, women are taught to live in fear of men in general terms - men do not live in fear of women. This makes a difference.

That should say "see point 2 of my initial post", by the way (just to clarify).

Well I didn't actually say "they wouldn't think rape by a man was worse" (see point 2), but that I strongly suspect most men would consider it a different offence - hence why it seems to make sense to have a different term. And you are quite right that I may be wrong about that, but that said, if a significant number of men felt that both things should have the same description, I would have thought there would have been some kind of push for change - in the press, in law or elsewhere - whereas your post (from a woman) is the first time I can remember seeing this suggested.

As for the pregnancy thing - yes, there could be effects for a man of becoming a father unwillingly. Financial effects potentially (not always), possibly mental/emotional effects. Though it's also possible the man could become a father in this way and never even be aware of it, or else walk away with minimal or no effects on him (which doesn't quite work the other way round). Still, without meaning to ignore these effects, I'm not quite sure it's comparable in scale to what a woman can potentially face, particularly in some parts of the world:

• Death in pregnancy/childbirth
• Permanent disability/pain/incontinence
• Ante/post-natal depression or psychosis
• Stigma
• Exclusion from her family/community, shunning
• Inability to marry, or breakup of existing relationship
• Poverty (from extra mouths to feed, inability to work or interruption to career, or disability as above)
• Having to gestate, give birth to and then nurture her rapist's child to adulthood
• In some countries, formal or informal punishments for her perceived "crime" in having been raped (up to corporal/capital punishment )

"Some men that I have spoken to about this are frustrated and unsupportive of feminism because of the perception that it seeks to increase the rights of women, rather than seeking to promote gender equality... and they site the lack of campaigning by feminists on issues where men are disadvantaged."

But do they grasp that there are many more issues where women are disadvantaged? And yet they expect feminists to quit fretting about those and start concentrating on the minority of issues where men are disadvantaged?

And they feel that the current state of affairs is the fault of feminists for not campaigning harder, even though the current laws were conceived of, implemented and reviewed by men (or by bodies that are so overwhelmingly male that they are effectively "by men")?

And both of those things so much so that they are now "unsupportive of feminism"?

They sound a bit... well... up themselves, really.

I wouldn't object to a change in the law. If I'm ever in a position to vote "yes" or "no" to a change I'd probably vote "yes," assuming that the draft legislation was sensibly and thoughtfully drafted. But I don't see a reason to go out and devote a huge chunk of my time and energy to campaigning for "giving a crime against men a different name from the one it has right now." Taking sexual assault more seriously, reviewing sentencing guidelines, protesting individual decisions -- yes, absolutely. That's something that would benefit both genders and promote gender equality.

"if you were to collect data from a sample of the population asking something like, "Have you been a victim of so and so crime?"... "

Hang on a second there! We were all agreed that sexual assaults go under-reported, now all of a sudden you're saying folks are queuing up to say they've undergone this particularly humiliating type of crime?

Make your mind up.

Meant to say great post MyNameIsInigoMontoya.

I'll have leave you to your musings prashad.

FWIW I don't think men need you defending them. Men get heard far more than women. They can fight their own battles.

Personally I'd like to see rape include objects, so rather then penetration by penis it is sexual penetration. This is not because I think that women need to be able to be accused of rape but rather I see the violent sexual penetration of women done not be a penis is just as awful as if it is done by a penis.