Women and crime statistics - increase in sex crimes?

Yep, as I said, what we need is accessible information.

How can we have insight into what is going on if we don't know if these increases are down to:

Increase in women committing sex offences
Increase in women being reported and convicted
TIMs

?

On what do we base the conversation?

I don't think it's a massive derail. We should be discussing the fact that women do commit these crimes whilst never forgetting that men commit 99% of them, and I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that at least some of these women committing these crimes are doing so at the behest of men and that some of these women committing these crimes might actually be men. If we are not to buy into the "angels/devils, madonnas/whores" script we need to have insight into what's going on. What we really need is accessible information about it all so we can challenge perception and change behaviour.

This all feels like a massive derail.

Obviously women commit crime including sex offences.
Clearly they do it at a much much lower rate than men.
That doesn't mean that the ones who do it must have excuses, nor that they are more evil than men who do, both narratives that get played out.

The inclusion of TIMs in women's stats will skew them because women commit far fewer sex offences. If we don't know whether it's men or women doing it then how do we know whether there are new issues that are coming out that need addressing?

Meanwhile look at these headlines and the 11000+ committed by men is a sideline at the end.

Women committing crime is still seen as far worse than men committing crime, to the point that men raping women, unless there is additional extreme violence, or other "interesting" circumstances, is not generally even news. The reporting also makes it seem that women commit more crime than they do - men committing crime is unremarkable. Whole thing is a minefield and filing male sex offenders under "woman" is not going to help matters.

Yes, they clearly did.

Obviously the local press reported it wrong then.

No they weren't. They were charged with ABH and sexual assault by penetration and they all pled not guilty to those charges. The court agreed with their not guilty pleas and acquitted them of those charges. At no point were they charged with rape.

Sorry they were charged with rape but as the defendant refused to give evidence they were convicted of the lesser offence.

No they weren't. They were convicted of sexual assault and found not guilty of assault by penetration.

Rape involves penetration however 3 women were recently convicted of rape of a man for using objects.

Exactly bewilderedness. Women are neither angels or devils, they are just humans.

I don't think I looked at MN when Margaret Atwood said "Am I bad feminist?" but I agree with her:

"My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system"

Reading the sentencing remarks for Julia Beards is absolutely heartbreaking: A woman of an IQ "less than 70", deemed unable to interpret situations and communication properly, who'd been sexually abused by her father, sexually abused by her husband and probably drugged through the process of her husband's violent rape and murder of another woman with learning difficulties. This was a woman in her 30s whose sources of pleasure were pushing dolls round in a pram and watching children's Disney movies and who had been assessed with the mental age of someone circa 9 years old.

It's maddening that the general conclusions that people draw is that women are perfect angels and if they did something wrong or messed up, it was because a man made them do it.
To me what is maddening is that women are rarely viewed as people, neither angels nor devils.

Joint enterprise is the term of law that I was wondering about when I commented earlier. I worked in the criminal justice system in the eighties and it was not unusual in DV cases involving children for the man to go to mental health treatment, because the judges believed as Vegeetas does, while the wife or partner is charged with the same crime (joint enterprise) because she did not stop him and was not viewed as mentally ill.
It is important to remember that prosecutors and LEOs can have a surprising effect on statistics by the choices they make and the trends they set within their extended community.

Well in that case and all things considered I am pleased to be abnormal lol :)

Vegeetas, for what you have been through. I have known several men who are rape victims (in their case the perpetrators were other men) and on a moral level, I can see why you would want to count what was done to you as rape rather than sexual assault.

However, here we are using the legal definition of rape in order to get a handle on the way official statistics are being distorted and in fact rendered meaningless by gender self ID. Rape is one of the few offences which because of its legal definition means that it is very hard to cover up the fact that the vast majority of the perpetrators (barring, as pointed out, a tiny minority of women prosecuted under common purpose) are unequivocally, unquestionably biologically male.

As for the "have to be mentally ill to rape", sadly not. The work of American criminologist David Lisak is very interesting in this respect. He uses questionnaires with questions like "have you ever had sex with a woman who has said no, and you've gone ahead by physically restraining her?" (i.e. questions describing situations which meet the legal definition of rape, but don't use the actual word "rape"). He finds about 6% of American male college students (his chosen study group) will admit to actions meeting the legal definition of rape. (When he repeats the questionnaires with the word "rape" overtly in the questions, 5% will admit to being rapists).

Sadly it's not a tiny minority of mentally ill men, and it certainly isn't monsters - this is a sizeable minority (1 in twenty - two or three or four in every busy railway carriage you've ever been in). And they look normal. For the most part they act normal. They probably help old ladies across the road sometimes. They may have offered to get milk for a housebound neighbour during last week's snow. They're probably respected in their workplaces. They vote Tory... and Labour and LibDem and Green. They wouldn't dream of kicking a puppy. They may well run half marathons for cancer research. They maybe give up Saturday mornings to help at their sons' sports clubs. But they still rape.

All of my sexual assaults and rapes were ‘normal’ men.

Normal men, who felt entitled to do as they please, viewing me only as an object.

And not feeling any guilt, because in their eyes, they hadn’t done anything wrong.

In times of civil unrest, war, natural disaster, etc, many many men rape. They do it because they can. Or because the people they are with urge them to. Because it becomes the norm.

There are different levels of rape in different societies - this is not because men are somehow different, more monstrous in some societies than in others. It is becasue of how society views rape and rapists and their victims.

These are basic truths.

The idea that only monsters rape is one of the ideas that acts to the detriment of rape victims, it is part of the narrative that makes it so hard for juries to convict.

Many men who rape don't even see it as rape.

Society does not see rape as always a monstrous act, sometimes it is seen as perfectly understandable for a man to do it.

These are basic truths.

I understand the point Vegeetas is trying to make. The word "normal" may mean different things to different people, but a discussion on the semantics could easily fill a thread of its own without adding anything of value to this one.

Lots of very “normal” men ( men,not people, men) do rape though.

No normal person rapes another. Cut that how you will. No normal person kills another either. People that do that stuff DO have something wrong with them. I am and have always been a man and the thought of harming another sexually or violently sickens me. That is how a normal person works generally.

To clarify when I said about not reporting it, I typed out of turn and should have said that I should have reported it but didn't. Sorry for any confusion ;-)

Yes I found it all very confusing which is why I looked it up. The article says she was charged with aiding and abetting rape and murder by joint enterprise and I still am not clear whether she was convicted for rape or for aiding and abetting rape, though in the sentencing comments the judge refers to rape.

If you read the sentencing comments for Steven Beards:: www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/steven-beards-sentencing-remarks-20160526.pdf

and for Julie Beards as linked above, it's an appalling and heartbreaking read and you can see why the first jury acquitted her of murder and could not come to a decision on the rape.

No, as a pp suggested I most certainly do not think that all women are angels and if they did something bad then a man made them do it, but in this instance I would say that is the case (not that she was an angel but that a man made her do it).

mirialis
Ah I see. The linked article didn’t clarify which charge she’d pleaded guilty to. Anyway, the point I was trying, and failing, to make was that the stats make it clear they do not include incidents with more than one offender but then do not go on to show those that do include more than one offender (which presumably is what joint enterprise would fall under). So it’s difficult to guess what it is the ‘six’ figure represents in terms of the stats from MOJ, single offender, multiple offenders, or both.

Judas - she pleaded guilty to rape by joint enterprise and manslaughter right at the start of the fresh trial she was supposed to face (having been acquitted of murder and no verdict on rape) and was sentenced for both. You can see sentencing here:

www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/julie-beards-sentencing-remarks-20161207.pdf

So she will have been on of the 6.

" The difference is I never reported it,"

WTF?

Women and girls rarely report.

Such a tone-deaf post and really offensive.

My rapists have both been perfectly normal men with no mental health issues whatsoever.

Who the fuck do you think you are making statements like that on a website like this? You think women don't know what rapists are like?

Pathetic.