to be shocked at the sentencing in the Gayle Newland case?

[hackmum]

Eight years seems excessive to me. This is the woman who had sex with a female friend while pretending to be a man. Story here:

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/12/gayle-newland-sentenced-eight-years-prison-duping-friend-having-sex

hackmum, are you actually being serious? That you can't see the difference in consenting to penetration via one particular method and not by another?

Surely as women we have a responsibility to ourselves to not be utter nitwits stay safe. I'm concerned that a very long sentence turns this incident into nothing more than a villain/victim. While it is that, it is also someone being very stupid.

I'm not saying rapists are any less culpable if the victim is a fool, but there does seem to be too much foolishness around.

I would like there to be a way for the judge to say 'what were you thinking' without it sounding like he's blaming the victim. Or perhaps I want there to be a way of talking about how the victim made herself ridiculously vulnerable to a predator without a chorus of indignation.

I'm sure plenty of people have said "what were you thinking?" to the victim. As the verdict points out, she has had to move because of the ridicule. It isn't really relevant to the sentencing though, other than to say that if it makes the victim stupid it makes the criminal worse for preying on someone who is stupid, and therefore vulnerable.

stoppingbywoods, no, we don't have a responsibility, and especially not "as women".
Because rape should not be something that happens to anyone.

People are not naive on purpose. They can't not be naive.

And let's be realistic here, that case is so weird that it is not like the victim could have suspected that the person she had sex with was actually a woman. That's a thing that's way rarer than, say, the prince from Nigeria who claims to want to give you millions of euros, and you just have to give him some few hundred in advance so that he can bribe someone.

Warning about such deceptions is okay, but accusing victims of beint "too stupid" afterwards is just cruel.

From that article "...he said she told the woman about talking to girls online as Kye Fortune, and that a couple of days later the woman added Kye Fortune as a friend on Facebook.

The complainant’s version of events was rather different. She told the court that she received a Facebook friend request out of the blue from what she understood to be an Asian man named Kye Fortune."

Would the police be able to get FB to confirm who contacted who? I'm guessing not. Or could they trace that from your computer?

I'm truly puzzled as how you can spend 100 hours with someone and never see their face. Or sit there with a mask on like its normal. Extremely bizarre.

Of course it is awful what Newland did to her, but it's not wrong to point out that men generally don't get anything like that long a sentence for rape unless they nearly kill the woman.

Except it is wrong. Because 8 years is the average sentence for rape.

venus - again, the average sentence for men is apparently 8 years. I know it seems we always hear about the cases where it is less, but that is the average it seems.

apologies for the old link but I doubt there's been much change and if you google you will find more recent ones
www.theguardian.com/society/2011/may/26/rape-sentence-average-eight-years-justice-figures

the thing about having spent so much time with someone while blindfolded, it is hard because a good lawyer could probably make a case that a level of game-playing was going on and that there was a mutual agreement.

it would be interesting to know what would happen in a case where this went ahead without penetrative sex because for me the crucial issue that she didn't consent to penetration with an object. So if she had been doing all but that with someone she thought was a man and wasn't, would it still count as assault?

It would be interesting to know if the case hinged on lack of consent to penetration by an object or if the identity deception was sufficient for the crime. If the Gayle had been a man instead of a woman and had PIV sex with the victim, could they have got a conviction?

vestal

I don't think you understand the point I'm making. We want there to be less of these incidents in the future so it's important to talk about it in a way that will bring that about. Being able to critique the choices this woman made is crucial to having an honest conversation about avoiding it happening again. If we can't do this, the narrative stays at victim level ('What a dreadful thing to happen') instead of becoming constructive ('She made some major mistakes - what were they and what should she have done?'). In my view, justice should be about equipping the victim as well as rehabilitating the offender. So the judge should be able to give some suggestions about the choices that were made without the rather irrational response that it lessens the perpetrator's pot of blame in some way.

Our responsibility to look after ourselves is something we start telling our children about when they're tiny and prone to going off with strangers. It doesn't impact the other person's culpability. As women, we need to be particularly aware of safety issues because of the obvious physical differences between us and men who are usually stronger. We're often at more risk, period.

lorelei9: "hackmum, are you actually being serious? That you can't see the difference in consenting to penetration via one particular method and not by another?"

I didn't say there wasn't a difference. I said that I wasn't sure it would stand up in court. You have to imagine a scenario where a woman consents to sex with her boyfriend, he penetrates her instead with a dildo, and she is then so upset that she reports it to the police, it goes to the CPS and all the way to court etc. It doesn't seem very likely to me that either the police, the CPS or the court would take such a charge seriously, unless the woman had been physically injured. Can you point to a case where this has happened?

In that sort of case the problem isn't whether there is a crime or not (because there clearly is) but how to prove lack of consent.

I remember reading this and wondering how someone wouldn't notice sooner.

Stopping I think you will lower the incidence of crime if you concentrate on the criminals, not if you concentrate on the victims. Crime goes down when people more likely to engage in it find other things to do. If you just make one set of victims harder to attack the criminals simply move on to something else, it may not be a deception that finds someone naive enough to wear a blindfold, but it will be something, because there is nothing that tells the abuser not to.

Let me proffer another scenario.

Man blindfolds a woman and ties her up as part of consensual bondage.

Woman then has sex, thinking it is the same man. Unknown to her, another man has entered the room and it is him she is having sex with.

No one would argue against that being called rape. I fail to see how, in the GN case, the factual matrix is significantly different. Just substitute a dildo for the second man's penis and what you have is identical.

Collaborate, I think for some people (me at least) it's more that she didn't realise it wasn't a real penis. That the whole thing went on for so long without her realising that things weren't quite as they seemed. In the case you've described, it was still a second, real penis.

collaborate your scenario brings a third party into the room. The crux of the GN case is there wasn't an unknown third party in the room.

But it wasn't what she had been told it was. Therefore no consent was given, therefore rape.

BMW I'm not sure if you were responding to my post? Yy obviously GN was convicted of sexual assault. I was just making the point that I didn't find Collaborate's scenario helpful since it drew a parallel with duplicity over identity and as PPs have pointed out the case seems to rest more on penetration by an unauthorized item rather than identity of the perpetrator.

Hating the victim blaming on this thread...

I think the jury found beyond reasonable doubt she hadn't realised it was her female friend. There's no point second guessing that verdict.

She had consented to being penetrated by that man's penis. That man didn't exist. Least not as a man. So there wasn't a penis. Whether GN used a fake penis, or a real one belonging so a real man (and still attached!) is immaterial in the sense that both would be a crime. If a real penis, it's rape. If a fake one, it's sexual assault.

I think the shock of many at the length of the sentence is that the victim agreed to be penetrated by GN. It is the deception she is effectively guilty of. We do not know, however, the effect upon the victim, other than what was spoken of in court. It appears to have had a profound effect.

"If someone says they would like a cup of coffee, then don't make them a cup of tea and force them to drink it instead."

Just wondering how this would fit into the tea/consent analogy that's been doing the rounds.

*Man blindfolds a woman and ties her up as part of consensual bondage.

Woman then has sex, thinking it is the same man. Unknown to her, another man has entered the room and it is him she is having sex with.

No one would argue against that being called rape. I fail to see how, in the GN case, the factual matrix is significantly different. Just substitute a dildo for the second man's penis and what you have is identical.*

Really?? If my DH and I were to have consensual sex involving bondage, and he used a dildo on me without telling me, then I probably wouldn't care very much. If he sneaked his best mate in to take part, without telling me, I would be horrified!!!

To me the GN case is far closer to the first than the second in terms of what actually happened. (Although of course I don't mean that the victim in this case shouldn't care. Clearly there has been a deliberate and sustained deception here)