MNHQ here - should we support the campaign to end ‘rough sex’ defences?

[JustineMumsnet]

Hello

As lots of you will already know because their campaign originated on Mumsnet, the group We Can’t Consent To This has been running a campaign to end ‘rough sex’ defences - and we’d like to know what you think about MNHQ signing up as a supporter of their
campaign.

Their aim is to end a situation in which defendants can claim that the death of or injury to a woman was caused by ‘consensual sex games gone wrong’.

They say:

‘We’ve now found 60 UK women who’ve been killed by men who claim a sex game gone wrong - and in the last 5 years the defence was successful in 7 of the 17 killings of a woman which reached trial, with the man being found not guilty or receiving a manslaughter conviction. We've found many more women injured in what the accused men claim was consensual sexual violence.
Yet more women tell us it’s now commonplace to be assaulted and abused by men they’re dating, with 38% of UK women under 40 reporting being assaulted - choked, slapped, gagged or spat on - in otherwise consensual sex. That equates to 3.6 million women under 40 in the UK who have experienced unbidden violence in sex - and we know that women over 40 experience this too.
We do not believe that women can consent to their grievous injury or death, and will campaign until claiming this is no longer a useful defence.’
We Can’t Consent To This is currently lobbying to tackle these ‘rough sex defences’ by adding amendements to the Domestic Abuse Bill that is going through Parliament, meaning that now is the time to get writing to MPs to encourage them to support the changes.

We'd love to get behind this campaign but as ever we said we’d ask you what you thought - so please let us know by adding your thoughts here or voting YANBU for ‘Yes please I’d like Mumsnet to support this campaign’ and YABU for ‘No, I don’t think Mumsnet should support this campaign’. (Apologies for using the AIBU metric for this but it’s the best way we have at the moment to get a snapshot survey of people who’ve read the OP.)

Big thanks

Does that mean not allowed to say it in court?
You can say what you like in court!

It means that it wouldn't be considered as a valid argument in defence
I guess that puts it more clearly than I did

Most definitely yes.

Yes please.

Of course you should.

Men are getting away with murder and adding insult to injury by pretending women are asking them to torture them to death.

This shouldn't be happening in a civilised society.

The current law is about right - the case law from memory is R v Brown which was used without success in the Max Moseley case - his privacy was held to have been breached and the attempt by the papers to suggest he could not consent to the beating as it was too hard and thus automatically a crime despite his consent to it was correctly regarded by the court as not relevant here The law has a lot of examples of when people can consent to violence - rugby, boxing matches, people who brush up against you in a normal walk down a street etc etc.

Plenty of men (and women for that matter) have a sexuality which differs from the norm on a consensual basis. It sounds like MN wishes to take a majority view and the proposal is very popular on here so I suspect it would be supported by most contributors. However some women will have husbands who want to be subjected to consensual sexual violence and vice versa and as long as it not too hard them it is currently law if there is consent. In a liberal society where people do not have to be the same as others and where we allow eg gay people freedom to express their sexuality it seems a bit inconsistent to pick out one example of sexuality and say that is not acceptable.

I think the current law is about right but am going to bed now and expect very few will agree with me.

Oh Xenia. You do spout shit sometimes.

BIWI you saved me some typing

Yes of course MNHQ support it
All of us should shout it from the rooftops for those that do not/no longer have the breath to do so

Yes of course

Absolutely.

As an aside, I don’t think the “rough sex defence” is actually a defence.

There was a case called R v Brown years ago, in which it was decided that consent couldn’t be given to this sort of violence. Crucially, perhaps, in that case the participants were gay men.

It feels like there’s a distinct element of the law jumping to protect men before it protects women.

Xenia Max Mosley’s case was a libel case, not criminal.

Yes please.

It's just another excuse men use to humiliate, control and destroy women.

Enough is enough. We have to stand together.

Of course!

Yes please

In a liberal society where people do not have to be the same as others and where we allow eg gay people freedom to express their sexuality it seems a bit inconsistent to pick out one example of sexuality and say that is not acceptable

Sexual preferences that involve serious physical injury can't be compared to the harmless fact that people have different sexualities in the LGBTQ+ spectrum. No one is going to die from having non-heterosexual intercourse - the analogy doesn't exist.

Of course there are people for whom sexual violence is a turn-on but acknowledging that doesn't mean that the 'rough sex' defence should ever be acceptable in a murder trial:

• If the consensual sex is "rough" enough to cause serious injury or death, then there may well be a question mark over the 'submissive' party's mental capacity to consent.

• Even if we accept that some people may consent with full capacity to this type of sex, in the knowledge that death might result, does their right to enjoy this trump the rights of others not to risk death during a sexual encounter where they have absolutely not consented to die or sustain serious injury?

I would say, by any objective moral assessment, it absolutely does not.

This is a long thread but for those few posters in doubt about why this is needed, take a look at the sobering post by Tappering on page 1 at 12:55:29 about Natalie Connolly.

Absolutely.

Xenia your post is exactly why this defence must be stopped.
The notion that anyone can consent to the level of violence that results in their death is just absurd. That's not me being prudish.
As long as people like you spout this nonsense, juries will fail to convict these dangerous men.

Yes, of course.

The notion that anyone can consent to the level of violence that results in their death is just absurd. That's not me being prudish. As long as people like you spout this nonsense, juries will fail to convict these dangerous men.

If you're a scaffolder and get paid per job it might be quicker to work without safety harnesses. You might consent to working unsafely, you could even sign a contract saying so but your employer would still be liable if you fell and died without using the correct equipment. Your signature wouldn't mean anything, as that contract would be unenforceable.
Is this infantilising scaffolders? Should they not have the right to decide what they do with their bodies?
Well, what about if we talk about the job insecurity in the construction trades, and blackmarking men who would find it hard to work again and being undercut by untrained migrant workers who may or may not have been trafficked and used as basically slave labour?
Ok so we accept that there are circumstances in which an individual might not want to use a certain method or use PPE. Human nature innit?

We still hold the employer responsible.

How does that translate to a man strangling a woman as he fucks her? Simple. She might well enjoy being strangled, she might just like the naughtiness of it, she might get off on pleasing her man - but when she stops breathing and dies, it's still his hand on her throat and his responsibility. (If there was an epidemic of men being strangled by porn crazed women it would be the woman's fault if she managed to strange him to death, but strangely the vast majority of violent sadists are men and the vast majority of submissives are women...)
Like someone mentioned earlier, men are super keen to "do what makes her happy" when it involves strangling her.
Men, if a woman asks you to do something awful to her, you CAN just say no, you know. You don't have to be so obliging.

MNHQ, another voice saying please support this campaign.

Natalie and the others who have died deserve to be recognised.

I cannot believe Natalie consented to being injured and killed, and we should stop this kind of defence.

If there is any doubt about whether this is ‘just’ enthusiastic sex play or men squirming out of murder please read @Tappering ‘s post at 1255.

This excuse was also used by a simpering weasel in a city very nearby.

He got a few years.

Having non vanilla sexual desires is one thing. No one consents to die. If this was the case then there would be a proportionate amount of men dying.

Using it as an excuse for murder is a disgrace.

it seems a bit inconsistent to pick out one example of sexuality and say that is not acceptable.

It seems to me more inconsistent to pick out one example of extreme violence and say that it is acceptable. An action such as throttling someone to the point of unconsciousness or death isn't remotely ok in any other scenario, why should its being associated with sexual gratification by one or both partners make it so?

Yes

Violence is not "a form of sexuality".