To think that “innocent until proven guilty” just doesn’t always apply, particularly in cases of sex offences?

[AngeloMysterioso]

It should… I know it should. In a fair and just world.

But the fact is that, in this country at least, because it’s almost always a he-said-she-said, the level of prosecutions and convictions for rape is so shockingly low that virtually every rapist out there is technically an innocent man.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t like trial by media, I don’t think someone should be convicted of a serious crime purely on somebody else’s say-so, but I also know that so many men are being able to get away with it that innocent until proven guilty has become a complete crock of shit.

Especially when the perpetrator is famous. Even setting aside the one in the news right now, we also have a recent case of a footballer whose crime was literally recorded and he still got away with it.

I mean what the fuck do we do?!

What evidence is there that there is a huge wave of unreported sex crime?

If it’s unreported, surely any reliable data as to its prevalence is going to be hard to come by?

Our legal system is founded on the premise that we would rather 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be deprived of his life.
By its very nature that puts the rights of men above the rights of women. Because it means 100 victims don't see justice and 100 men carry on raping, to protect that one innocent man.

I would support a less serious crime if reckless penetration where the onus was basically on the penis owner to prove he used it responsibly. Asked your mate instead of the woman? Reckless. Accidentally got into bed with someone thinking it was your girlfriend? Reckless. Tripped and accidentally penetrated someone with your erection? Reckless. Had sex with someone who had drunk so much they were slurring? Reckless.

It comes from providers of services to rape victims. It is not hard to come by.

If people make crucial decisions on how to behave when someone is accused of rape based on finding a random anonymous forum post to be condescending, then that really says everything about their intelligence level.

I am not trying to "change anyone's minds", merely stating legal facts.

https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/statistics-sexual-violence/#:~:text=How%20many%20women%20are%20raped%20or%20sexually%20assaulted%20every%20year%3F&text=That's%201%20in%2030%20women,in%20the%20last%2012%20months.

I thought your post was brilliant logan

I have thought about this a lot - family of lawyers - and personally would prefer 10 unconvicted people walking free than 1 innocent person in prison for life. The state needs a really, REALLY high burden of proof to take away someone's freedom. And the weight of responsibility should be fully on the prosecution to prove guilt, rather than on the accused to prove innocence.

I also think there needs to be a) robust and well resourced courts so a case doesn't drag on forever and ruin everyone's lives, victim and accused both, b) modern and well resourced policing, including far more support for victims, so people feel able to go to police rather than have to go to the media, and c) well resourced legal aid so everyone has the chance at a fair trial.

A known person abused my friend and her sister throughout their childhood, as adults they took him to court and he got off with it. They had to read all about it all over the papers how this poor man had been dragged through the court by malicious women set out to ruin his career. Several years later two more women brought him to court over allegations of child abuse and thankfully he was convicted and sentenced to several years in prison but towards the end of his sentence he had his conviction quashed on a technicality. Again he was all over the papers saying that he was out because he was innocent.

Knowing in depth about his crimes I was absolutely sickened and I knew that the ones who had taken him to court were just the tip of the iceberg.

He died a couple of years ago and lots of well known people came out to say what a wonderful man he was, people all over twitter talking about how this poor man had had his name dragged through the mud by liars - until his daughters came out and said he'd abused them all. Two if them were the ones who had taken him to court the second time, he was a monster who ruined their childhood.

Even more sickening stuff has come out since.

Too many rapists and paedophiles get away with these crimes, especially ones in positions of power. I'll always stand with the victims. It's only a very small minority of men who are wrongly accused compared with huge number of victims who never see justice whether it goes to court or not.

The state needs a really, REALLY high burden of proof to take away someone's freedom. And the weight of responsibility should be fully on the prosecution to prove guilt, rather than on the accused to prove innocence.

Couldn’t agree more.

I wonder how the maths of that '100 guilty men go free than one innocent man convicted' add up?
With regard to rape, I would bet a lot more than 100 guilty men are free in the UK today than to one innocent man in prison.

I wonder how the maths of that '100 guilty men go free than one innocent man convicted' add up?
With regard to rape, I would bet a lot more than 100 guilty men are free in the UK today than to one innocent man in prison.

almost certainly- but what’s the figure we’ll accept? What’s the point at which we say we’re ok with innocent people being in gaol and having their lives ruined in order to secure convictions for an unspecified number of criminals?

and what happens when the political party you don’t support is in power and start arresting and prosecuting innocent people on flimsy evidence who happen to be political opponents? Surely that consequence is even more horrifying?

I don’t fully agree with the OP but I think because the legal system is so poor at getting convictions for sexual offenses I could never be assured that being found ‘not guilty’ in a court would mean the person hadn’t committed the crime. What an awful state of affairs that is. It’s horrific for the victims, and unfair for those genuinely innocent of the accused crimes. The only person who benefits from this poorly performing system of law is the perpetrator of sexual crimes. These failings in the legal process need fixing asap.

I'm of the opinion that a person should not be named until convicted when highly emotive crimes like rape are involved. There is risk on both sides with vigilante behaviour against the person or family, as well as people obstructing justice by making up false rhetoric which later gets the case thrown out.

As far as Brand is concerned, none of us know what he is guilty of other than he is about as funny as piles and appears to be a total dickhead.

It's worse than that, though; the CPS seemingly has no barometer for what is actually a reasonable case to bring to court. I was the foreperson on the jury for a sexual assault case - the accusation was that a woman's friend had put his hand up her skirt on a night out repeatedly and assaulted her. The defence counsel put a stop to it with one piece of evidence and one question - it was a series of photos of the night in question from her Facebook page, in the bar in question, and she was wearing jeans the whole night, after she and her five other friends had testified specifically that she was wearing a skirt. It turns out that he'd even pointed the police to these photos in his interview, so they and the CPS were fully aware of their existence.

It's not relevant to this discussion, but for the sake of completeness in case anyone's curious...turns out he'd raised concerns about the fact that she was conducting her prostitution business at her house while her young children were present, and he felt it was an unsafe environment, so she threatened to ruin his life if he said anything...which she did anyway. He lost his job, his family, his friends, his house (she was friends with his landlord) and had to move to another city.

Now, we've all heard this story before, but it's doubly tragic - because we all know there are limited resources in the courts and at the CPS, so this false case inevitably resulted in a more worthy case not being brought to court.

That's the point - the CPS (or the police) could've easily have done five minutes of investigation on this woman's Facebook page and seen that she was obviously lying through her teeth, and then not wasted the court's time and resources on it. If they display the same staggering level of competence with other cases, it's absolutely no surprise that genuine cases also fail.

I'm surprised you got away with this here..

It's quite true and there are manipulative, vile women who use this notion to their advantage

Its not helpful to women because it sets us at odds with men. And like you say, infantises us.

Some of these replies.
The amount of people actually raped, who get no-where with the legal system (97%) vs false accusations (between 3-4%) are widely different.
If you’ve seen dispatches I fail to see how anyone could think that man is innocent.
I was raped and I’ve never told anyone because there’s just no point.

We like to think we believe in "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law", but in reality we make up our own minds based on what we hear and see.

A good example is Jimmy Saville, we all assume he was guilty as sin, including me, but in legal terms he was never found guilty of anything.

I agree wholeheartedly that a massive amount of women experience sexual assault and either don't report or it doesn't lead to a conviction. Reality is that it is an incredibly difficult crime to prove in most cases. It is generally one persons word against another.

But it must always be a case of innocent until proven otherwise and that a safe prosecution is carried out.

The recent case which resulted in the girl being convicted in Barrow of false claims of rape and sex trafficking show just how dangerous public conception can be with no actual proof.

There are numerous safeguarding laws and regulations that require people in certain jobs to assume guilt without conviction, if you're a headteacher of a primary school and a teacher has been arrested on suspicion of possessing CSA images, or accused by ten pupils of molestation, your legal safeguarding obligation is to suspend that person unless he is found innocent. So legally in terms of safeguarding the law says that it's guilty until proven innocent. Would anyone genuinely advocate that a person found with CSA should be allowed unsupervised access to young children during the months/years they're waiting for the case to come to trial? Of course not! When someone's behaviour has flagged a serious safeguarding concern, then legally it has to be a case of "guilty until proven innocent" in order to protect children.

This is all true, but displays the problematic nature of guilt until proven innocent. Even when teachers are suspended, if the allegations are uproven but they also cannot "prove their innocence" they often find their careers are never the same again, "no smoke without fire", etc. Get a new job, you have to declare you've been suspended, it dogs you for the rest of your life.

It's supposedly a "neutral act" to suspend a teacher when an accusation of misconduct is made but human nature being what it is, it never is really. A single malicious accusation can ruin a teacher's career, even if there is no evidence, and every teacher knows they're one vindictive parent or child's whim away from a significantly stressful and sometimes career-ending accusation. But that's because as a society we have decided that the safety of children takes priority over the career and mental health of an accused teacher, as a matter of public policy.

This can be extremely problematic, but potentially it is the only way to deal with accusations against teachers, with the best intentions of keeping it quiet people always find out some version of events.

At my school a teacher was accused, the girls eventually admitted it wasn't true (we all knew it wasn't as they had told people) the teacher was suspended and it was in the papers etc. Once the girls admitted it he was cleared of course but it had made him so depressed he killed himself. He had a husband of 20+ years who was of course devasted. Unfortunately people always think no smoke without fire so once these things are public they are so difficult to come back from.

JFC
why are we unable to talk about the victims?

This girl killed herself after the police didn't take her rape seriously
https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/semina-halliwell-rape-victim-12-took-her-own-life-directly-after-police-interview-her-mother-tells-sky-news-12582931

This one killed herself after bring forced to show her underwear at her rapists trial.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/mum-ayrshire-girl-who-killed-13591548.amp

This woman killed herself after a man she said raped her took out a civil case for false allegations

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/uk-31930196.amp

Why is a man's life being ruined by a "false accusation" held up as so much more serious than the much much higher number of real life women whose lives have been ruined by being raped?

Why are these threads full of "I know a man who..." with no evidence at all?

I swear mumsnet has become infested with misogynists. Its gross

Everything @AdamRyan says.

Also, people seem to think that 'innocent until proven guilty' applies everywhere. It doesn't. It applies in a court of law. We are all free to read the media's investigations and decide for ourselves what we think.

It's as if some people on this thread are saying we should assume the women are lying until or unless a court finds the alleged perpetrator guilty. Which would be utterly ridiculous and grossly offensive.

And as someone else pointed out, if the alleged perpetrator is acquitted, it doesn't 'prove' their innocence. All it proves is that there wasn't enough evidence to convict.

The ... weight of responsibility should be fully on the prosecution to prove guilt, rather than on the accused to prove innocence.

It is. As the legal system stands it is for the prosecutor to prove and an accused person doesn't even have to lead any evidence in their own defence.

This reminds me of last summer a uni lad, think his name was Luke, climbed into the bedroom of his friend and raped her. Found not guilty as she had sent a text message saying that was her fantasy. Very unclear though whether he ran with that or she was aware of the timing therefore can't consent. He spent the next few weeks all over sky news saying how young men's lives are being ruined and he's been found innocent, but really even if someone tells you a fantasy you can't just carry it out without planning, consent and a safe word so is he innocent?

OK 2017 surely not! But the point stands, those texts he thinks mean innocence but she feels raped. He did climb masked into her window while she slept.
https://news.sky.com/story/student-accused-of-rape-ive-spent-two-years-living-in-fear-11175185