Should someone who has been charged with rape be freed on bail?

[spookyskeleton]

Just been reading this story about a man who had been charged with several counts of rape against his partner, subsequently released on bail and then he murdered her .

I do think that there seems to be a difference between this kind of rape and the 'stranger' rape as I can't imagine someone who raped a stranger in a park, for example, being released on bail...whilst the man in the news story was probably not a danger to the general public, but he was clearly a danger to his ex-partner.

What do you think?

Women know your role

Spread eagled and up for grabs for anyone

Better this a million times than for one man to be accused blah blah blah

And all these false allegations ruining it for the real victims who presumably are elderly virgins on their way home in broad daylight from choir practice etc etc

FFS

What next ticker tape parades for rapists

Again ridiculous responses.
You make women look hysterical and irrational.

Ooh yes dittany don't forget that as a woman you are responsible for all women - say the wrong thing and you will personally cancel out feminism!

FFS not doing women any favours like we are some kind of fucking monolith

oh FFS mamatomany.

So your friend was treated properly. But one case does not prove that everything is rosy in the garden. Let us repeat the figures again:

Between 60-85% of rapes are not reported, because women know there is no point.

Of those 15- 40% which are reported, there is a 6% conviction rate.

6%.

It be much better than under the Taliban, simply because you can't get that much lower than 6%.

Unless you are going to claim that 94% of rape victims are lying, that means that the system is biased against rape victims, and that "the days of women not being believed are long gone" is quite simply a load of rubbish.

BTW, what sort of rape happened to your friend? A stranger one or someone who knew her? Because the first one accounts for less than 10% of cases and that is where on the whole, victims are treated better by the police. Which still leaves the more than 90% of cases where police are pre-disposed not to believe the victim and not to bother to investigate the crime.

Lol I have cancelled feminism with my hysterical reponses

do you assume that any given man speaks for all men?

Meant to say it can't be much worse under the taliban.

Figures don't get much lower than 6%

6 fucking %. And you're telling us that everything's OK?

But wait HerB I have an anecdote that completely demolishes your pathetic carefully sourced and cross referenced statistics - something happened to my friend this one time

SO THERE

Refute that I dares you

TBH I think I have the right to be hysterical about rape.

If any of my male neighbours decided to rape me, there would be absolutely nothing I could do about it. Nothing. The law presumes that I consent, unless I can prove I didn't consent. And as you can't prove a negative, the law as it stands, tells me that I'm fair game for any creep who wants to rape me. I think that's something worth being hysterical about.

Although I don't think we're being particularly hysterical, we're putting forth fairly sober arguments backed up by research figures. Where is your evidence that rape victims are treated fairly Mama?

Chibi - my nana smoked 20 fags a day from the age of 18 to the age of 92. She died at the age of 98.

That one anecdote, proves that all that research about smoking killing you early, is bollocks, doesn't it?

Well oooooooobviously

But let's get back to the real issue- 6% of rape trials end in a conviction

Has it occurred to any of you that some of these men might not be guilty

Someone should really look in to that

chibi, I think that the 6% figure relates to the number of convictions in relation to the total number of rapes.

In a criminal trial, the actual conviction rate is something around 58%.

I'm not suggesting that is good enough by the way, I accept that there are far too many rapists escaping justice.

As to this particular case, I cannot understand why this man was bailed. Will there be some sort of enquiry into the failures that allowed this to happen?

Mamatomany, will you please, please stop conflating being accused with being charged. It is not the same thing.
If you go to the police and tell them that your milkman raped you, they won't pull him in and charge him automatically. They will only do it if they think there is evidence.

hubbly - that 6% figure is not for all rapes, just for all reported rapes (IE formally reported to the police and a statement taken - between 15 and 40% of all rapes).

Most of those are not put forward by the CPS because it is deemed that there is not enough evidence (because a woman cannot prove that she didn't consent to sex).

You're quite right, of the cases that go to court, a majority result in a conviction - but that's generally because they are stranger rapes, involving extreme violence and it's difficult for rapists to argue that a woman consented to having her nose broken, for example. (Although not impossible. Some of them do and some of them walk free.)

And of course, we know that over 90% of rapes don't involve brusing, blood and broken bones, and those are the ones that tend to be thrown out with not guilty verdicts, or not taken to court, or not reported in the first place.

HB, yes, you're right! So that figure doesn't even take into account those rapes that are never reported.

It's interesting what you say about the cases that do get to court. I hadn't really thought about it but it's obvious really that the only cases that are getting that far are those where it's difficult to argue that the victim consented.

I remember many years ago watching a documentary on rape. One of the victims featured had been horribly beaten by her rapist, he still walked free from court.

His defence claimed that this woman, a total stranger to him, had invited him in from the street and wanted 'rough' sex. This ludicrous scenario was apparently explained by the fact that the victim had previously suffered from depression and mental health problems.

It truly beggars belief that any jury could find such a defence credible.

there was someone on another thread recently whose dd had had a similar experience (though AFAIK, and I certainly hope, without such severe violence.) Classic stranger rape - he jumped out from an alley and grabbed her - jury believed he might have been telling the truth when he said that she had accosted him in the street late and night and asked him for sex, and he hadn't really wanted to but went along with it anyway.

re what HB said at 19.28, it strikes me that if I let someone into my house, say a workman or meter reader, and they decided to rape me, they would easily get away with it because they would just have to say it was a bored housewife scenario and it would be so much like the plot of a porn film the jury would buy it easily.

Seriously, that is the scenario we are all looking at.

The law says that we have to be considered to be permanently in a state of consent - any old random can fuck us whether we like it or not and we have to prove that we didn't want him to, he doesn't have to prove that we did want him to. However unlikely the scenario, however unorthodox his sexual proclivities, the law says we must be considered to be in a permanent state of consent and that if we say we aren't or weren't, we are liars.

That's how much protection we get from rape.

people really do have no idea. There's this myth that it's her word against his and we only have to say the word and the poor bloke'll get locked up, guilty or not.

whereas in fact if stranger rapes, gang rapes, violent rapes, still don't end in convictions, what hope would there be?

Read this this morning - Dominic Lawson in Independent, on Michael Winner's lionising of O.J. Simpson.

If anyone doubts Dittany's statements re rapists not being as stigmatised as you might expect, have a look at this:

'The interesting thing about this account is that Winner did not seem to share the original trial jury's dismissal of the DNA evidence of OJ Simpson's own blood at the scene of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman; nor that of the even more compelling DNA analysis of Simpson's socks, which found traces of his ex-wife's blood in them ? fresh blood, that is, not ancient relics of the many beatings which he had inflicted on her over the years, and for which he had been repeatedly cautioned. No, Winner thought his old chum was "a double murderer" ? but still worth showing off all over town.

He was not to be disappointed; "Girls endlessly came to the table to pass him their telephone numbers... We went round to the Belvedere restaurant in Holland Park... and a rather posh friend of Andrew Lloyd Webber's came over to our table. When I introduced him to OJ, he practically curtsied." On reading this, I practically vomited. I didn't feel much less nauseated by Winner's follow up, in which he describes how, four years ago (after Simpson had been found "liable" for the two murders by the civil courts), the one-time American football star turned up at his home in London: "I said to my fiancée Geraldine, 'That's OJ ? if he's got a knife, throw yourself in front of me.'"

I suspect that's what Ronald Goldman tried to do to save Nicole Simpson's life; but it hadn't stopped the immensely strong former sportsman from stabbing her so many times through the throat that she was all but decapitated ... anyway, which fashionable restaurant shall we grace with our presence tonight, OJ, you naughty man?'