Jack Tweed found not guilty of rape

[Ponders]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/8644486.stm

hmm. Did he just get the benefit of the doubt do you think - his word against hers?

Or "she knew what he's like when she chose to go back to his house"?hmm

Will she now be named?

These cases are horrible - really hard to determine who's guilty - maybe we should adopt the Scottish Not Proven verdict.

(put this in sleb twaddle before & then realised hardly anybody reads that!)

Thanks Hula, moment of stupidity

No worries - I was just concerned there as the rules are pretty strict - and even just telling you could be enough for disciplinary, let alone the whole internet! Hope MN get it sorted for you.

The problem may be that a common sense definition of rape (to the general public) may not be what is actually rape under the law.

We're all saying he was found innocent by a court, who heard all the evidence, etc., etc. But maybe we need to look at what the law actually says.

Maybe the law is still allowing men to deliberately have sex with women who do not consent. ('Actual rape' under a common understanding of the word, but not 'legal rape' IYSWIM.)

Maybe it allows enough scope for a jury to have to say 'reasonable doubt', even where they (and we the public) would normally consider it to be rape.

I'm actually really upset by this thread. I have absolutely NO time for Jack Tweed at all. However, he has been found not guilty-on a fairly dubious charge actually,thos who have inserted quotes above have taken a very limited part of the case so if this is all you have read,please read more!

Re:the door being closed,her friend on the stand,said she asked 'are you ok?' and her friend laughed and replied 'yes!' -the friend laughed and walked away.

Also,I happen to live in a city chock full of footballers and girls who would do anything to pull one. As a relitavely young woman who knows many of these girls I can honestly say that pressing a rape charge and seeing it through is not beyond them. Some of them have very few morals.

Say what you want about Jack Tweed,but I also am a little suspicious of a girl who goes back to someones flat and asks to get comfy.....changing into effectively 'a strangers' pajamas. I just know it's not something me or any of my friends would have done and smacks a little of a rubbish chat up line! (disclaimer I am absolutely,in no way at al saying that ANY of this means that a girl should be reped AT ALL-I'm just saying that the picture being painted of the girl as young, innocent and shy doesn't really sit with some of these details)

I really don't think any of us know what went on there,a a jury took only 15 minutes to find him not guilty, that is a very short time and I have too much faith in a jury to think they all decided to 'let him off' within that short time. (naive?)

I know this is a site for woman-and I know rape threads tend to get heated,but I am a bit sick of everyone turning into a witch hunt where all woman are innocent and all men guilty!

I have been on both sides of this personally,I know the low rape conviction stats and the fact that this any many other factors lead to woman not reporting it,but I also know more than one man (one was very close friend) who hAve been falsely accused of rape and it ruined lives. We have to acknowledge that there are some crazy people out there .....men and woman!

I actually feel pretty uncomfortable discussing this-just in case the ruling was wrong and the girl was telling the truth but I just really really felt that we all need to step back and consider the very real possibility that he is innocent-and that sometimes woman do the unthinkable.

I don't know if it's true as I read it in a tabloid but apparently pictures of the victim on different nights out (which were taken from her facebook) were shown in court as 'evidence'. I thought this kind of thing was no longer relevant in rape cases?

I would agree about the public attitude also, but I do wonder about the law itself:

"Rape .(1)
A person (A) commits an offence if? .

(a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis, .

(b) B does not consent to the penetration, and .

(c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents. ."

That means someone could force me to have sex against my will, the jury agrees I was forced against my will, but because the perpetrator might 'in all the circumstances' have thought I consented, they have to let him off.

I must be the only woman on these boards who's had sex with a man without beforehand uttering the words "You may enter my vagina now".

If there's no evidence, there's no evidence - what else could the jury do? I don't think any of us want to see men or women convicted on the basis of what we think happened. Rape victims obviously suffer disproportionately because of this - the nature of the crime is such that it often takes place between people who know each other, in private and can have another construction placed upon it - all those things make it hard to prove.

What is beoynd doubt though is that in our culture many men operate on the basis that sex with a woman is somthing to be ruled out by said woman not something that they need to wait to be ruled in. An absence of No has historically been interpreted as Yes and that continues. It's very depressing - and as the mother of three daughters, not a little frightening.

But in this case the witness statements obviously were not sufficent evidence in order to convict. Unless you have access to a full transcibe of what was said and shown in court it is impossible to know exactly why the court decided one party was guilty or not guilty.

As said before - tabloid press is not a reliable source of information in such cases.

This bit alone screams guilty to me

"Mr Tweed had admitted having sex with the woman but said he was not aware his friend was in the room at the same time."

How can you not be aware who is in a room if you are having nice sensible sex with another consenting adult (drunk or not).

Have only read on today's BBC report on home page I have to admit, and the BBC report on that page makes no references to the type of comments identified on this thread.

But I still stand by the comment that unless we have the evidence as potrayed in court - in its entireity, not just snippets taken out of context, that we can't really make a judgement on his innocence. Surely? Else what would be the point of court cases anyway?

That is one eye witness - the girl's friend I believe?

Honestly - I have read enough of court transcripts etc and looked at so many court proceeding stuff to know that one witness does not always make a full story.

Of course this friend's statement is very damning. And taken in isolation one would immediately believe the accused to be guilty.

But there was obviously other evidence, other statements that led to reasonable levels of doubt.

And didn;t someone say that the jury came to their decision quickly? Which means something stood out as being very doubtful.

Not that doubt may be purely twisted because of an alternative witness statement. The other witness may be lying completely, but the doubt exists.

But without all that no one else knows what happened. I have no idea who is innocent or not. I am simply stating that it is impossible to declare his guilt purely from what is reported in the press. He may well have "got away with" a horrendous crime which is of course dispicable. But the jury had doubt - from ALL the evidence they saw and heard. What more can they do? If there is doubt, when they cannot convict.

One sad thing about this story is that no one seems to bat an eyelid about the two men on one girl. Modern culture seems to think that it would be very normal for a young woman to be with two men at once. Women apparently want to be "roasted" when they get into a room with a few footballers according to tabloid culture. I worry that young women are thinking they should indulge in this behaviour not because they want to but because it's expected. I do think porn is having a nasty influence over young people with this too.

It's one think for a mature woman to explore her sexual boundaries if she wishes to but these young girls, barely out of their teens getting into these behaviours, often when drunk, saddens me.

Really dittany?

As I say, I have no idea one way or the other. There was obviously some doubt in the evidence, but not being there, I can't say.

IMO:
he could be guilty.
he could be innocent.

Regardless a court of law decided he was not guilty based on what they heard.

I do hope that the rape didn;t happen for both of their sakes though; for he - so she never had to experience such an act upon herself; for him as it would make him a dispicable nasty piece of work.

I think dittany is being ironic, hula

Yes, I had worked that one out Ponders.

DuellingFanjo - the Facebook pictures were allowed to be shown because the girl in question had stated that since the incident, she was afraid to go out whereas the pictures showed her on a range of nights out with friends subsequent to the night in question.

As I understand it, I think because she introduced this as evidence, the defence were allowed to use the pictures to refute it.

Hmmm - have seen enough of prison and court reports to realise that not guilty verdicts doesn't aways mean innocent. But yes, for the purposes of MN libel - these two men are, in this case at present, not guilty.

Skihorse viz your remark about giving explicit consent to sex, men are perfectly capable of understanding sexual cues about whether they have consent. There's a very interesting piece of research which shows that men know perfectly well when a woman doesn't want sex as they are familiar with all the non-verbal "No" signals. If you google O'Byrne, sexual consent or something along those lines, you'll see the research paper with the transcripts from the focus groups, where it's quite clear that men fully understand and read non-verbal No signals. We don't need to give verbal consent - men understand non-verbal communication as well as we do.

That point about the fact that it was 2 men - twenty years ago, that would probably have been enough to convict them as most people would have thought that there was no way a young woman would have consented to have sex with two men in the same room. You're right, porn has really skewed expectations of what is normal sexual behaviour.