The age of consent to be raped....

[InmaculadaConcepcion]

I was shocked by this story about two twelve year-old girls being raped by six men, as anyone would be.

Apparently, from what was said in court, one of the two girls had texted the men and set up the meeting and allegedly suggested having sex. She ended up being raped by five of them.

The age of consent in the UK is 16, so below that age a girl cannot legally give her consent to sex.

But further down in the article there was this quote:

"if the activities had taken place just four weeks later than they had, when the main girl would have turned 13, none of the defendants would have faced any criminal charges because of the defence provided by her actions."

In other words (it seemed to me) although at age 13 a girl is judged legally unable to give consent to sexual intercourse, it seems she can consent to being statutorily raped.

Have I got this thoroughly mixed up?

More chilling is when the man doesn't think that the rape was rape. But then so do lots of the wider public, hence the bizarre jury verdicts and enormous contentious threads on MN. And why many of us get particularly het up about this issue.

Yes, it was interesting that when I worked in the media, details given out to the press about rape cases tended to be framed thus:
"a woman was allegedly raped...."
The word "alleged" was almost always used in the case of rapes, but it was noticeably absent when the police press offices gave out details of other crimes. No one was "allegedly burgled" or "allegedly robbed" or "allegedly assaulted" etc.

I had a big row with one police press officer about the use of "alleged/allegedly" when used in relation to a rape which had taken place in the city centre the previous night. In the end he amended the recorded message about the crime and removed the allegedly, which was at least a tiny victory.
But it was an endemic part of the attitude towards rape and rape victims when I was working in the media (which was until about three years ago) and judging by a number of the press reports I've read recently, still is.

6% is the attrition rate for rape cases, not the conviction rate.
In other words, the number of reported rapes that ultimately result in a rape conviction.
I believe the conviction rate is 58% (of those rape cases that make it to court) BUT if you take out the number of cases where the defendant pleaded guilty, it's much lower.
Anyway, however you describe it, it's still an abysmally low figure. Especially when you consider that something like 90% or more of rapes aren't even reported to the police in the first place.

Yes, I understood that too - the conviction rate for reported crimes is around 6% (the pedantry alert was because I knew I was nit-picking!)

But I thought that meant the same as the attrition rate?

This was the definition I was using:
The attrition rate refers to the number of convictions secured compared with the number of that particular crime reported to the police

But I'm happy to be corrected if I've got it confused.