Should the UK law on rape be changed?

[prashad]

I anticipate some flack for this post, but please hear me out and hopefully we can have an interesting discussion about this.

UK law current states that rape is necessarily committed by a man; that the perpetrator has to insert their penis into the victim. Of course, this means men can rape women, and men can rape men, but women cannot rape anyone.

However, many people would define rape as 'forcing someone to have intercourse against their will'. In the dictionary, rape is defined as;

"1.
the unlawful compelling of a person through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse.
2.
any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person."

It is my view that according to this dictionary definition, a woman can rape a man. Typical objections include the issue of erection when not aroused, but we all know that men can have involuntary erections when not aroused.

In light of the feminist aim of equality, should be campaign to change the law so that men who have been raped by women can have justice?

I know men who have woken up with a woman on top of them, or who have drunkenly had sex with a sober woman that they otherwise would not have slept with. Perhaps it occurs more frequently than we may think but men don't report it?

I am well aware that the above mentioned hypothetical assaults are against the law in the UK, but called sexual assault, and that the maximum sentences are the same, but why not brand such women 'rapists'?

Conversely, how would you feel if the rape of women by men was just called 'sexual assault' instead and the term 'rape' abolished from our lexicon?

Some men that I have spoken to about this are frustrated and unsupportive of feminism because of the perception that it seeks to increase the rights of women, rather than seeking to promote gender equality... and they site the lack of campaigning by feminists on issues where men are disadvantaged. Do you think that campaign for equality in rape law would be good for feminism because it would show a concern for equality in an issue where men are disadvantaged?

I'd also note that other countries (such as the United States) have updated their rape laws so that women can be convicted of raping men.

Thanks for reading.

Yes Garlic, police data suggests that. And there was a poll here.

Yes prashad there is are great problems with the methods of collecting data with regards rape. I suspect we are thinking of different problems though.

If they thought it important enough to change in the United States, perhaps there is a desire amongst the public for change even if you cannot see why?

That poll was just meant as example btw, not the definitive authority btw!

Or maybe there isn't a mood for change and you can't see why?

I don't think the US are paragons for equality and women's liberation. Far from it.

Rape is a crime committed by someone with a penis. It is specifically a crime of using the penis as a weapon. Rape can indeed be committed against men and boys too, by people with a penis.

However, rape is an act of violence, predominantly against women and girls. It is used as a weapon of war, it is used as an act of power against women. It is used to impregnate women, and harm, or kill them. It is used to force them to carry the children of their enemy (as in the Yugoslav wars) It is not purely an unwanted sexual act - it is a violation, an act of power, violence against a woman, an act of dominance, of control.

Thanks, scallops.

Why the bloody hell would we want to model UK law on US law?

Yy Sabrinnnnnna well put.

And to deny that does harm women, prashad.

scallop...

Probably.

The problem I'm talking about is that when we talk about the incidence of crimes vs the reporting of crimes, the figure for the true incidence is nothing but an estimate. Since if you were to collect data from a sample of the population asking something like, "Have you been a victim of so and so crime?"... there is no way of establishing the truth of the answer. You just take the result as a given and use it as a comparison against the number of people who reported. It's not very scientific, but it's the best we've got.

Similarly, criticism of conviction rates assumes the guilt of a percentage of those found not guilty.

If you want some hard facts about statistics re rape and sexual assault, here are the figures from the 2012 British Crime Survey ( including the 85,000 women and girls who were victims of rape)

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/214970/sexual-offending-overview-jan-2013.pdf

I still fail to see how this is an "issue where men are disadvantaged". Are you saying more men want to be raped?

Personally I'd like to see rape include objects, so rather then penetration by penis it is sexual penetration. This is not because I think that women need to be able to be accused of rape but rather I see the violent sexual penetration of women done not be a penis is just as awful as if it is done by a penis.

I think men who are traumatised by having had a woman force sex on them would probably prefer to be considered alongside women who've experience the opposite.

Meant to say great post MyNameIsInigoMontoya.

I'll have leave you to your musings prashad.

FWIW I don't think men need you defending them. Men get heard far more than women. They can fight their own battles.

"if you were to collect data from a sample of the population asking something like, "Have you been a victim of so and so crime?"... "

Hang on a second there! We were all agreed that sexual assaults go under-reported, now all of a sudden you're saying folks are queuing up to say they've undergone this particularly humiliating type of crime?

Make your mind up.

"Some men that I have spoken to about this are frustrated and unsupportive of feminism because of the perception that it seeks to increase the rights of women, rather than seeking to promote gender equality... and they site the lack of campaigning by feminists on issues where men are disadvantaged."

But do they grasp that there are many more issues where women are disadvantaged? And yet they expect feminists to quit fretting about those and start concentrating on the minority of issues where men are disadvantaged?

And they feel that the current state of affairs is the fault of feminists for not campaigning harder, even though the current laws were conceived of, implemented and reviewed by men (or by bodies that are so overwhelmingly male that they are effectively "by men")?

And both of those things so much so that they are now "unsupportive of feminism"?

They sound a bit... well... up themselves, really.

I wouldn't object to a change in the law. If I'm ever in a position to vote "yes" or "no" to a change I'd probably vote "yes," assuming that the draft legislation was sensibly and thoughtfully drafted. But I don't see a reason to go out and devote a huge chunk of my time and energy to campaigning for "giving a crime against men a different name from the one it has right now." Taking sexual assault more seriously, reviewing sentencing guidelines, protesting individual decisions -- yes, absolutely. That's something that would benefit both genders and promote gender equality.

Well I didn't actually say "they wouldn't think rape by a man was worse" (see point 2), but that I strongly suspect most men would consider it a different offence - hence why it seems to make sense to have a different term. And you are quite right that I may be wrong about that, but that said, if a significant number of men felt that both things should have the same description, I would have thought there would have been some kind of push for change - in the press, in law or elsewhere - whereas your post (from a woman) is the first time I can remember seeing this suggested.

As for the pregnancy thing - yes, there could be effects for a man of becoming a father unwillingly. Financial effects potentially (not always), possibly mental/emotional effects. Though it's also possible the man could become a father in this way and never even be aware of it, or else walk away with minimal or no effects on him (which doesn't quite work the other way round). Still, without meaning to ignore these effects, I'm not quite sure it's comparable in scale to what a woman can potentially face, particularly in some parts of the world:

• Death in pregnancy/childbirth
• Permanent disability/pain/incontinence
• Ante/post-natal depression or psychosis
• Stigma
• Exclusion from her family/community, shunning
• Inability to marry, or breakup of existing relationship
• Poverty (from extra mouths to feed, inability to work or interruption to career, or disability as above)
• Having to gestate, give birth to and then nurture her rapist's child to adulthood
• In some countries, formal or informal punishments for her perceived "crime" in having been raped (up to corporal/capital punishment )

Garlic...

It's obvious that there are crimes that are under-reported, and it's obvious that there are people who are guilty but acquitted by a court.

But the figure, is always an estimate. It's arbitrary and unscientific. That's why I'm against using statistics in discussions like this.

We can say "There are women/men who are raped and do not report it, and there are rapists who escape prosecution", but we cannot say how many. It's pointless to use such statistics in discussion.

MyNameIsInigoMontoya...

Agreed. The effects are greater for women, certainly in less civilised countries. My point is only that it can have a life changing effect on men, too.

That should say "see point 2 of my initial post", by the way (just to clarify).

Rape is an act of penetration - with a penis - and that act has further reaching affects on women. Pregnancy, actual bodily harm, higher likelihood of STDs.

And that's not even touching on the stigma attached to the victim by society: victim blaming, she was asking for it, wearing a short skirt and so on. Men do not live with that stigma - they are more likely to be believed, less likely to victim-blamed, asked what they were wearing what they were doing out aloe etc. They are physically stronger than women, women are taught to live in fear of men in general terms - men do not live in fear of women. This makes a difference.

There is actually an offence, 'assault by penetration', which includes penetration by things other than a penis for the poster up thread who wished this offence existed. It carries a similar sentence to that of rape.

Sabrinnnnnnnnnna....

I'd agree with your first sentence if only you prefaced it with "In the UK..."

It's not a universal definition.

And y'know what, I'm inclined to sign off for the night by saying that when the men's rights folks have helped to tackle that little list of consequences above, I'll gladly consider any campaigning they want feminists to lend a hand with. I'll wait for the call.

Night, all...

I think there's some confusion about terminology here. Some people (including maybe the OP) seem to think that "rape" basically means "the worst end of sexual assault". But legally, rape is a very specifically different crime from sexual assault. I'm not sure that it should be, but it is.

The point of the separate category of "rape" is that it's specifically about sexual penetration, rather than just sexual gratification generally. I think this has to do with the historical roots of rape being not so much a crime against the woman, but against the man who owned her. A type of property crime against the valuable commodity of female sexual propriety. If you rape somebody's daughter, you deprive them of the value of her potential marriageability. If you rape somebody's wife, you potentially make her pregnant and deprive them of certainty about their offspring. This is why nobody ever gave a shit if you raped someone who wasn't a looked after, protected daughter or wife. And it's why touching somebody sexually or flashing at them or whatever was never the same type of crime - none of those things lowered the property value of the woman suffering them.

If that's even a half-way accurate interpretation of history, I'd be interested to hear how people feel about the relevance of still having the separate categories now. Is somebody sticking their penis into somebody's vagina a specifically different type of crime to, say, getting off by rubbing it somewhere else on their body? Or is it just a more severe version of the same crime?

Logically, it would seem to me to make more sense just to have a single crime of sexual assault, and abolish rape as a legal term. I think this is what they do in Canada, and a few other places, isn't it? Intuitively though, that seems to lessen the severity of the crime. Rape is so much more powerful a word - even if the legal treatment and sentencing were the same, it would just feel like some of the outrage had been taken out of it.

The power of the word is probably why these kind of arguments come up. I suspect what the OP is really trying to say is that women forcing men to have intercourse with them is just AS BAD as men doing so to women, so it deserves the same word. I'm not sure whether it actually is though. That depends upon whether the specific fact of being penetrated takes it to a whole different level.

I'm in the UK. But if we're going to talk worldwide then it is important to take into account the fact that rape is used as a weapon of war. Against women and girls by their aggressors. Women are deliberately violated, both as of violence (and to cause their death) and to impregnate them with their violators babies.

It really is not as simple as an unwanted sexual act - rape is predominantly an act of violence and aggression against women, and the weapon is a penis. it is important that is is defined in this way.