do you think women should be held accountable while drunk?

[AbbassidEdge]

"Now I have an important question to whomever can answer: Suppose a Women got dead drunk, took a knife and killed a child or better yet got into a car and ran over a family. Do we considre this a murder or let the women go as she was drunk? I know for a fact that the feminists will argue as to let the girl get away scot-free but Im curious of what you think is the right action."

Alcohol doesn't affect the mens rea to commit a crime. Obviously.

Is this a shitty 'drunk woman responsible for getting raped' thing I sense? FFS.

This doesn't make any sense. Your example is in no way related to being a victim of rape. Men commit crimes whilst drunk and are held accountable also

I think this is something to do with women being incapable of consent.. and blameless versus men being simultaneously incapable but responsible. I can't tell if this is a feminist point..ie that men are always seen as responsible and women as incapable even when wasted so that is inherently assuming women are lesd capable/responsible/vulnerable wheras men are autonomous and responsible.. or the menz point that its unfair..

If a woman gets so drunk she is incapable of rational thought, then yes she is a bit daft. That is not licence to all men in her vicinity to rape her. If she commits a crime in that state, she is responsible for it and should be punished under the law, she is not blameless. If a crime is committed against her, the perpetrator of that crime can't use the fact that she was drunk in their own defence. The same would be true of a man. A person on trial for theft wouldn't use in their defence "but he was really drunk so it was really easy for me to take his wallet, he was too crosseyed to focus enough to see what I was doing so he was practically asking to be robbed" - this is exactly equivalent to the defence regularly used in rape cases, which is equally idiotic.

I'm not sure if people are reading the OP right.

Isn't the point that if a woman can be held accountable for criminal actions when drunk, she can be held accountable for consent to sex when drunk - and that sex with such consent is therefore not rape in the first place.

I don't think anyone believes that just because a woman is drunk it's OK to have sex with her without her consent. But isn't the law now going further than that and saying that it's possible for such consent, even when given, to not be legally valid - like the "consent" of an underage person?

I don't know. It probably turns on HOW drunk she is, and how active the consent. And I don't know if it has anything to do with the Chad Evans case as the victim there didn't say she consented; she said she blacked out and had no memory of it (so must have been VERY drunk).

I know my stance on this but I'm getting confused about the issue of consent - what the pp has just stated.

I have too many victim blamers in my life and am weary of challenging done of them when I'm unsure on how to word it. It's the point the pp made that makes me stumble.

Can someone more articulate than I help me understand this?

FarFromHomer's post is the one I'm referring to.

FarFromHomer that's an interesting point.

I think that any risk there is mitigated by a number of factors:

• That women who have cheerful sex when drunk (even very drunk) don't tend to see it as rape and therefore don't report it to anyone
• That even if they were inclined to report it they almost certainly wouldn't as women are as immersed in society as well as the rest of us and will think well I was pissed and I can't remember what happened and I'm not hurt so I was joining in. People who have blackouts - where they are still walking and talking and not passing out or vomiting etc - but won't remember the next day - are usually fairly ongoing heavy drinkers and have a reasonable understanding of the sort of things they might do when in this state. Whether they will be happy with themselves is another matter of course but not one for reporting to anyone
• Even if they wake up and it is obvious to them that they have been raped, they are unlikely to report it if there is not quite a bit of evidence that it was non consensual above and beyond the fact that she was drunk as women triage their own cases, they know what the police / courts will listen to and what they won't
• The CPS only bring cases where there is a reasonable chance of conviction and in a case with say two people who knew each other or who left somewhere together and with no evidence of violence etc and it's just him saying it was consensual and her saying I can't remember, that is not getting to court quite frankly

This is demonstrated in the CE case where his mate was found not guilty of rape presumably as she had gone back with him even though she was hammered. CE OTOH was found guilty as the circumstances of what he did were quite different.

Of course the law is not just there to protect women who are too drunk to consent around men, apart from the act of rape itself which can only be committed by a man, it is gender neutral. So will apply to a man having sex with a drunk man, a woman having sexual interaction with a drunk man, the sexual assault laws will cover off the different acts.

It's this idea that the "grey areas" cause a lot of trouble and make up a lot of cases, this is not true.

Having a law which says that it is rape / sexual assault to interact sexually with someone who is not in a fit state to consent is fine, it doesn't need changing. If you look at convicted rapists they are not in prison because they had consensual sex with someone who was pretty pissed.

Like the laws around underage sex. Many people object by saying it criminalises young people in consensual relationships. Well yes the letter of it does but the spirit and intent of it doesn't (this is explicit in CPS guidance) but the law is required to protect those who are being coerced exploited or where there is a big power differential etc. If you remove it for over 12s then you have decriminliased those in similar age perfectly normal situations but you have also decriminliased eg all those men in rotherham.

SevenZarkSeven wrote - "If you look at convicted rapists they are not in prison because they had consensual sex with someone who was pretty pissed."

Also, I've heard the Police say that convicted rapists in the UK usually have multiple convictions for rape.

Hex if I went up to a drunk person and and stuffed cake in his mouth, it would come across as very very odd. If he then got annoyed about it, and I said in my defence, but he likes cake, or he said earlier he felt like a bit of cake, or even how was I supposed to know he didn't want cake everyone would think I was a total nutter and rightly tell me that it's normal to offer cake a be pretty sure the person wants it at that moment before serving it to them. Even then, if the person is so drunk I have to feed them the cake -as in, they're not really participating in the whole thing- well, probably best to leave it. Normal human behaviour dictates that you are careful and considerate when interacting with others, especially when that interaction involves putting something into their body.

And yet with sex, the most intimate, sensitive and vulnerable of social interactions, we have the bizarre situation where men will put their penis into the vagina of a very drunk woman, a woman who isn't really participating or responding, and claim they "didn't know" she wasn't up for it. Eh sorry if your social boundaries and awareness are that bad, where you right next to a person and you honestly can't read any of their body language or ask a simple question like "want to shag?" before inserting body parts into them then perhaps you shouldn't really be out in society. At the very least you could probably do with some intensive training on how to ask before sticking things in places.

My issue is, if a straight man gets drunk, and is raped (by a man, for avoidance of doubt), this is seen by everyone as an awful crime, he clearly didn't want to have sex with a man because he is straight, so it was definitely rape.

If a woman is raped, then they don't believe her, because women are there to have sex with men - so it doesn't matter which specific man it is, it's not fair for her to say that yes, I have sex with men, but I'd never have sex willingly with this particular man.

Basically people who claim that it's women's responsibility to ensure that they don't get raped by getting drunk, are in effect implying that women drinking alcohol near men, makes men rape them.

Which is a quite extraordinary proposition if you think about it.

It makes a claim that alcohol does not just affect the person taking it, but that like cigarettes, there's a form of "passive drinking" which in men, leads to them raping women. Which rather implies that men shouldn't be allowed into bars, clubs etc., where women are getting drunk, in case they are affected by the drunkenness and compelled to commit the criminal act of rape, but for some reason, the people who believe in passive drinking don't ever suggest that as a solution. Their solution is always that women restrict their non-criminal behaviour instead of men restricting their potentially criminal behaviour.

I've just remembered years ago out clubbing with a friend, we picked up a bloke who was drunk as a skunk and waving money around like a lunatic.

He had tons of money in his pocket, he offered to pay the taxi fare and to give us both a wad of notes each (I'm not kidding, he would have handed over a couple of thousand pounds, there were wads of £50 notes).

If we'd taken them and then he'd realised the next day that he hadn't meant to give them to us, what would the legal position on that be? I suspect he might have a case to say that we had to give him the money back because he'd given it to us while not in a fit state to make an informed choice about doing so.

(I hasten to say we didn't, just took him home and let him sleep it off on the sofa. He turned out to be the dullest man alive at breakfast the next morning. But he was loaded. )

Cailindana, that's it. You've nailed it for me.

Thank you.

In the Chef Evans case, the victim slept with 2 men. In the first case, she was drunk but conscious so he was acquitted. Chef Evans then has sex with her afterwards, when she was presumably unconscious, so he was convicted. There is a difference between drunk and willingly having sex with someone that you may not have shagged sober and being so drunk that you are unable to consent. The other party in this case is then committing rape, as the other party has not been able to consent.

I know he's not called Chef Evans BTW! Its my autocorrect!

Cailin, I love the way you explain things. You have a gift for it.

I am confused on one aspect of this.

If a women does give consent, but was very drunk, to a man who she would not have had sex with if she had been sober, is this consent valid?

PS!
I don't want to engage with the OP on this as the OP's comment is just trying to start an argument I want to discuss.

AICM I think that's up to a jury.

The test of whether someone is guilty of rape, isn't if a woman has given consent to sex: it's whether the man had a reasonable belief in consent.

Reasonable of course, is quite a subjective concept.

If a woman is in a fit enough state to consent, and consents, then of course her consent is valid.

These sorts of hypothetical question bother me as so many people use them to say "oh but look grey area the law is out of order" when in fact rape - that is rape that the vast majority of members of the public would recognise as rape - is so rarely reported let alone successfully prosecuted.

Yes there's this enormous concern that women would up and start reporting men for consensual drunken sex en masse if we actually started to take consent seriously.

While there is very little concern about the actual incidence of actual rape.

Instead of looking at the women in these mythical 'grey areas' that always seem to pop up, we should be looking at the men's behaviour. Their motive for penetrating a woman who is that drunk where this is even an issue. What are they getting out of it? Why do they think it is OK? What do these men think of women?

The Ched Evans case reveals a lot about how these men feel and their intent. Neither of these men cared about consent nor how this woman felt. That is the reality.

There is no grey area in rape, just in some people's heads.