Margaret Atwood

[MrsJoJo86]

What does everyone think of Margaret Atwood's recent comments on #metoo?

I'm a bit disappointed to be honest.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42708522

I'd rather that the woman was presumed to be telling the truth and if the man can't convincingly present evidence that she isn't, then he is convicted.

I fervently hope you're in a tiny minority.

@LeCrossiant what? There is no assumption of mens rea on the woman's part at all because she isn't being prosecuted for a crime. Mens rea is mental component of a criminal offence. If a woman was tried for a sexual offence then there would still be an assumption of innocence. The alternative is to assume that the accused had intent unless they can prove otherwise which is hardly adequate.

*To translate into your lay person think a woman isn't presumed anything because the court isn't judging her ffs.

She is just trying to repair the damage she caused to her reputation during the UBC case. Of course she now sounds rational and logical and absolutely fair. But the letter that was the cause of her having to rethink her position and repair her image was anything but. She came out unequivocally in favour of a writer friend, the entirety of the who’s who in CanLit was essentially ‘persuaded’ to to the same (by Atwood and one other male author) and the letter caused untold damage to the ability of any female student in an English department to raise a complaint if they sexually harassed or abused.
Due process is fine. Atwood didn’t want due process for SL. She believed him to be innocent and essentially shut down university classes across an entire country because she forgot that students have rights to make complaints.
The writers that I met who removed their names from the letter spoke openly about how flattered they had been to be asked to sign (initially) because they had done so as a result of flattery at being asked by the CanLit cognoscenti. After discussing the letter in university departments across the country, they realized that the letter would cause many many students to be unable to report their tutors or supervisors for inappropriate behaviour (thus removing the possibility of due process).
Writers, lecturers and students across Canada were effectively being bullied into shutting up and letting him off. The entire industry is controlled by the big publishers and the major names who signed the letter. Disagreeing with it would end your career. I sat in on long and emotional discussions where female students and faculty told long stories about their own abuse at the hands of older male professors. People were having to decide whether to trash their hopes of ever publishing or stand up for the rights of women not be harassed at school.
This was not a simple ‘oh i’m all for due process’ whatever Atwood is claiming. She started a movement in CanLit that made it insurmountably difficult for anyone who wanted to end the appalling treatment of women in English departments to succeed in a career in Canada.
I lost a huge amount of respect for her.
I don’t think she realized what would happen - she was just standing up for a male friend. But she inadvertently threw every single female academic and student in Canada under the bus.
I’m bloody glad she has seen the light. She needed to.

'To translate into your lay person think a woman isn't presumed anything because the court isn't judging her ffs.'

I think you should read what I wrote again. In theory the court isn't judging her but if you've ever seen a rape trial then you'll see that in practice it very much is. All the defence has to do is to make the woman look as bad as possible according to society's standards (by making out she's a slut for example) and that's it, she's judged to be lying. Her word counts for nothing.

I think you should read what I wrote again. In theory the court isn't judging her but if you've ever seen a rape trial then you'll see that in practice it very much is. All the defence has to do is to make the woman look as bad as possible according to society's standards (by making out she's a slut for example) and that's it, she's judged to be lying. Her word counts for nothing.

Which should be remedied by changing the way that we deal with the victims not by assuming the man is guilty.

I don't advocate for assuming the man is guilty, I advocate for the same attitude in rape cases as in other cases - if the man is shown to have had the opportunity to commit the crime (ie he was with the woman at the time) and the woman says he committed the crime then it's on him to prove that no crime was committed, not on her to prove that it was. If I say you stole my car and there is proof of some kind that you drove my car at the time I said it was stolen, that's you pretty much convicted. This is not the case in rape trials. And that is the issue.

But that’s not true le
If you say I’ve stolen your car and I say you’ve let me borrow it they will look at the evidence, have you let me borrow it before? Am I on the insurance? Do you have the car back?
They won’t just say ‘well they were driving it and le says it was stolen so a crime must have happened.’

Deadly - I think this is a little bit too complex for Le

Don't be so fucking rude sawdust
Go and read some cases where men have been cleared of rape and you might see what croissant is talking about.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/black-student-cleared-night-time-7951757

www.google.co.uk/amp/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/millionaire-ehsan-abdulaziz-who-said-he-accidentally-tripped-and-penetrated-teen-is-cleared-of-rape-a6774946.html%3famp

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-england-41885897

I could link this kind of thing all day.

I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying Deadly. We don't know each other, so you're definitely not on my car insurance. If it is shown that you drove my car and I say you stole it, then it would be totally on you to prove that I gave you permission. If you couldn't prove that, you'd be convicted of stealing.

However, if I were a man and you said I raped you (god forbid) and there was physical proof sex happened, the chances are I would get away with it because you saying that we don't know each other and I didn't give you permission wouldn't mean anything. Chances are it wouldn't even go to court. But if it did, going on many many past cases, if I said that you liked a certain type of sex and the defence could find someone to corroborate that (no matter how much you deny it) then that would be proof enough that you were lying.

@LeCroissant thankfully your perverted notion of justice will never come to pass.

It looks like Alison Saunders is making an arse out of her job, another one plastered over the press today.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42745181

Yes instead we have the current perverted notion of justice where, to all intents and purposes, rape isn't a crime - there are so few convictions for rape that if a man does rape a woman he is very very likely to get away with it.

Yes instead we have the current perverted notion of justice where, to all intents and purposes, rape isn't a crime

Yeah that will be it

Fuck sakes.

For something to be considered a crime in a practical sense, the number of convictions in relation to the number of commissions of the crime has to be within a certain proportion - for example it may be technically a crime to wear yellow on a Thursday but if 4 million people wear yellow on a Thursday and only 10 people are convicted then it's not actually a crime - you can wear yellow and be pretty sure you're going to get away with it.

Equally with rape. Yes it is on paper a crime. But in the UK, for example, only 5.7% of reported rape cases result in a conviction. Many more cases go unreported. And that's the case around the world. Every year millions of men get away with rape. It's easy to do - even when there is a lot of evidence, a conviction isn't very likely.

Atwood is clearly suspicious of ideologues, whether conservatives or revolutionaries. She understands that power can be abused by both.

Anyway, it's a bit of a meaningless argument because hardly anyone in the world has had no socialisation at all. You'd literally have to be locked in the dark for years with no contact from other human beings.

Oooh, posted above in wrong thread. Soz.