Lying about vasectomy doesn’t make it rape.

[fascinated]

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/man-who-lied-about-vasectomy-has-rape-conviction-quashed-s9kb6x9q5

Very disappointing case.

But taking off a condom during sex without permission is...? That doesn't make any sense.

Exactly. I haven’t checked who the judges are but you wonder how they can have such little empathy for women.

Surely the consent is vitiated either way? I could understand a law that said consent to sex is consent to sex, and cannot ever be made conditional, but here they seemed to be saying it is fine to place some conditions on it but not others.

So never believe men saying they have had one on that case..... (same for men when women say they are on the pill)

This is insane, it makes no sense
According to the three-strong panel — which included Lord Burnett, the lord chief justice and the most senior judge in England and Wales: “A lie about fertility is different from a lie about whether a condom is being worn during sex.”

He is a serial rapist, too. Not a nice chap.

@Xenia

So never believe men saying they have had one on that case..... (same for men when women say they are on the pill)

Except the man doesn't become pregnant, pretty significant difference.

Not that I agree but the lie is a little different because the condom doesn’t just prevent against pregnancy

Good God, he texted her the next day to tell her. What a psychopath.

Is there a woman alive who is neutral as to the risk of pregnancy when she agrees to penetrative sex ? This is the absolute worst kind of legal nit picking. Surely no female would see it this way.

It’s just so frustrating.

Sheer bloody madness!

I’ve always thought that failure to invoke the single sex exemptions should in itself constitute sex discrimination, as only natal females need worry about the risk of pregnancy and therefore allowing trans persons into the opposite sex spaces is inherently more dangerous for natal females than natal males (even accepting that both sexes are at risk of rape/physical assault).

But reading this it appears that the risk of pregnancy doesn’t seem to feature in judicial thinking at all.

Agreed, fascinated. And the fact that actual harm was done is confirmed because she did get pregnant and did have an abortion. I can't help feeling that they are minimising what happened and basically saying that lying like that is perfectly acceptable (he does not deny that he lied) and it's a case of 'buyer beware', as it were.

@stepmotherofone

Not that I agree but the lie is a little different because the condom doesn’t just prevent against pregnancy

This is an interesting point.

Does this judgment display a conservative frame of mind on the part of the judges which believes, deep down, that the risk of pregnancy is inherent in sex, and that the female involved has no business seeking to guard against it anyway? I sincerely hope not, but then again, not much would surprise me any more.

Sorry, cross-posted; I was agreeing with your previous post.

Funnily enough I agree with your next post too.

reading this it appears that the risk of pregnancy doesn’t seem to feature in judicial thinking at all.

Presumably they think oh well, she 'just' had an abortion, all sorted

Will this case be appealed, I wonder?

The law in this area is a mess - the exceptions are completely ad hoc and unprincipled. So the judge says the deception was not related to the physical sexual act, but to risks or consequences of the act. Ok...this case hasn't arisen in the courts yet, but it's almost certain that if a man lied to a woman about his HIV status this would be rape. But HIV makes no material change to the sex act itself, and it only pertains to the risks or consequences of sex! The courts are in a very tricky position now, it seems. I think this whole 'must pertain to the sex act' is a very narrow, fuzzy boundary that can't be drawn in a principled way.

My view is that everyone should be able to set whatever conditions they like to have sex, and it's rape if those conditions are violated. If that sounds harsh, the reality is that business people who set up contracts get more protection in the law for breaches of promises - why do we care more about protecting businesses as opposed to protecting people's sex lives?

There was a really sad case where a fraudster tricked a woman into going through an entire fake marriage ceremony just to have sex with her. This was not rape, because being married or not didn't change the physical sex act. But she was a deeply religious person and felt a huge degree of her choice had been taken away. Why is this condition deemed less important than any other condition on sex?

I'm also convinced there's a gendered element to these kinds of cases. There was one case where a woman was tricked into performing sex acts online, on video, because she thought she was being blackmailed by criminals and her family would get hurt. In fact it was just her boyfriend. This was not sex by deception, not criminal at all, because it didn't affect the quality of the sex act. But check out this very similar case - a father was upset that his daughter's boyfriend dumped her.He decided to embarrass the lad by posing as an attractive woman online. The dad filmed the boyfriend doing a sex act and then revealed who he really was. This WAS deemed sex by deception. But surely the sex act is materially the same whether it was really a woman or not? The boyfriend just saw a text box and had no idea who he was talking to. I suspect the male judges felt sorry for this boy. The same sympathy doesn't seem to be extended to women.

No bother. It’s chilling.

It’s as chilling as the thought that the answer to sexual harassment/rape in schools/institutional settings wouldn’t be to stop the rapes but to enforce birth control or at the very least create a presumption that a failure to be on birth control or have an abortion to reduce or remove the risk or actuality of a pregnancy is a failing on the part of the female involved - some kind of “contributory negligence”, as it were.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, it seems.

I'm was really dismayed reading this. She didn't consent to the possibility of pregnancy. She consented to unprotected sex on the condition of his lack of fertility, so a lie about his lack of fertility took away her 'freedom' to choose which is a condition for consent. As evidenced by her saying she would have chosen differently had she known.
Every pregnancy is riskier to a woman than not becoming pregnant.
So is a medical procedure such as a termination (which I believe his victim had to have) as opposed to not having a termination.
If they don't want to call it rape (for whatever goddamn reason) then it should be a category of GBH or something. He had intent and exposed her to unnecessary bodily harm.

If someone consented to having their appendix out on the condition that risk of harm was 1 in 10,000 or something, when in fact the doctor performing the procedure knew it was 1 in 100, I doubt a judge would say 'well the patient consented to being cut open and having the surgeons hand inside her and her organ being removed so the consent is valid'.

Wee Bison. Indeed. I agree.

And of course, there is the whole issue of the rough sex defence - those cases seem to suggest that if you consent to sex, you consent to whatever assault is then meted out. I wonder if this issue will be addressed as part of that review (not that I have high hopes for any such review).

some kind of “contributory negligence”, as it were

Oh, sure. I mean:

*what was she doing having sex with some random man?
*she should have used condoms anyway, she could have caught something!
*she met him through online dating, soooo.............
*women should know that men will say anything to 'get' sex, I can't believe she took him seriously!

And so on and so forth. None of which the law addresses explicitly, but they're certainly beliefs that are floating around in the culture at large.

I imagine the judges fear reciprocal cases in the future if lying about invisible contraception can be classed as rape. I can just imagine the following "She said she was on the pill, and she got pregnant. That means she raped me and now i don't need to pay child support"

The general public’s understanding of sexual etiquette is very different for that on FWR, that’s for sure.

I have to go and do something else, as thinking about this is profoundly depressing.

I did wonder about that. The floodgates argument. And of course it wouldn’t benefit women, it would be turned around on to them as you describe....