'Rape should carry a mandatory life sentence' - Herald article, Neil Mackay

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/23154534.rape-carry-mandatory-life-sentence/

Can't find an archived version. I am in Scotland at present, so read it in print. Strongly agree with what he says, especially these bits.

... Thirty years reporting on the cruelties humans inflict on each other has left me with a few simple beliefs: firstly, our jails are filled with the wrong people.

Get the sex workers, drug addicts and shoplifters out of prison. They're victims of circumstance - often poverty. There but for the grace of God, go I. Jail isn't were they should be. They need social workers, not turnkeys.

Another belief is this: all crimes which cause deliberate, indelible, life-altering harm to another human being should carry a mandatory life term, just like murder. ...

Those three decades as a crime reporter taught me another lesson: some offending is hardwired, particularly sexual offending.

You cannot "cure" rapists or paedophiles. You cannot "reprogramme" them. ...

... we can recognise that there are certain acts which are so beyond the boundaries of society that the offender deserves the harshest of punishment and exclusion from the society they've offended against. Rape is one of those acts, as is murder.

I'd rather focus on getting more rape allegations to trial and on the police response to victims than lazy soundbites like this which wouldn't really help.

I agree with PP that not all rapes are the same. There is a vast difference between a man lurking in a park waiting to attack a lone woman and a man who's had a few drinks at a party going home with a woman who's had too much to drink to consent. Both cases would be rape and both should be punished but there is a significant difference in intent and criminality.

An acquaintance of mine was living in Cape Town when a young woman was raped and murdered in her local post office:

edition.cnn.com/2019/11/15/africa/south-africa-student-murder-sentence/index.html

Which is why I know that in SA many rapes attract a life sentence, as does murder. Many rapists murder their victims after raping them on the basis that a dead victim can't identify them.

We need to think carefully about the unintended consequences of well-intentioned laws.

The recidivism rate is very very high. That doesn't mean it's hardwired. It is very persistent though.

Much like addictions it is persistent over time and only with very good supports, a will to change and a different life available can change be achieved.

I do think sex offenders are only ever 'recovering' not 'recovered'.

Did you even read the story? It is exactly what I’m talking about. Rape is often a he said, she said scenario.

She said this happened:
“The teenager claimed she woke in the early hours of the morning to find Mr Abdulaziz on top of her, forcing himself inside her. Outlining the case at the start of the trial last week, Jonathan Davies, prosecuting, had told the court: 'She said "what are you doing?" he said "it's fine" indicating that her friend was asleep. She got up to find her friend, tried to wake her but couldn't, she then tried to get out of the flat as quickly as she could.”

He said this happened:
”Mr Abdulaziz said he had gone to wake the young woman to offer her a T-shirt to sleep in, or to offer to pay for a taxi home, but that she pulled him on top of her and placed his hand between her legs. But he said she become angry when he had offered to call her a taxi and stormed into the bedroom to wake her friend.” “He had already had sex with her 24-year-old friend and said he might have fallen on top of the teenager while his penis was poking out the top of his underwear.”

Thats the problem with rape trials. It’s not a given that she was raped. And it’s difficult for her to prove rape.

What a strange article. It's hard to argue for or against it because, for all the words he expends on how strongly he feels there should be mandatory life sentences for rape, he doesn't once give any idea why.

Is it because rapists pose such a danger to society, so need to be put away for as long as possible for society's protection?

Is it because we hate rapists so much that we'll feel better if a harsher sentence can be imposed, to express our anger and outrage?

Is it because victims are more likely to be able to heal if they know their attackers are behind bars and not a danger to them?

Or is it for any of numerous other possible reasons? He doesn't say - it could be any of these, they all have different arguments for and against and the article reflects differently on each of them. All he seems to do, at the end, is contradict his whole point by admitting that a longer sentence wouldn't actually have made any difference to the victim he introduced at the beginning.

I have two issues with this.

One is that the approach of non-prosecution for petty crime has been largely disastrous where it has been tried.

Secondly, in general I think minimum mandatory sentencing rules aren't all that useful. Especially when you have a crime which can include quite a large swath of circumstances. People are more likely to hesitate as to whether the sentence fits the crime in some cases.

I'd also not that longer sentences don't have a particularly strong correlation to prevention. So making the law harsher isn't necessarily going to make offences less frequent. I suspect with rape it would not likely do so.

This case gets brought up a lot and it's a bit of a red herring.

The problem is not that that story is ridiculous (which it is), the issue is that the prosecution could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that any sexual encounter took place / was non-consensual. The onus is on the prosecution to prove this.

Unfortunately the media seized on that one frankly bloody stupid reply from the defence and now it's become the notorious "man cleared of rape because he said he tripped" story instead of the rather more accurate but boring "man cleared of rape because the prosecutions case was not strong enough" story.

If I was a serial rapist the threat of a life sentence wouldn’t stop me raping but might encourage me to start killing my victims.

I'm not convinced that studies on men in prison for rape tells us much about rapes or sexual assaults overall. I tend to think the guys in those situations have all kinds of reasons that they are likely to be repeat offenders, and also violent offenders in other ways, too.

Do they tell us a lot about instances at places like parties that involve s ton of alcohol or drugs, and young people, which almost seem designed to create problems around consent and poor self control and bad decision making? I'm not so sure they do, and those people don't tend to be represented in the prison population.

But as far as conviction rates, I tend to agree that the real problem is that often there is no evidence of a crime. There may well be evidence of sex, and two stories about what happened, but no evidence that a crime has occurred.

I don't think the law can elevate the narrative of one side over another - that destroys the whole basis of the justice system and would have huge implications in other areas. My conclusion is that rape may simply be something that is not very effectively be controlled by the law, and it may not be the most useful avenue to try to do so.

I believe in some places where rape carries the death penalty that acts as a deterrent to reporting. Rape is normally not carried out by strangers, and vulnerable women and girls (and men and boys) don't want to report someone they know, perhaps an ex partner, and then feel responsible for their death. I wonder if a mandatory life sentence might have the same impact.

My brother was sexually abused as a child and it took him many years to come to report it because he was afraid his abuser would commit suicide and it would be his fault. I don't think he would have felt able to report under this system, even if the abuser absolutely deserved (and deserves) life in prison.

I'm not convinced that studies on men in prison for rape tells us much about rapes or sexual assaults overall. I tend to think the guys in those situations have all kinds of reasons that they are likely to be repeat offenders, and also violent offenders in other ways, too.

Yes, the rapists in prison are the tip of an iceberg of rapists. These are the ones that got caught either by raping repeatedly or raping in an obviously and easy way to prove. Most rapists will never spend a day in prison and that’s because they are not repeat offenders or are very calculating and sneaky or are rich/upper class because the law still does protect the toffs.

But as far as conviction rates, I tend to agree that the real problem is that often there is no evidence of a crime. There may well be evidence of sex, and two stories about what happened, but no evidence that a crime has occurred. I don't think the law can elevate the narrative of one side over another - that destroys the whole basis of the justice system and would have huge implications in other areas. My conclusion is that rape may simply be something that is not very effectively be controlled by the law, and it may not be the most useful avenue to try to do so.
Yes, that is my view too. Making sentences harsher isn’t going to change anything except to increase the standard of proof, making it even harder to prove rape.

MacKay is a hardline gender ideologue. I'd be concerned he'd be happy for these mandatory life sentences to be served in the women's estate.

Slightly glib, but a serious point is that he's close to some in power and maybe they feel that if they are seen to be tough on rapists it won't matter that they are destroying safeguards. Of course it does, mainly because most will never get to trial and prevention is always best. I do feel there is a whiff of "see I do care" about all this too.

I'm torn on this issue. I'm fairly sure life sentence for rape isnt the solution, BUT I'd like it to be.

But longer sentences for rape should happen.

Before he got to me my rapist was:

Convicted of raping a child - no apparent sentence

3 years later he was:

Convicted of raping a child - sentenced to a couple of years

On release he:

Murdered a woman in her 80s - sentenced to life in prison, later released on a life licence

He behaved himself for some months then he, whilst still on his life licence:

Raped me.

So would anything after the first rape have happened if he had been dealt with properly? Who knows. Personally I wish he'd been locked up and never allowed out the first time.

It would have saved a lot of people.

I'm not impartial enough to be able to view this issue properly though.

My case does show though that some people just don't give a shit and shouldn't be allowed out into society as they can't be trusted to behave themselves.

This would be the only way to increase the rate of conviction which is more important than increasing the punishment for the tiny percentage of rapes that end in conviction. Harsher sentencing is already possible depending on circumstances.

Establishment views cannot simultaneously believe that:

Rape is so very serious in terms of damage to a woman mentally, physically, life altering and in some cases long term to permanent harm in terms of the trauma that it deserves a very serious sentence

AND

Rape is hardly prosecutable and seen in society and courts as something women have responsibility for (only this week I heard of a male responding to a woman talking about her rape by telling the woman who had been raped that she must say it was an 'alleged rape' - even though the woman was the one who had experienced it) and an unkind thing to talk about because it makes males uncomfortable

AND

Raped women are such a small matter that the risk of stuffing serious sex offenders (with rap sheets of such repeated, terrible, sadistic rapes that they not only got through court but had a heavy sentence) in women's prisons and a few rapes happening to women prisoners is not something anyone should talk about or care about. And that a female sucking up a rape or two is small potatoes compared to the devastating harm of limiting a male person's validation of their chosen identity.

This can't all be simultaneously true. They're going to have to pick a side.

I’d like to see rape AND everything that goes with it prosecuted fully and properly,

For example, if a woman is attacked on her way home and dragged into a back alley and raped, the offenses should be rape, AND kidnapping/deprivation of liberty, AND actual/grevious bodily harm, AND any other crime that occurred.

I hate that other crimes are usually ignored on the rare occasions rape charges are brought.

BoiledBeetle

Where did he say rape survivors are better off dead? I'm sorry but I am so tired of comments that wilfully take text out of context. It's not cool anymore. You're not getting any gold medals for this.

We can take your comments out of context too! For instance I could suggest that you sound a bit like you're a rape apologist because you think some rapes aren't as bad as others. Did I win any cool internet points for that?

I don't like mandatory sentences. It makes sentencing decisions dead decisions and takes judgement of circumstances out of the process. If sentencing is to be just then it has to be the decision of a court, not legislators. And it has to be seen as being so, with a judge giving their reasons for it.

It's reminiscent of the view that a woman who has been raped is better off dead.

This is a historic reality. This is part of the history of womenhood that current women are standing on. There was a time when it was supposed to be better for a raped woman to commit suicide or die in the attempt to resist the rape than to survive it 'ruined' in the eyes of men and the civilised world. It was not that long ago; a lot of the 1950s famous westerns are based around stories of that time. It doesn't help to forget and blur the realities of what women faced and the attitudes they dealt with because we're dealing with a resurgence of misogyny I've never seen in my lifetime, and that's more than half a century.

The idea of rape being equivalent to murder is something worth discussing and considering, and like the word 'hysteria' there is a grim history there for women. This is a valid point in the conversation whether you agree, disagree or have views that shade between the two.

@DarkSol You've lost me. I'm not trying to sound cool. Yes, in history (and in some parts of the world today) rape is seen as such a disgrace to the woman and her family that it would be better if she died. Her validity as a woman is erased, if that's the right way of putting it. To me, saying that rape is so damaging to a woman that it is as serious as murder and merits an all life sentence (whatever the circumstances of the rape, and in the UK in 2022), does make me think of that attitude. But that is not how women in the UK (from most cultures) are perceived if they have been raped.
And yes, I do believe that some rapes are "not as bad as others". And that doesn't make me a rape apologist. I don't believe that a boyfriend not withdrawing when his girlfriend tells him to do so at the last minute should be judged in the same way as an attack in the park, for instance. Do other women really believe that these 2 rapes are equally serious and should be punished in the same way?
I remember there was a thread a while back where people stated as a fact that the death of a child was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a parent and that all deaths of children were all without exception equally terrible. Eg a stillbirth was as terrible as the brutal murder of a 10 year old. I didn't agree with that either.

Specially trained, three judges, somewhere between balance of probabilities and beyond a reasonable doubt?

I don't see how this could be allowed, it's directly removing the most basic rights we all have in the justice system. Which people did not always have.

If we were now to say, no, actually, those aren't your basic right as a citizen, don't be surprised if very soon people begin to think that might be true in other cases where they are not getting as many convictions as they believe they should. I think we'd begin to see the creep in less than a generation.

We have specialised family courts, why not sex crimes courts? There are restorative justice initiatives, Indigenous processes in some countries. Yes, you'd have to look at the principles of justice. It is just possible that a bunch of white blokes a couple of hundred years ago didn't capture the exact best way of doing everything.

Blackstone's ratio or Franklin's quote about guilty people going free is fine if you don't understand recidivism in sex offending and conviction rates. If Franklin thinks 100 guilty men should go free, that's a thousand rapes. If we carry on with our current conviction rate that's hundreds of thousands. My risk of being sexually assaulted is about a million times higher than the risk of being falsely imprisoned. Not 100 times. Or ten times depending on the principle.

I'm not saying there is a better way, just that the current way is shockingly poor.

I wouldn't rule out sex crime courts, but this idea that you could get rid of juries and proof beyond a reasonable doubt to me is simply not acceptable. The number of false imprisonments for rape is really irrelevant to undermining those principles. There is no reason that would apply only to this one kind of crime, if we say the principles are invalid.

It would be a fundamentally different kind of justice system and I don't think people would be happy with the outcomes.

There certainly are other types of justice systems, but neither restorative, nor what are often put forward as indigenous approaches, tend to be a lot harsher than western systems. If anything it seems the opposite. Or, in the other direction, you get systems with long jail times in horrific conditions, physical punishment, or the death penalty, often with a highly biased trial.

I guess rape is an unusual crime in that the actual crime of penetration can in other circumstances be a lawful act. And because often it takes place behind closed doors it becomes one word against another. All evidence can be explained away by saying the act did take place but was consensual.

The measures listed above by pp: lower standard of proof, ditch the jury; and build data; letting juries know about previous convictions or other complaints would undoubtedly increase the conviction rate but would, as many have said, go against natural justice.

It’s hard to know then what possible way they could increase conviction rates. I often read how rape convictions are 2% and this is a disgrace and how many women don’t even report because there’s no point. But I’ve never seen any really convincing ideas about how to improve things.