women | ukwatch.net

Beyond the dogma: the real abortion debate

tim — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:54:29 +0000

The debate about abortion today often takes the form of competing scientific claims: about exactly when the fetus becomes viable, whether it feels pain, the psychological effects on the woman, and so on. These are the issues regarded on both sides as the crucial ones on which to convince the public and more particularly policy-makers. But fundamentally the question of whether women should be free to have abortions is not a scientific one but a moral and political one. And this was the focus of a public debate taking place as part of the Future of Abortion conference organised by BPAS (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), with heavyweight speakers on either side.

BPAS chief Ann Furedi was joined by Jon O’Brien of the intriguing US lobby group Catholics for Choice, up against Josephine Quintavalle of the anti-abortion Comment on Reproductive Ethics and conservative journalist Dominic Lawson. The discussion ranged widely, but was most interesting when it touched on the core moral question that is at the heart of the political controversy. While acknowledging that nobody ever sets out to have an abortion for fun, Ann Furedi made the case boldly that abortion can be a morally good thing, as opposed to a ‘necessary evil’. This position is rarely heard, but it is crucial to any serious debate about abortion.

Dominic Lawson’s anti-abortion argument hinged on the idea that a woman’s decision to abort is the crucial moral factor. This seems reasonable enough, but it is one-sided. Too often the discussion proceeds from the assumption that once pregnant all a woman has to do to have a baby is not have an abortion. Debates about ‘when life begins’ focus on the sperm, the egg and the embryo as if those factors alone are sufficient to create a human life. The forgotten ‘factor of production’ is nine months of a woman’s life. The availability of abortion means this factor cannot be taken for granted. The principles of autonomy and equality mean that it should not.

Of course, it is quite true that if a woman does not abort her embryo or fetus, and if she continues to look after herself and eat properly, ‘nature will take its course’, and the chances are she will have a child. But human beings have always tried to exert control over this process, and modern medicine allows women to have relatively simple and easy abortions at almost any point during pregnancy. In this context, it is disingenuous to pretend that women, like wild animals or plants, are mere vessels for natural processes. Not only is it untrue, but it obscures the resulting moral significance of a woman’s decision not to abort. A woman’s decision to go ahead with a pregnancy, to have a child, is not morally neutral – depending on the circumstances, it can be a morally good or morally bad decision. Crucially, since it concerns her own life, it need not – and probably should not – be a selfless decision.

In fact, many mainstream anti-abortion arguments implicitly acknowledge that what is really at issue is not the life of the fetus, but the motivation of the woman, and especially whether it is selfless or selfish. The greatest moral condemnation is reserved for those women who have abortions because they want to pursue their careers, or simply for the sake of convenience (as with the notorious news story about a woman choosing to have an abortion because pregnancy would have interfered with a skiing holiday). Dominic Lawson suggested at the debate that, with so many infertile couples desperate for children, it was obvious that women with unwanted pregnancies ought to opt for adoption rather than abortion. In this view, abortion is immoral because it is selfish.

Ultimately, who is to decide whether any particular woman’s reason is good enough? The real question here is how much value we place on individual autonomy. Anti-abortionists typically see virtue in resignation (especially when it comes to women), and ‘accepting the consequences of our actions’, however avoidable. Those of us who support the right to abortion do so because we believe men and women should take responsibility for our own lives, and assert as much control over them as possible.

Even those who condemn abortion in general are usually sympathetic to women who want abortions because they’ve been raped. Living with the consequences of a careless night of passion is one thing, but the idea that a brutal physical violation should lead to such a serious disruption to a woman’s life as having to carry the child of her attacker is abhorrent to most people. Given the possibility of a swift abortion, it is impossible to justify in ordinary moral terms. Here, anti-abortionists must fall back on ‘the absolute sanctity of life’. Josephine Quintavalle deliberately brought the example of rape up at the debate, because it is the one most often used against her. She gave the example of a woman she’d counselled and who had gone ahead with a pregnancy in such circumstances and now had no regrets. This anecdote is hardly a convincing argument for denying abortion to anyone else, but Quintavalle had already confessed that her position is grounded in Roman Catholic doctrine rather than moral reasoning.

Too often, religious doctrine is presented as the beginning and the end of the anti-abortion argument. This is partly because Catholics and other religious activists are the most vocal opponents of abortion. But Jon O’Brien reminded us that millions of morally thoughtful Catholics do not accept the teaching of the Vatican on the issue (as is even more the case with contraception), and some actually question its theological foundations. Perhaps more importantly, millions of non-believers (like Lawson) have strong moral intuitions against abortion, which they bring to bear on the political debate without recourse to irrational absolutes. It is not enough, then, to dismiss anti-abortionists as zealots.

Most people, certainly in Britain, do accept that abortion is morally acceptable at least some of the time, and further, that the best person to decide whether it is or isn’t is the particular woman in question. If these women are to continue to have access to safe abortion, we must not be afraid to have out the argument, and should not be afraid to make a strong moral case grounded not in science, but in respect for individual autonomy and equality between the sexes.

Abortion: Their Morals and Ours

Ellie Keen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:26:35 +0000

The right is seriously mobilising around the issue of abortion. Tory leader David Cameron has stated that he wants to bring the limit down to 20 or 21 weeks and Tory ex-minister Anne Widdecombe has been taking her “pro-life” road show around the country in an effort to rally the troops. This is not something a Tory has been confident enough to do on any issue for many years – though, thanks to local activists, these meetings did not happen without noisy protests outside.

It is clear that the right have been waiting for the opportunity to challenge the abortion law for some years. They have partly succeeded in focusing the debate about the time limit, currently set at 24 weeks, around the issue of viability and away from a women’s right to choose.

There have been regular stories in the press claiming that new scientific developments prove the need to bring the time limit down. The medical establishment has rejected this view. Last year’s inquiry into the abortion time limit by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee reported: “We have seen no good evidence to suggest that foetal viability has improved significantly since the abortion time limit was last set, and seen good evidence that it has not.”

The arguments about why a small minority of women might need to access an abortion at this stage in a pregnancy get little coverage and need to be constantly restated. It is a fact that some young women simply don’t realise they are pregnant, some go into denial until they can’t hide it, and, in the case of older women, some mistake missed periods for the menopause and don’t realise for some months that they are pregnant.

One other major reason that women need access to abortion at a later stage is the discovery of severe foetal abnormality. For example, one important test for impairments such as Down’s syndrome is amniocentesis. This cannot be carried out until 16 weeks, the results may take two to three weeks, and then the woman may need counselling and advice. If she decides to have an abortion it may be yet another week or two before this can be arranged.

The truth is the anti-abortionists are not concerned with any of this. They want to stop all abortions happening but they are faced with the fact that an overwhelming majority, 83 percent of the British population, support legal abortion. So they are left with trying to chip away at the time limit where they think they can make gains. If they win this time they will come back for more.

The anti-abortionists will have gained confidence from the defensiveness voiced by some pro-choice campaigners in recent months. Even David Steel, the man responsible for bringing the 1967 Abortion Act onto the statute book, has been quoted as saying that “everyone can agree there are too many abortions” and “there is a mood now which is that if things go wrong you can get an abortion, and it is irresponsible”. The implication is that women are frivolous about having abortions, and it repeats the myth that women use them as a form of contraception.

For socialists the key argument is that women are more than incubators: they have the right to control their own bodies. No woman should be forced to continue a pregnancy if she feels she cannot cope.

So there is no optimum or “normal” number of abortions to aim for. Every woman who needs one should be able to access one speedily and safely. When abortion was illegal no one knew how many took place. Many women never told anyone for fear of the law (see below) and so the pre-1967 numbers were based on speculation and the number of women who ended up in hospital with sometimes life threatening complications. Neither will it ever be known how many women went through with pregnancies simply because they didn’t want to take the physical or legal risk of a backstreet abortion.

Sex education

Today, far from being too easy to get an abortion, there is massive unevenness in access across the country, which is why any new amendments to extend and improve provision are to be welcomed. The 1967 act was never about giving women full choice. As David Steel himself said at the time, “We want to stamp out the backstreet abortions, but it is not the intention of the promoters of the bill to leave a wide-open door for abortion on request.” Politicians claimed that opening up abortion provision too much would encourage sexual activity.

Today the right still argue that access to sex education, contraception and abortion is too open, claiming it has led to Britain having the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe. Every year almost 50,000 young women under 18 fall pregnant in Britain – six times that of Holland, four times that of Italy and three times higher than in France. In the 1970s rates of teenage pregnancy were similar across Western Europe. The idea that this is because of too much sex education and the availability of contraception and abortion would be laughable if it didn’t have such tragic consequences.

The example of the US is telling. Over $1 billion has been spent on abstinence programmes in schools yet the rates of teenage pregnancies are the highest in Western industrialised countries. Britain comes second.

One way Holland has achieved the lowest rate of teenage pregnancies across Western Europe is by having compulsory sex education in schools from the age of five and continued explicit and supportive sex education from then on. In contrast, comprehensive sex education is still not a required part of the curriculum in Britain, making provision uneven. What is needed is more openness about sex, and systematic and sympathetic sex education in schools from a young age.

Of course, some teenagers choose to become parents and they should not be demonised. But society needs to make it as easy as possible to avoid unwanted pregnancy, and attempting to repress natural sexual behaviour will not do that.

We are a long way from the crushing morality of the 1950s, when any women who got pregnant outside of marriage faced stark choices: illegal and dangerous abortion, have the baby and then feel there was no alternative but to give it up for adoption, or keep the child and face society’s opprobrium. It is hard to convey the stigma that went with being an “unmarried mother” – a pejorative description which used to be commonplace. The term “unmarried father” was never used.

Happily, today millions of us have relationships and babies without feeling the same pressure to marry or conform, and no serious section of the ruling class can argue that women should be pushed back into the home. Women are now a permanent part of the workforce and women’s paid work is vital to the economy.

Yet despite all the advances and changes in women’s lives, ideas about the family, and a woman’s role, still persist. We are told that the family is a vital cornerstone of society, and women’s role within it as child bearer is central. Such ideology still plays an important part in shaping expectations and consciousness. It helps ensure that people continue to see it as natural that the family carries the bulk of the economic burden of bringing up the next generation.

This lies behind the moral panic about single mothers and working class families that politicians still regularly whip up. If you have a baby on your own it will be financially difficult, unless you have a very highly paid job and good maternity leave. But the state makes you go through hoops to get assistance. You are seen as feckless and undeserving, and in some way hardship is still judged as an appropriate state for you.

Women can’t win. If they have children young they will struggle to be financially secure but will get little support. If they wait to have a baby until financially stable later in life they will receive little sympathy if they then face problems with fertility as they have tried to “buck their biology”. When women do have children they can only stay at home without criticism if they are not a “burden” on the state. Any single parent on benefits will, from October, be forced to look for work when the youngest child is 12 rather than 16 as in the past. New Labour wants to bring this threshold down to seven years by 2010. This completely ignores the reality of the lack of affordable and flexible childcare that means some low paid workers can’t afford to leave the house to work.

In contrast, middle or upper class women can make other choices. They can leave their children with nannies or send them to boarding school at a tender age and not be accused of neglect. Imagine if Madeleine McCann’s parents had been manual workers rather than doctors and had been staying on a package deal in Benidorm, leaving their children locked in a flat while they went to a pub. I believe the media would then have taken a very different stance. Instead of sympathy and global support we would have witnessed at best a wave of vitriol about selfishness and irresponsibility, and possibly even the prospect of legal charges.

But the other side of this is that women today have more economic independence and are more sexually liberated than 40 years ago.

Whatever the state or politicians say about our lives we are not going to go back to a time when our lives were totally restricted and repressed. Women are not going back in the box. The enthusiasm for the pickets against Anne Widdecombe’s rallies and the success of the 300-strong Abortion Rights meeting in London in January show that. Veteran activists are being reinvigorated, but most importantly a new layer of young women are getting involved in the campaign to defend and extend abortion rights. Many are hearing these arguments for the first time.

There is no time to lose. Every trade unionist and activist needs to raise the issue of abortion rights at work, in the trade unions and at college. During the last serious battle to defend abortion rights the bigots were pushed back by the collective strength of the trade union movement. We need to be prepared to make such a mobilisation again.

But by taking on the wider arguments about women’s oppression, morality and class we can do more than stop the current attacks. Already there are thousands of women, and men, who are angry about women’s position in society, about the rise of raunch culture, unequal pay and the lack of childcare. Right now we have a real opportunity to win this new generation to socialist politics and the fight for women’s liberation.

Judith Orr is the author of Sexism and the System published by Bookmarks, £3. To join Abortion Rights go to www.abortionrights.org.uk.

Before abortion was legal

For the first 30 years of my life abortion was illegal in this country.

Almost as soon as I got involved in politics in the late 1950s, a friend came round to my flat and asked to stay with me for a few days. She had just had an abortion; the foetus had come away in the toilet. She had to borrow lots of money and was frightened she would be found out and imprisoned.

We sometimes had telephone calls from teenage girls giving false names and asking if they could come and stay. They were afraid they would be chucked out of their home or arrested after having abortions.

In the late 1970s I interviewed an old lady who had had an abortion as a young woman. She insisted I did not give her name or anything that could reveal her identity. Even though abortion was by then legal she was still worried that she might get into trouble.

I have friends who have told me horror stories after they realise I am in favour of a woman’s right to choose, but they always say I am the only person they have ever told and I must not tell anyone else.

It is terrible that people are still frightened of the law, even though it no longer applies.

Mary Phillips

The Rising Women's Liberation Movement in the Radical 1960s

Ellie Keen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:55:45 +0000

It is hard to imagine just how different the world was for women before the 1960s.

When my mum got married she had to leave her job in a bank. It was assumed that her husband would keep her and she would look after the home.

This was not unusual – in many jobs, including the entire civil service, married women were not employed. It was difficult for a woman to get a mortgage or even buy something on hire purchase without a man’s guarantee.

These were the days before the pill. Sex before marriage was seen as shameful and if a single woman got pregnant it was devastating. Abortion was illegal and many women risked their lives going to the backstreet, or were forced to give their baby up for adoption.

The radical political movements of the 1960s blew apart this repressive and stifled world.

The gains women made then – legal abortion, easier divorce, freedom to express our sexuality and the principle of equal pay – changed the lives of millions.

The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) was born in the US among students radicalised by the mass black civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.

In Britain the WLM developed from the struggles of women workers for equal pay.

The two movements had different characteristics but both were rooted in the effect of the long post war economic boom.

This had pulled increasing numbers of women into the workforce and into further education.

For example between 1960 and 1965 there was a 57 percent increase in women being awarded degrees in the US (the same figure for men rose by 25 percent). Suddenly a whole generation of women had new expectations.

The universities of the US became centres of struggle and debate. By 1967 thousands of women had been on marches and protests. They had fought for black civil rights, opposed the war in Vietnam and challenged the state.

Yet they faced sexism in their own political organisations and felt sidelined and trivialised by the mainly male leadership.

It seems shocking that such brilliant radical movements did not take women’s rights seriously. But when the movements exploded in the 1960s they did so in a vacuum.

The socialist tradition had been decimated by the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. There was no Labour type party or revolutionary left to speak of. The shadow cast by the experience of Stalinism made many feel that socialism had nothing to do with liberation.

Women activists began to organise their own workshops, write papers and talk about their oppression.

The movement in the US was dominated by the idea that women had to organise separately. Meetings often involved women talking about their personal lives – a process described as “consciousness raising”.

Groups, dominated by college educated middle class women, spread to cities all over the US.

But although it was never a truly mass movement in terms of numbers and activity it did articulate the dashed hopes and frustration of millions of women.

In Britain the experience of the women’s movement was shaped by the greater influence of the left and class politics here. The presence of a Labour Party, the higher density of trade union membership, and an organised revolutionary left made a difference.

It meant that there was an understanding of the socialist tradition of fighting for women’s rights.

These influences ensured the demands of the British WLM reflected the needs of working class women – free abortion and contraception, equal educational and job opportunities, free 24 hour nurseries and equal pay. Strikes of women workers like the London office cleaners were seen as very much part of the movement.

But there were problems. Ideas about women needing to organise separately divided the movement. In fact bitter experience showed there was nothing inevitably “sisterly” or democratic about women-only organisations.

By the mid 1970s the high point of the WLM on both sides of the Atlantic had passed. Groups fragmented over questions of sexuality, race and issues such as national liberation and imperialism.

Yet the world had changed. For the first time women could control their fertility. Millions of women were gaining a level of economic independence that gave them new choices.

The struggle for women’s liberation and equality had made massive strides but the movement disintegrated. Next week I will look at why.

Seen But Not Heard

Ellie Keen — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:11:06 +0000

On Tuesday evening, around a 100 women and men were heard protesting noisily outside Ealing town hall at the council decision to cut funding for Southall Black Sisters. Among the oldest women’s organisations aimed at helping ethnic minority women, SBS has been caught in the crossfire of two political trends that started since the July 7 bombings in 2005.

The first has been for the government, in an effort to give the impression that it is trying to deal with terrorism, to shift funding to Muslim groups at the expense of other minority groups. In October last year, Hazel Blears announced £70m to combat extremism. Here too there has been a shift, initially from funding top-down “community leaders” to grassroots groups to a bigger focus on empowering women.

Either way, the government is chucking money at the problem and hoping it works. That agenda has inevitably sucked funds out of other priorities. That in itself is likely to breed resentment due to its politically motivated nature.

The second trend has been for commentators of every stripe to decry multiculturalism as the source of all evil and the collapse of our society, without specifying how they define the term and what exactly they object to.

In accordance with the political weather, the commission on integration and cohesion last year declared that funding groups based around ethnicity fuelled separatism. Curiously it said very little on specifically funding religious groups, probably because one of its commissioners, Ramesh Kallidai, is the one-man-band otherwise known as the Hindu Forum of Britain.

Giving money to groups on the basis of ethnicity rather than need can fuel resentment and separatism, especially if that group in question deliberately sets out to exclude others. Plus, I have my own criticisms of multiculturalism.

But SBS’s case is rather different. It provides specialist services to ethnic minority women who may not feel comfortable at mainstream/bigger refuges. As I uncovered in my radio documentary last year, there are plenty of brides who come to this country every year without having learned any English and face domestic violence at home. For them, such services are vital, if we focus purely on need rather than political pointscoring.

Asian women have thus become political footballs. Everyone is falling over themselves to protect them by banning sharia and railing against forced marriages. In a speech on Tuesday the Tory leader David Cameron again mentioned forced marriages, citing the campaigner Jasvinder Sanghera. And yet her refuge group, Karma Nirvana, set up for women in similar situations who had run away from home, would face funding cuts under Cameron’s regime. Ealing council is Tory controlled.

This isn’t to say that Labour is any better. Despite all its rhetoric in favour of equality and women’s rights, the party is largely perceived to be under the thrall of “community leaders” who have little interest in the well being of Asian women.

Last month the tragic story of 19-year-old Sabia Rani’s murder by her husband came to light. And yet, even if she had escaped him and run away, current legislation forbids such brides from recourse to public funds. In other words refuge groups would get no funding to shelter her and her choice would be to stay at home or be destitute. Who cares about those Asian women now?

Southall Black Sisters, it must be remembered, also campaigned hard to get justice for Kiranjit Alhuwalia, who had faced domestic abuse for years, before retaliating one night by setting her partner on fire. It made legal history because the legal interpretation of what constitutes as “provocation” (for murder) was changed for domestic violence cases as a result. It was later even made into a film.

This is the same group that spearheaded Women Against Fundamentalism, which bravely challenged and picketed Muslim activists in 1989 when they were calling for Salman Rushdie’s head. They were fighting the fight against extremism and trying to empower Asian women way before these agendas were even on the political radar. Now, typically, our brave politicians are full of empowering language with little in the way of action to back it up.

For more and more women, booze offers the only escape

Ellie Keen — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:34:58 +0000

Why do women drink themselves to death? Twice as many do, compared to 15 years ago. They vomit alone in their bathrooms, throwing up their self-disgust. In 1991, 7.2 women aged 35-54 per 100,000 died of alcohol-related diseases; today it is 14.8. Some will die of cirrhosis of the liver, or of the drugs they take when they are drunk. Some will die in alcohol-related accidents and some of despair – they will simply kill themselves. The question is, why are more women becoming alcoholics today?

As a recovering alcoholic, I know why I tried to drink myself to death. I was lonely and angry, and I felt worthless. I started drinking when I was 13, a middle-class teenager from the most suburban of suburbs, who came home from school for a quick nip of vodka from an old blue mug. Alcohol was a lover who changed my feelings – I became less angry, and less lonely. Then he swallowed me back, and took everything. By the time that I knew I was an alcoholic, it seemed too late to do anything about it. I washed up in AA at 27, with everything broken.

Nobody knows exactly what causes alcoholism. I believe it is genetic, but triggered by trauma. A person born with an inbred disposition to alcoholism may never develop it if they grow up in a healthy and stable environment. All the recovering alcoholics I know say the same thing – they felt different, even as children. They didn’t feel safe.

Alcoholism has little to do with alcohol, just as bulimia has nothing to do with food; it is a disease of the soul, a system of self-harming thought, which the alcoholic treats with alcohol. The drinking is merely the final, fatal symptom. And what matters for binge-drinking girls is this – not everyone who drinks heavily will develop alcoholism. But to develop alcoholism you have to drink heavily. You have to put the hours in at the pub.

The modern childhood is a kindergarten for alcoholics. All the external criteria are in place to ease the maybe-baby alcoholic into full-blown unto-the-gates-of-hell drunk. Alcohol has never been so cheap. The supermarkets and the happy hours and the clubs can’t stuff it down our throats cheaply enough or fast enough or long enough; some supermarkets sell it at less than cost, to draw the shoppers in. They don’t treat it as a dangerous drug, but as a commodity that is great for business. The more units they sell, the more alcoholics there will be. And the more alcoholics there are, the more units they will sell. Sainsbury’s is now selling cider, the drink of choice for 13-year-olds, for 26 pence a pint.

There are wonderful new ways to make young women feel worthless. Sparkling advertisements and whispering editorials encourage them to aspire to an ever-receding fantasy. You can never be beautiful or thin enough for the fashion magazines of 2008. You can never be sexy enough for MTV, or pornography. You can never be famous enough for Heat. The message is clear and simple and lucrative – be someone else. And that is the tiny voice inside every alcoholic’s head.

But now it is a shriek from a billboard, and young women respond with bulimia and anorexia and compulsive eating and chronic debt – and booze. If Cinderella were rewritten for the 21st century, the prince would say: “Have your pubic hair waxed off. And starve down to size zero. Perhaps some breast implants? Don’t you feel like a better woman now, Cinders?”

Alcoholism is a disease of unreality, and of fantasy. That is why so few recover – you cannot see the gutter to crawl out. The alcoholic lies to herself on a daily basis. And when society lies too – be Britney Spears! Be Posh Spice! You too can be thin and happy! – more will fall. Alcoholism used to be called a “family disease”, in which every family member played a part. The alcoholic was the bad child, the mother or father the caretaker or abuser, the sibling the good child. Now it has become a social disease, and there are “bad children” everywhere.

And how do we respond to this burgeoning mental illness in young women? We treat it with a disgust that will send the alcoholic spiralling ever downwards, or as a comedy, which is almost worse. We watch Britney Spears shaving her hair off and running around Los Angeles, half-dressed or strapped to a stretcher, and wait for her to die. We watch Amy Winehouse crawling on the ground towards her front door. We mouth “Isn’t it terrible?” with a terrible smile and what we really think is, What is the end of the story? Will Princess Britney, the most Googled woman on the planet, be buried in a pink coffin with a Disney Channel logo, before the credits roll? Will Amy pay for her talent with her life, and be immortalised in death, Janis Joplin part two?

Denial is the best friend of alcoholism – and now we all collude. These women are punching themselves in the face, and dying, not dancing, in the streets. And that’s entertainment. As for what’s really going on inside her – who cares?

Rape Rules OK?

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:48:11 +0000

Solicitor general Vera Baird has announced that the government is to abandon a proposal to use expert witnesses to brief juries on the “myths” surrounding rape after judges warned the plan could lead to miscarriages of justice.

Now which miscarriages of justice would they be? The serial date rapists who walk away again and again from rape trials, having convinced the jury that the woman, often met only in the previous 24 hours, had said yes?

Would that be the miscarriage of justice that repeatedly sees men with long records of rape and sexual assault declared innocent by a jury because the victim was too brazen or unemotional or cocky or because she failed to recall a series of traumatic events in a clear, concise and unemotional manner?

Only one in 20 reported rapes lead to a conviction: a poor rate that is plummeting further. Research (see Sue Lees’ book Carnal Knowledge) shows what often happens – police, while improving, may fail to investigate properly; the Crown Prosecution Service is at times too eager to drop cases; a case is further damaged by inadequate prosecutors and finally juries are expected to come to a decision perhaps utterly at odds with each other, irrespective of the details of the case, about the “right” rules of engagement between men and women; husbands and wives; boyfriends and girlfriends.

“Consent” is that magic word that has allowed the crime of rape to become the safest offence for any man to commit if he is so inclined to take what he wants from a woman who is upset; drunk; terrified or laid out cold: male power gone mad.

In war, of course, as we’ve seen in Darfur, consent is brushed aside because rape is a weapon of war. However, in what passes for peace, every decade has had its own variations on what consent may mean – almost all of them laying the burden on women to behave according to an ever-growing list of rules, removing the responsibility from men.

Thirty years ago, a teenager only had to stick out her thumb and hitchhike to be told she was “asking for it”. Judge Betrand Richards in Ipswich crown court in 1982, fined a convicted rapist £2,000, because he believed the victim, a hitchhiker, was guilty of “contributory negligence” for being out on the road.

Even earlier, one of the “rules” of engagement was the conviction that a woman said “No” when she meant “Yes” – because she didn’t want to be seen as too easy. So, wasn’t a man capable of taking the word “No” on face value?

A Home Office report Concerns About Rape, published in 1989, included the results of an unpublished study of male students. Half thought it acceptable to force a woman to have sex under certain circumstances. These included if the man had spent a lot of money on the woman; if she’d had intercourse with others; if they had been dating a long time; if the woman had “led him on” and if the man was so turned on he couldn’t stop (a mythical state much loved by rapists).

Arguably, a similar survey today would not only have similar responses – the list would be longer. And justified because some women now are sexual exhibitionists on a scale not seen since Sodom and Gomorrah. An Amnesty International poll in 2005 found one in three respondents thought a woman was partly or wholly responsible for being raped if she acted flirtatiously – one in four held the same view if she wore sexy or revealing clothing.

It’s not provocation that’s the crime – it’s rape. The fact that half of the students in that 1980s study, did not share these views underlines how rape is sited less in sexual activity and alleged confused communication between the genders and more in a dark and predatory misogynistic streak endorsed by popular culture, and the lack of legal redress.

So, why not have a public inquiry into rape, so we do have a clearer picture of how and why the crime is committed and how and why the culprits walk free again and again? And who the culprits really are. That same Home Office report referred to a Californian study in which SC Smithyman advertised for men who had committed rape (defined as non-consenting penetration of vagina, anus or mouth) to volunteer for a confidential interview (no clue is given as to how the men’s stories were verified).

While American jails were and are full of young, ill-educated black rapists, the men who responded to the ad were mostly white, had qualifications and were in professions.

The Home Office study said:

“... it highlights that men who admit rape may be more evenly distributed through the male population than previously imagined. If this is true then the role of masculine culture, socialisation, attitudes towards women and the differences between men and women’s expectations of behaviour and, in particular of sexual behaviour should be considered if a fuller understanding is to be gained of why rape occurs.”

That was 1989. And a fuller understanding of why rape occurs is nowhere near being part of the mainstream of thought that influences police, prosecutors, juries, judges, ministers and crucially ordinary members of the public, women as well as men.

Now, the minister Vera Baird says the danger in calling psychologists and psychiatrists to give evidence on the range of behaviours among rape victims, is that the defence could call expert witnesses too. And that there would be established: “a profile of a true rape victim, how they behave, and then woman would be put off complaining, thinking ‘I don’t know if I fit this profile’.”

What a load of cobblers. The whole point is to establish the range of reaction and behaviour. If that’s not acceptable then why is it OK for a groups of experts to draft a statement about rape and its impact that will be presented to the jury in a booklet or by the trial judge – losing all the power of being directly related to the individual woman whose word is on trial in the court?

A US study in 1989 found that myths and stereotypes affected the outcome of rape trials more than any other evidence. Rape isn’t sex between lovers with a bit of rough. Talk to rape victims – many of whom don’t report the crime for obvious reasons, only to have to cope with the knowledge that the rapist has attacked again. It even happens in Ambridge (Cathy in BBC Radio 4’s The Archers is facing this dilemma now). Talk to rape victims and the details are frequently horrific, physically and mentally. Humiliation can often leave even deeper scars than having to be stitched as if after childbirth.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Home Office and the police had begun to sharpen up their act – challenging attitudes; conducting research; making changes. Harriet Harman as solicitor general also tried to initiate improvements – but now this has become the equivalent of stitching patches on a threadbare system.

Vera Baird should order an inquiry; collate the plentiful research that already exists; monitor the courts; study how juries reach their verdicts; talk to serial rapists who have had years of successful activity before, perhaps, finally being convicted.

It’s not just expert witnesses that are required. It’s a complete overhaul. Until then, rape continues to rule, OK.