Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Why Ken Clarke essentially is right regarding 'serious' rape
Ham-fisted though Ken Clarke may be, he is essentially right about rape, and David Cameron merely trots out deeply uniformed disgraceful PC-fascism
The clear reason why over recent years the proportion of convictions has declined is the change in the nature of the cases coming forwards. 'Stranger rape' remains rare, but so-called 'acquaintance' rape has mushroomed. These cases are inherently not only usually one person's word against another's, that by definition can't even reach the civil standard of proof, let alone a criminal conviction; but often revolve around applying a definition of rape that in many cases is borderline, if not marginal to the point of splitting hairs; and often amounts to a retraction of consent after the sexual act took place.
'Stranger rape' cases are by contrast always clear-cut. By comparison rare, perpetrators usually are serial offenders, who are -- bar police clumsiness -- fairly easily caught. Clearly, albeit that there are cases of 'aquaintance rape' of a character more akin to 'stranger rape', in that these are very much the minority then there should be a profound distinction in sentencing accordingly btween 'stranger' and 'acquaintance' rape.
Self-evidently hopeless 'acquaintance' rape cases nevertheless are still passed by the CPS to be taken to court, not least because in effect the burden of proof has been shifted on to the defence. Changes in the law in 2003 now require an accused man to show that he took "reasonable steps" to establish consent. The court even supplies a "non-exhaustible list" of what he should have done! The law is supposed to be that any activity is presumed not to be illegal unless it is so proscribed, but in the case of sex, all sex by men is on sufferance of being declared illegal in what amounts to a 'show trial'.
To make matters far worse, research across the world reveals that specialist rape investigators conclude that most rape allegations made to police are fabricated. This is why, despite decades of pressure from the Home Office, a quarter of complaints are still 'no crimed'. No crime is deemed to have taken place. On top of this, many of the large number of cases put under 'no further action' police strongly suspect likewise are fabrications. Sir Ian Blair himself authored the study in England that showed that police estimated 50-70% of complaints to be bogus. Even on the Home Office's own figures in two specialist rape studies, conservatively 35% of formal rape allegations are bogus.
Professor Keith Soothill has researched the reasons why women fabricate rape, which can be and often are extremely trivial. So it was that the two large studies on supposed 'drug rape' found that the whole phenomenon was a hoax. The Forensic Science Service looked at over a thousand hospitalised cases and found that a third had self-administered illegal drugs, a third has self-administered alcohol, and a third were not intoxicated with anything at all. The embarrassments that in the case of each of these thousand individual women these claims of 'drug rape' were to cover, were varied but mostly astonishingly inconsequential.
Given all this, it should be clear that there needs to be a radical review of sentencing for rape, the role of the CPS, and the question of anonymity for both defendents and accusers.
Talk of wanting to increase the rate of conviction is an appalling travesty of justice, and is the Harriet Harman line of trying to convict nine innocent men to try to catch the one man who actually is guilty.
Friday, May 13, 2011
''Not fit for purpose' -- as ever. The Borders Agency hasn't a clue even when given 100,000 of them
Four reports in quick order by independent inspectorates has revealed that The Borders & Immigration Agency is no more 'fit for purpose' and no less dysfuctional than the former Immigration & Nationality Directorate supposedly it replaced.
Of course, this is to be fully expected because there was no replacement but merely a rebranding. That is all that the 'points system' is; plus renaming the whole shebang as an 'agency' so as to symbolically distance the sub-department within the Home Office from Home Office top management. Journalists should be ashamed of themselves for not delving in even the most cursory manner to see that this is the case.
The latest castigating report is by John Vine, the independent inspector for the BIA, who states that there is no routine way that the BIA acts upon the 100,000 tip-offs annually they receive about illegal migrants. They simply don't record outcomes -- for the obvious reason that there aren't any, or very few; at least not positive ones.
"It's not wthin the DNA of the officers", Vine quipped.
This is fully in line with the Home Office contention that immigration is an impossible problem to solve, and that in any case an in effect completely open border is consonant with the 'political-correctness'-fascist stance through Government and the government-media-education elite (the major backlash against ordinary UK citizens).
The BIA has no idea how many illegal migrants are in the UK, even to the nearest million ... not even how many of those it has granted entry are bona fide. It does not know who or where they are, nor what they are doing.
Given that there will be no reintroduction of a system to take the details of all those entering and leaving the UK until the inexplicably delayed 'e-borders' scheduled for 2014, then in the meantime anyone can come here as a mere tourist and disappear -- never mind as a bogus student, marriage partner, etc.
There is no immigration system in the UK worth the name.
What is even worse is that there is no routine mechanism to stop illegal (and deemed legal but actually fraudulent) migrants from accessing benefits, National Insurance Numbers and the NHS.
The Home Office and Government more widely (notably the DWP) evidently continues to regard the whole shambles as just too daunting to tackle and to do little more than take gesture measures and simply to 'news manage'.
It was ever thus.
There is little sign that the Coalition Government will do much to change any of this. After all, David Cameron seems hardly that much less of a PC-fascist than most Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians -- it pains me to say as a former long-time LD activist -- notwithstanding his recent immigration speech, which appears very much to be just talk ahead of last week's elections.
What sort of signal is it to cut 5,000 BIA staff?
Yes, they're useless, but only because they are made useless by a system the hopelessness of which should be Cameron's very top priority to radically change.
'Not fit for purpose' -- as ever. The Borders Agency hasn't a clue even when given 100,000 of them
Four reports in quick order by independent inspectorates has revealed that The Borders & Immigration Agency is no more 'fit for purpose' and no less dysfuctional than the former Immigration & Nationality Directorate supposedly it replaced.
Of course, this is to be fully expected because there was no replacement but merely a rebranding. That is all that the 'points system' is; plus renaming the whole shebang as an 'agency' so as to symbolically distance the sub-department within the Home Office from Home Office top management. Journalists should be ashamed of themselves for not delving in even the most cursory manner to see that this is the case.
The latest castigating report is by John Vine, the independent inspector for the BIA, who states that there is no routine way that the BIA acts upon the 100,000 tip-offs annually they receive about illegal migrants. They simply don't record outcomes -- for the obvious reason that there aren't any, or very few; at least not positive ones.
"It's not wthin the DNA of the officers", Vine quipped.
This is fully in line with the Home Office contention that immigration is an impossible problem to solve, and that in any case an in effect completely open border is consonant with the 'political-correctness'-fascist stance through Government and the government-media-education elite (the major backlash against ordinary UK citizens).
The BIA has no idea how many illegal migrants are in the UK, even to the nearest million ... not even how many of those it has granted entry are bona fide. It does not know who or where they are, nor what they are doing.
Given that there will be no reintroduction of a system to take the details of all those entering and leaving the UK until the inexplicably delayed 'e-borders' scheduled for 2014, then in the meantime anyone can come here as a mere tourist and disappear -- never mind as a bogus student, marriage partner, etc.
There is no immigration system in the UK worth the name.
What is even worse is that there is no routine mechanism to stop illegal (and deemed legal but actually fraudulent) migrants from accessing benefits, National Insurance Numbers and the NHS.
The Home Office and Government more widely (notably the DWP) evidently continues to regard the whole shambles as just too daunting to tackle and to do little more than take gesture measures and simply to 'news manage'.
It was ever thus.
There is little sign that the Coalition Government will do much to change any of this. After all, David Cameron seems hardly that much less of a PC-fascist than most Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians -- it pains me to say as a former long-time LD activist -- notwithstanding his recent immigration speech, which appears very much to be just talk ahead of last week's elections.
What sort of signal is it to cut 5,000 BIA staff?
Yes, they're useless, but only because they are made useless by a system the hopelessness of which should be Cameron's very top priority to radically change.
