Earlier this week, an episode of the BBC TV series EastEnders included a rape scene that generated hundreds of complaints. As rape scenes go, there wasn’t much to see. I have written about this elsewhere, commenting that whatever the storyline it is a thinly veiled piece of feminist propaganda. Thinking about it further, I think the phrase “thinly veiled” is misplaced.
The reason for this rethink is a news report of a potential sex attack in a Crawley park, around thirty miles as the crow flies from where I am sitting now. A 14 year old schoolgirl was attacked by a man from behind. That was his big mistake, because not only did the girl fight him off, but she gave him a good kicking into the bargain. Okay, she is trained in martial arts, but the contrast between her and the fictional victim in EastEnders is stunning.
Clearly a girl who is attacked under such circumstances must realise she is in big trouble, even if she finds it difficult to think on the fly, as would most of us. She was in danger of at least being raped, or far worse. It is little more than a week since the body of another 14 year old girl – Alice Gross – was fished out of the River Brent near her West London home. Alice is believed to have been murdered by Arnis Zalkalns, who committed suicide shortly after.
Having said that, predators, be they human or other, will generally attack only those they perceive to be weaker than themselves, so this girl is to be commended on two counts.
The simulated rape in EastEnders was an entirely different scenario. Although the victim was a smallish woman, her attacker was not formidable, and the rape was committed upstairs in a busy public house, and any member of her family could have walked in at any time. True, she said no, but she made no real attempt to fight him off. Self-styled anti-rape activists would have us believe it was because she was paralysed with fear. Because this rape was left to the imagination, the logistics of it are likewise unknown. In an earlier, similar scene, in the ITV soap Emmerdale, an older woman is working late in a factory with a family friend, just the two of them, so that is more plausible, but again in the EastEnders rape, the rapist is behind the victim, with the implication of him penetrating her so, but there is no indication of how he held her down with one hand while unbuttoning his trousers with the other...under such circumstances I feel sure that the overwhelming majority of women would have raised the alarm or at worst given their assailant so much grief that he would have caused visible bruising, torn the victim’s dress, and so on.
Instead, after the rape she simply lies there until he has gone, then undresses, jumps in the shower, and destroys all the forensic evidence. This may be the natural inclination to wash away the dirt of an attacker, but even a woman with a single digit IQ realises this is not the thing to do. Now we are witnessing the victim’s life coming apart as she begins behaving irrationally and doubtless breaking down. What we are supposed to conclude from this is that this is confirmation not only that she was raped, but that any woman who claims to have been raped under similar circumstances has indeed been raped, and that we, and more importantly the police and the jury, should believe her uncritically, even if she points the finger at her alleged attacker a week, a month, a year or a decade after the event, when of course there will be no corroboration at all.
This is what has happened in the Operation Yewtree cases, although in those there has been an even more mendacious perversion of the rule of law by using what has been called corroboration by volume, ie loading the indictment with charge after charge in the hope of bamboozling the jury. That tactic worked to such spectacular effect in the Rolf Harris case that he was even convicted of one sexual assault in a place he had never visited – certainly at the time – and of another in which he was accused of attacking a teenage girl in a crowded room under a cloak of invisibility. Max Clifford suffered a similar fate; Dave Lee Travis managed to beat most of the charges, but as the man himself said, it had always been his fear that if the prosecution threw enough mud, some of it would stick, and he was convicted of a solitary offence.
None of the above cases involved rape charges, but William Roache – who was tried for rape – managed to beat the rap primarily because even after the passage of decades it was clear his accusers were lying.
The whole focus of self-styled anti-rape activists appears to be to lower the threshold for conviction in sex cases, if not to abolish it entirely, that and to demonise men, hence their ludicrous promotion of so-called statistics that have absolutely no basis in fact. According to Rape Crisis (citing government figures) there are around 85,000 rapes annually.
Of course, there are government statistics and government statistics; the number of murder convictions can be calculated accurately, the number of actual murders reasonably accurately, but when statistics depend on simply asking people questions, all manner of other factors come into play, including the size of the selected pool, how it was selected, the veracity of the respondents, and so on. The reality is that no one knows how many rapes are not reported; obviously some are not, and by the same token some reported rapes never happened.
Those who wish to genuinely reduce the incidence of rape should look to other methods, but the ludicrous feminist mantra of teaching men not to rape, or the promotion of idiotic ideas like rape culture and patriarchy theory are not the way to do it anymore than the current and ongoing attack on the rights of the accused in sex cases, something that like all other repressive legislation will be extended to other offences if not now then at some time in the not-too-distant future.
