Why are so many women being chastised for crimes committed by men?
I’ve got a new idea for a light entertainment show. It’s called Judges say the Craziest Things: a bloopers reel, featuring the latest amusing gaffes our wig-toting arbiters of justice have spouted.
Because they’re always coming out with funny things, aren’t they? Like how a woman who was forced to drink bleach by her husband couldn’t have been 'vulnerable' because she had a university degree, or a man who sexually assaulted a schoolgirl couldn’t be guilty of rape because he ‘did not enjoy it.’ If not a TV series that might have been primetime viewing three decades ago, what are these absurd comments asking for?
To provoke debate, maybe - though utter disbelief is surely the more likely by-product. “If I hit you with this bat with my full power then you would be dead,” 34-year-old Mustafa Bashir told his wife Fakhara Karima after striking her with it. He forced her to drink bleach, take tablets, told her to kill herself and branded her a “slag” when she went out with female friends.
After telling the courts that, if excused a prison sentence, he could take up a position at Leicestershire County Cricket Club (LCCC), judge Richard Mansell QC determined that Fakhara was not vulnerable as she “is plainly an intelligent woman with a network of friends and did go on to graduate university with a 2:1 and a masters.” Hours after the verdict, the LCCC said they had never heard of Bashir.
What bearing does a university degree and a group of female friends have on one’s likelihood of being beaten by a spouse? Absolutely nothing, if you believe that the one person responsible for abuse is the perpetrator; a lot if, like many judges appear to have expressed this week, the victim’s accountability becomes a tool with which to admonish them.
Last July, 18-year-old Megan Clark was raped by a man she met on a night out in Manchester. The pair drunkenly started talking in a Burger King; Ricardo Rodrigues-Fortes-Gomes, 19, ignored her screams when he later attacked her in a stairwell. He has since been sentenced to six years in prison for two counts of rape. Retiring Judge Lindsey Kushner told the trial that “as a woman”, she implored others to be aware that potential attackers “gravitate towards girls who have been drinking”.
The attack on Megan, now 19, was filmed by a passer-by: had that not happened, she said after waiving her right to anonymity, she would not have reported the crime.
Yesterday Judge Jamie Tabor QC, upon sentencing a man to six years in prison for child sex offences, turned to teenage girls visiting the public gallery on a school trip to warn them that they should always assume a “decent pose” in photographs and remain fully clothed, should pictures to the contrary ever be used to “embarrass” them in later life. Michael Nash, 53, who Tabor was sentencing at Gloucester Crown Court, had admitted to seven sex offences involving a 14-year-old girl.
Accountability is important as Megan, who yesterday agreed with Judge Kushner's assessment that women must take care while drinking, said. Does alcohol and drug-taking reduce your inhibitions? Yes. Might you be less able to fend off a potential rapist under the influence? Yes. Does that make the men who perpetrate these kinds of crimes less guilty? No. In all of the cases mentioned above, including 21-year-old Diego Cruz, cleared in a Mexican court of the gang rape of a then-17-year-old classmate because he had done so “without carnal intent”, alcohol - often cited as the key reason rape convictions remain so ground-scrapingly low - features in just one.
What are the UK laws on sexting?
It all smacks of the oft-cited ‘don’t-leave-your-house-unlocked-if-you-don’t-want-to-be-burgled’ mentality; the notion that women have the final say-so when it comes to whether or not they’ll be abused. Debate on this will always rage, but the problem with these kinds of analogies is that they always liken women’s bodies to inanimate objects: to be prized at best, or stolen and damaged at worst.
That a judge would feel the need to address teenage schoolgirls in a public gallery with the advice that they should not take naked photos of themselves - in a trial where Nash had incited a child 40 years younger than him to do so - rather than telling their male classmates not to push them to make such requests in the first place, puts the blame in entirely the wrong place. As does telling a courtroom that a man who penetrates a girl with his fingers against her will, as Cruz did, is not an offence because she was “never helpless.” Ditto the comments made about Fakhara Karima and Megan Clark.
Advice on how to avoid being entangled in a sex attack is crucial. Perhaps judges might first try levelling it at those who commit them, rather than their victims.
