In 1975,American author Susan Brownmiller wrote a “startling”,seminal book calledAgainst Our Will:Men,Women,and Rape. One of the myths she was most determined to cut down was that women make up fibs about sexual assault for revenge or giggles. “While men successfully convinced each other and us that women cry rape with ease and glee,” she wrote,“the reality of rape is that victimised women have always been reluctant to report the crime and seek legal justice – because of the shame of public exposure,because of that complex double standard that makes a female feel culpable,even responsible,for any act of sexual aggression committed against her … their accounts are received with a harsh cynicism that forms the first line of male defence.”
And here we are,again,today. Four in 10 Australians think women fabricate sexual assault to get back at men,theNational Community Attitudes Survey revealed in 2018. One in 10 of us think women are “probably lying” about rape if they don’t report it instantly. Almost a third think women who say they have been raped have often “led the man on” and just had regrets. Exactly a third reckon rape results “from men not being able to control their need for sex”. And more than one in 10 thought non-consensual sex was fine if the women initiated intimacy in a situation where they had just met. Andone recent study showed half of tweets doubt or undermine the stories of women accusing men of rape.
This is the rape culture former Sydney private school student Chanel Contos has spectacularly exposed by gathering 4000-odd stories of young women assaulted by young men. (In 2018-19,the highest number of sexual assault offenders were aged 15 to 19.) But I will come back to those explosive accounts. What’s important to remember is thatonly about 10 per cent of rapes are reported. Of those,while it is very difficult to ascertain exact numbers in different jurisdictions,about 5 per cent are found to be false (a Victorian study found 2 per cent were). It’s a tiny fraction of the whole,comparable to other crimes.
The most important questions are why 90 per cent don’t report,and why so few go to jail. Of those reported,only about 7 per cent result in convictions. So 7 per cent of 10 per cent. Ponder that stat when you think about the rule of law.
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Consent,we keep hearing,is a fraught concept when it comes to young men on the prowl. Although many blokes seem to be perfectly clear about consent when a gay man or transperson is involved. So much so that,for decades,the gay panic defence provided that a man could plead that he was so provoked,offended,enraged or rendered insane by a sexual approach from another man,even just a verbal one,that he was driven to murder him. This defence could allow the charge to be downgraded to manslaughter – or even lead to acquittal.
Gay – or “homosexual advance” – panic was not abolished in NSW until 2014 and in Queensland until 2017. It could still be used as a defence in South Australia untila couple of months ago. A few years before its removal in Queensland,two men were jailed for kicking to death a man who made an advance to one of them in a church courtyard. With the gay panic defence,they were charged not with murder but manslaughter.