Getting drunk.

As a man, or what's left of one, can I say that there is no way the perpetrator of an actual rape can be the victim, although that is what they want you to believe. Drunk or sober, mini-skirt or habit, none of that says 'I'm up for it!' If it's not consensual it shouldn't happen.

Do women actually get as far as court if they are unable to bear witness to what happened? It is, I understand, hard enough to get a conviction when they do remember what happened.
Sounds a little unlikely to me but some of you will know the answer.

I agree Aka . I think she was just stating a fact, that if many rape cases involve women who are so drunk they don't know what they are doing, it's going to be difficult to get convictions. That doesn't excuse rape in any way.

The legal point of view is complicated, difficult to understand. Here's one explanation:
www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/consent/

That's not what she is saying.

In such cases, if the boys are just as off their head and drunk- they could almost be seen as victims in a way- as their physical attributes make them 'perpetrators' rather than 'victims' if you think about it.

Judge Mowat was not making a moral point she was making a legal one.

What she said was that when a jury has " 'a woman who says : 'I was absolutely off my head, I really can't remember what I was doing, I can't remember what I said, I can't remember if I consented or not but I know I wouldn't have done'. I mean when a jury is faced with something like that, how are they supposed to react? "

My friend has two daughters in their mid 30s who are regular binge drinkers and one of them has on more than one occasion missed her stop when traveling home late at night on the train from London.

If she had been attacked/raped on the train are you telling me that she is not responsible in any way for putting herself in that situation ?

Of course the rapist must take the blame, I am definitely not siding with the men, but I truly believe women need to protect themselves.

I can see I am very much in the minority with my views, but it is a no brainer for me.

Exactly. Please, drive to town at 2am one morning- you will be truly shocked. Of course a girl wearing next to nothing and blind drunk does not excuse rape - ever. But as the majority of the boys are just as drunk (and or drugged up to the eye balls) and some of the girls throw themselves at them- you can easily see how things can go badly badly wrong- and the boys are not necessarily the only ones to blame. Tragic.

NfkDumpling - my view too.
I've chatted with several women, and men, who say they woke up one morning in a strange bed next to a strange person without any recollection of the previous evening or night.
Lucky to get away unharmed, but who knows what disease could be passed on if there was no protection (as is likely if both were drunk.)
Or unwanted pregnancy.

I can see that a young bloke who's had a few too many may find it difficult to resist a young flirty girl, also rather the worse for wear and dressed in not much more than underwear. It's very easy, in a drunken haze to misread body language - on both sides. He may be too drunk to realise that she's too drunk to make rational decisions and go beyond the point of no return (as they used to tell us when we was young gals)

And that's without throwing drugs into the equation.

I have had cause to drive through our city's night club area and been dismayed at the appalling conduct and state of the youngsters. And that was before midnight!

I'm not a prude, really I'm not, but I don't recall ever being in the mindless, out of control state these kids were in. Never had the money for a start.

Very interesting thread, especially when read immediately after the one on Rotherham.

On the Rotherham thread there is a lot of criticism of police and CPS for the lack of prosecutions. Here, we have a Judge suggesting any female raped when under the influence of drugs or alcohol is in part responsible, because they put themselves in a vulnerable position.

Isn't that what happened in Rotherham? CPS/police reluctant to issue proceedings, because the girls wouldn't be seen as 'reliable witnesses' by the Judge or Jury?

Also she knew full well that she would be widely reported and so had a greater responsibility to reflect carefully on what she said. I have my suspicions about where we'll see her popping up next

But my ire is not a debate about personal precautions that we should all take ( last year whilst sober I had my bag stolen in Spain and I had been very careless - too relaxed - I have learnt a hard expensive lesson from that and changed my behaviour - but a crime was still committed) no, my point is that an (ex) female ( of which there are few) judges should have thought more carefully about what she said in a post resignation interview about the subject of low conviction rates for this type of crime. And by definition if the woman is too drunk to remember then she could not give consent

No. Sickening, isn't it.

I haven't noticed this principle (having the responsibility of staying sober in order to look after oneself) being applied similarly to other crimes.

Has anyone noticed a judge pontificating in the same way about, say, a man who was mugged or beaten up whilst drunk?

Men have their own problems - for every predatory male out there, there is a whole bunch of them looking for a fight. Two of my very sober young (early 20s) nephews ended up in hospital a few years ago, having been beaten up just for fun. They had met up to go to an evening lecture in Oxford, and were walking home afterwards. Luckily they had witnesses who called the police, who were able to catch a couple of the gang, and it went to court, but one nearly lost an eye and the other still has a limp where they stamped on his knees.

An analogy is that if you leave your handbag on the floor beside your seat and it is stolen, then you were asking for it by not padlocking it to the table leg and the thief is not to blame for succumbing to his natural impulses.

Or, perhaps, that a man whose car is taken without his permission and damaged should have put it away in the garage and not left it parked at the kerbside to tempt "joy-riders".

She does have a part of a point there, though. As there are men out there who will take advantage of a woman's impaired judgement when she drinks too much, it is sensible for women to keep their wits about them.

I do get very cross with people who keep trying to make women responsible for the actions of men. It's a very dangerous logic that forces women into burkas. It implies that men simply can't control themselves and that women are at fault for inciting urges that the men can't control. Which is very demeaning to nice men.

I ended up getting drunk a few times when I was young, certainly not on purpose. I was given drinks that I didn't know the strength of and had a few narrow escapes involving predatory males, but my intention was never to go out and get drunk.

I ended up on a radio talk show once defending my daughter's right to go out for a drink at the end of a hard week with her friends, just like the boys do, instead of staying at home and washing her hair, which was what girls of my generation were meant to do on a Friday night. I said that she had worked just as hard and had probably had twice as much stress, so deserved to be able to let her hair down and relax over a few drinks with friends without being scared to walk home afterwards.

Someone out there should be doing what I have done with my own son - teach their sons to be more respectful to women, remind them that they are someone's sister/daughter/wife.

In a perfect world it would be possible for a woman to get drunk and not have a man take advantage and the majority of men wouldn't, but there are a small number who would take advantage of a woman's condition, that doesn't mean they are "asking for it", just that the man is a reprehensible human being.

Women however do need to take sensible precautions, stay with friends, never leave with a stranger, keep an eye on your drink in case it gets spiked etc. Unfortunately, there have been a small number of women who have sex then change their mind and cry rape. This makes it harder for genuine victims of rape to be believed and should carry a prison sentence as long as that of a rapist.

Of course we all have to take sensible precautions to stay safe but men have a responsibility to accept that a woman who is drunk is not always capable of giving consent.

I don't accept that drunkeness is an invitation to rape.

I think she was saying that when the jury is deciding whom to believe they are siding with the man because the woman can't remember anything.

Also, if the woman can't remember a thing maybe the CPS will be reluctant to prosecute.

"I will also say, and I will be pilloried for saying so, but the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk."

And for a judge she seems woefully ignorant of a legal fact the if you are so drunk then you can't possibly give consent anyway so the problem seems to lie with judges being unable to direct juries properly with regard to this and with juries coming from what is frankly a mysoginist society at its core and there not accepting this fact

Kate - yes I do agree you should be responsible for your own safety and at my age I hope I am. However, we have all been young and sometimes have had that extra drink that was maybe the one that gets us drunk. I used to drum it into my daughter, be careful, get a taxi, if you run out of money we will pay, stay together. Unfortunately when she had one too many some of this advice went out of the window. Thankfully she never came to any harm.

She said women had to stop getting so drunk - why didn't she add that men should stop raping drunken women? She knew how it would play in the media