Sex laws that make sense at last

[fluffymark]

The government is finally introducing a new long overdue Sexual Offences Bill, sweeping away all the old archaic and odd sex laws, and replacing them with ones that appear to make sense.
With luck, the new laws appear to be not only gender equal, but also sexual orientation equal, and use mutual consent as the main basis to their decision on what is legal. They've finally seen the light. Hurrah!

Oh, and to completely change the subject, theres a total lunar eclipse occuring from about 3am to 6am in the early hours of tomorrow morning. Yay!

Comments

[fluffymark]

Just read it. Eeeep. I can see its being introduced as a catch-all to incriminate date-rapists, but it's scary. Thats not the way to do it.

[fluffymark]

Eeeep. I must have missed that bit. Grrrr. No that appears to make no sense. I'm mildly annoyed at it now. It was looking so good until then.

This makes me completely defenceless if a woman gets me drunk and decides to jump on me!!!

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

The exact wording (from http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs/vol1main.pdf ) is: "The law should include a non-exhaustive list of examples where consent is not present such as where a person: ... was asleep, unconscious, or too affected by alcohol or drugs to give free agreement".

Which to me is somewhat ambiguous. It could mean (and I hope it does) that alchohol or drugs are examples of reasons why a person could not give free agreement, as the term is already defined - eg, person lying drunk on a floor, not actually unconscious or resisting in anyway, but it could be rape if you went ahead and had sex with them anyway.

Or does it mean that being "too affected by alcohol or drugs" automatically implies that a person is unable to give free agreement - ie, that any consent they give is considered invalid? In which case we have scary situations where a women can be completely pissed, but still capable of luring someone back to her bed etc, and that would be rape.

I don't see anything about this only being available for women; it seems it should still apply if a man was raped by another man, or there's the new offence of "sexual assault by penetration" which would cover any penetration and doesn't seem to be gender specific. Although yes, if you mean specifically heterosexual sex, it is sad and one-sided that the woman can claim a crime has been committed if she was drunk, even if she actively wanted it at the time, but a man can't do so if he was drunk.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is trying to come up with a legal phrase that will cover all possible circumstances and situations. There's a big difference between not wanting to do something and the time and realising (however short a time later) later what a big mistake something was. So the answer to how incapacitated counts as unable to give consent will vary for every individual on every occasion. I think the question that should be asked in a case is 'would a reasonable person act in the same way as the defendant with all other factors the same?'

Gina

[fluffymark]

The problem is, one one person considers reasonable another person wouldn't. As you say, it depends entirely on the exact circumstances and peopel involved and any 'blanket' law to cover all circumstances is going to have a lot of exceptions. It would be wonderful if evertone coudl trust each other, but inevitably someone will abuse the law to their own ends.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

British law's full of this "reasonable person". I think it's a good way to estabish where precedence will be allowed to determine the law - although it doesn't work so well in practice when judges tend to be senile old gits...

[fluffymark]

The judges perception of what is reasonable needs to be...er...reasonable for that to work.

[laumiere.livejournal.com]

The penetration clause is non-gender specific.

As a feminist it does rather hack me off as it seems to assume that women are incapable of taking any sexual responsibility.

Also, it's abolished the law that if a girl is forced into an arranged marriage either in this country or brought her and she is under 15 (which is still statutary rape) the husband can be charged with a rape offence. *grrr*

[fluffymark]

The way i read it, it's actually assuming drunk people can't assume sexual responisibility. Which is a fair point up to an extent, but it's a fine line about what you define as merely tipsy seduction, and what you define as too-pissed-to-give-valid-consent.

Not too sure what to think about the arranged marriage lark. Arranged marriages aren't neccessarily bad things, and some of them appear to work well, but there are obviously going to be a few cases where it's totally against the woman's will (or possibly even tha man's) and thats bad. Presumably though, in those cases, the lack of consent makes these new laws applicable anyway.

Re:

[laumiere.livejournal.com]

Apparently not. Because of the job i do i get all bogged down in this. The consent thing is actually very much contested, as any woman can go to a ppolice station say 'i've been raped' and the man involved has to *prove* he did his best to ascertain consent. I think the only way to do this without any doubt is to ask someone to sleep with you in front of policeman or someother impartial party, which would sort of kill the romance.

[fluffymark]

*nods* The sex police would be an extremely unromantic idea.

Incidentally, what is your job? *wonders*

Re:

[laumiere.livejournal.com]

Researcher for an anti-Violence Against Women feminist organisation. So besides having been raped myself, i have to deal with the laws, court proceedings, crass stupidity, myths etc surrounding rape on a regular basis.

And i don't hate men.

[fluffymark]

Oh eeeeep. Poor you. That doesn't sound like fun.

*hugs*

Re:

[laumiere.livejournal.com]

The job isn't so bad, it's good to think maybe you can help people.

[fluffymark]

*smiles* If thats your attitude, then you're a truly wonderful person. Helping people, and crawling through much red tape and stupidity to do it, is a proper good thing. Go you! :)

Re:

[laumiere.livejournal.com]

Thank you dearlyng :-)

[fluffymark]

*smallsmile* flattery will get you everywhere. Or so they say.

Re:

[laumiere.livejournal.com]

Except Morecambe.

[fluffymark]

*shudder*. Don't remind me. I gre up near there. Morecambe was my stomping ground as a teenager. The idea that theres now a goth festival there is very surreal for me. Eeeep!

[fluffymark]

Well, however bad it is, it'd got to be better than the old rules. Which were quite frankly, silly. And even those were better than the puritanical sex laws in some US states.