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

[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.