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Home / Moral Panics / Drug
Rape urban myth Discussion
Papers about Drug Rape Scares |
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by Josie Appleton. Christmas partygoers are
apparently like lambs to drink-spiking wolves. Fears abound that revellers
will be drugged - with substances like rohypnol, ketamine, or liquid ecstasy
- then raped, robbed, or worse. Campaigns across the UK are warning people to
beware. In Newcastle, volunteers are handing out protective stoppers for
club-goers to put over their bottles. Norfolk Police have launched a campaign
to warn people not to leave their drinks unattended - dubbed ‘Operation
Enterprise’, the force is inviting youngsters to come up with catchy
drink-spiking-awareness designs and slogans (2). London’s Camden Police will be
handing out a brand of drink stoppers known as ‘spikey’ to people queuing for
clubs and bars; and Wrexham police and council are trawling bars, leaving
warning green foam ‘spikes’ next to unattended drinks, to warn their owners
that they could have been had. A number of bars across the UK - four in
Hartlepool, eight in Tyne and Wear - now stock ‘spikey’ drink stoppers. Graham Rhodes, founder of the
Roofie Foundation, estimates that there are ‘up to 50’ awareness campaigns
running this Christmas. He says that these kinds of campaigns started around
2001, and since there have been ‘increases every year’. But more needs to be
done, he tells me: ‘A drink spiking detector kit should be given to every
policeman and paramedic; there should be one behind every bar.’ But all this owes more to media
hype and urban myth than to hard evidence. Detective Chief Superintendent
Dave Gee of Derbyshire police is currently overseeing a UK-wide study into
the issue. He is sceptical about surveys such as that in More magazine:
‘Where does that figure come from? Okay, so somebody thinks they were a
victim - that’s easy to allege, difficult to prove’. He notes that one
Channel Four Dispatches programme on drug rape ‘went around with vox pops,
mainly talking to girls who had had a lot to drink’. The Roofie Foundation’s
stats come from calls to their helpline, rather than verifiable blood tests. Drink spiking does happen. There
have been a handful of successful prosecutions: one man in Edinburgh was
convicted of a sexual attack after spiking a drink; a woman in London picked
up men in West End bars, took them home, drugged them, and relieved them of
their wallets. But is it going on in bars and clubs across the land? Hardly. Dave Gee’s study
identified some 130 cases of suspected ‘drug rape’, and brought alleged
victims in for early tests and questionnaires. The report hasn’t yet been
published, but Gee tells me that most of these cases involve ‘high levels of
voluntary intake of alcohol’ - ie, women who got themselves drunk. Liquid
ecstasy was found in a few cases, and the women concerned denied having taken
it voluntarily. But there was ‘not a single case of rohypnol’, the notorious
‘drug rape’ substance. So it appears that many women who think that they were
drug raped were just plain drunk. It’s easy to see why the
drink-spiking scare had legs. These drugs are often colourless and odourless,
and leave the system quickly, so are hard to detect. And the symptoms they
cause - blackouts, memory loss - are similar to that of excessive alcohol
consumption. The common self-delusion after a night out (‘I didn’t even drink
that much! I don’t know why I passed out then went home with him’) is given a
new twist. The Roofie Foundation gives the
following as an example of suspected drug rape: ‘if you’ve woken up in a
strange place with your underwear scattered around the room, if you have
physical evidence on your body, if you have sore genital areas, or bruising,
you probably have been raped. Equally if you wake up in your own bed with no
idea how or when you got there - its also possible that the drug rapist took
you home and had sex with you in your own bed.’ (3) Perhaps you have been
drug raped - or perhaps you just had a riotous Saturday night. Drink spiking is even being used
as a defence in legal cases. A woman accused of smashing a window of a pub in
Ely, assaulting a police officer, and ‘using words or behaviour that could
cause harassment, alarm or distress’, argued in court that she could have had
her drink spiked (4). The court is investigating. These drink-spiking awareness
campaigns aren’t just wrong-headed, though. They play on people’s anxieties.
The message is: he seems nice but can you really trust him? Look who’s behind
you (‘Who’s watching your drink?’, is the advert for the ‘spikey’ stopper).
The Roofie Foundation advises revellers to ‘appoint a drinks-watcher’ in your
group of friends, ‘never accept a drink from anyone you do not completely
trust’, ‘do not share or exchange drinks’, ‘don’t leave your drink
unattended’, ‘think very carefully about whether you should leave...with
someone you’ve just met’, ‘do not accept a cigarette from anybody. Only light
and smoke your own’ (5). All this puts something of a
dampener on a night out. Pubs and bars are the last bastion of uninhibited
social interaction. By day, people walk through public spaces in their own
bubble, regarding others with suspicion. In the dark of clubs, loosened by
alcohol, they strike up conversations with strangers and let themselves go. That’s what makes bars and pubs
such rich pickings for the scaremongers. We’re on our guard on the Tube, but
at night the guards come down. ‘Awareness raising’ seems to be about keeping
people on perpetual alert, on the lookout for their safety. Graham Rhodes
tells me: ‘Having stoppers in bars creates awareness. Every one that is out
there is an awareness item - it says, “I’m worried about my drink being
spiked”.’ It’s not just a women’s issue, either, he says: ‘we estimate that
70 per cent of drink spiking is done as a joke or to commit robbery. Beware
of drink spiking, because there are a lot more issues than drug rape. We need
to make men realise that they are equally targets.’ These campaigns are doing their
damage. The More survey found that 77 per cent of women claimed to keep hold
of their drink even when they go to the loo; only eight per cent said that
they ‘leave their drink on the table and hope that no-one touches it’. On one
youth chatroom a young woman said: ‘I wasn’t worried [about drug
rape]...until I took a first aid course a couple of weeks ago! My first aid
tutor told us that there is date rape happening in this area!…. I think this
is a much more widespread problem than I could have imagined and it does make
me worried to go out to nightclubs.’ This is a campaign looking for an
argument. When evidence about date-rape drugs looks shaky, campaigners switch
focus to drink spiking with...alcohol. In the More magazine’s survey, the
figure of 23 per cent figure included women who had their drink spiked with
strong spirits. Indeed, alcohol spiking was the focus of the Newcastle
drink-spiking campaign. By these accounts, somebody
slipping an extra shot into your drink - or just buying you more drink than
you asked for - is ‘drink spiking’. The ‘What is drink spiking?’ section on
the Leicester Student website reads: ‘alcohol can also be used as a substance
to spike drinks - it can alter someone’s mind. Therefore asking for a double
shot instead of a single without gaining the consent of the person who you
are buying the drink for, is in fact illegal.’ Buying someone a pint rather
than a half might be seen as generous gesture, getting into the spirit of
things. Now, apparently, it’s a sinister form of manipulation. There’s no evidence for a mass of
predatory drug-wielders, on the lookout for unsuspecting victims. We do need
to keep our wits about us this Christmas - not guarding our drinks, but
guarding ourselves from drink-spiking campaigns. (1)
‘Young Women Too Scared To Walk The Streets’, 6 December 2005 |
