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Allegations
of Sexual Abuse |
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There'll be a lot of
unsettled people after last week's pack rape verdicts, most of them with no
link to the case. A woman now living in
Australia successfully brought charges of abduction and rape against four men
in the Wellington court. This followed events 16
years ago in a Mt Maunganui hut where she was lured one lunchtime, she said,
on the basis that she'd meet a man to whom she was attracted. At the time the woman
must have been 20, and her attackers 30, 24, 31 and 37. That's one odd detail
in the case - the men were adults, not experimenting youthful idiots, or gang
prospects out to prove their virility. The woman said her
hands were bound, and she was subjected to indignities. The men countered
that she'd suggested group sex herself, and had been a willing participant.
The jury did not believe them. The first unsettling
thing about this is the time since the rapes occurred. The case will have
stirred memories for many women who've chosen to overlook bad past
experiences - which seems to be most women I know - and also for many men
whose past sexual conduct is shaming. Rape is far more common
than we let ourselves believe. That knowledge will lie behind the immediate
suggestion from one women's group that more historic charges could follow
this successful prosecution. I doubt that many will,
though. Trials are aptly named. They are ordeals, and brutalising. Dealing
with intimate, embarrassing evidence in court would be beyond most people,
which is why we rather admire those who pursue justice there. The rest of us
live through bad experiences, and move on. We may be hurt by them but we get
by, and in time we may even forget. There's another issue
holding back woman complainants. It's thinking of the women who are now part
of those men's lives - their wives, and the mothers of their children. I
guess we hope those men, who may well now be feeling uneasy, are reformed
characters; that they've learned how to respect women, not treat them
callously. We hope they've matured into people who now and then remember the
past only with regret. If that's the case,
we'd reason, why upset their families, hurting people we don't know, for the
sake of revenge? Revenge won't bring back our innocence, or restore the trust
we lost. There's sense in that attitude
if it works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone. Hopefully the woman in
this case feels a wrong has been righted, and will be happier for it. But even she must have
felt some compassion for the women in the rapists' families who cried out so
heart-wrenchingly as the verdicts came in. They were also losing their
innocence; they were losing their trust. After the verdict, Dr
Felicity Goodyear-Smith talked about the unreliability of memory, and
suggested it might be preferable to have a limit on how long after a rape a
prosecution could be brought - say one to five years. But a crime remains a
crime whenever it happens. It doesn't go away by arbitrarily cancelling it
out because of a time limit, or by telling a victim it's no longer relevant. That,
it seems to me, would be yet another form of brutality. The only real
protection against having historic charges brought against you, if that's
what you fear, is not to have committed offences in the first place, or to
have exploited vulnerable women. And this is where this case revealed
peculiar attitudes towards sexuality. Only in pornography, as
far as I'm aware, would women who were sane, drug-free and sober clamour for
group sex with strangers for their own sexual gratification. Only a madwoman would
derive pleasure from it. What kind of thrill could it be to be gang-banged in
a shed with a cut lunch waiting for afters? But even more baffling
is the thought that a group of men could think the experience was worth it. What might they be
thinking about women - all women - and what about themselves? Would they walk
away whistling afterwards, heads held high? Would they really call this
pleasure worth having? What kind of bonds would you forge with your mates as
you went about it, and for what possible purpose? Rape degrades women,
but it equally degrades the men who commit it. It's a denial of the closeness
men and women naturally seek with each other, and even of the possibility of
friendship between them. Such sexual violence may make a woman feel like
nothing, but equally it makes a rapist declare he's nothing himself. When
your most intimate acts are brutal, you're nothing but emptiness and bluster.
Dare I say it, sex is too good for you. |
