“Bad Judge” Mary Jane Mowat spared a former Guardsman jail for having sex with a 13-year-old girl after blaming the teenager.
U.K. Judge Mary Jane Mowat’s record on rape convictions is horrible. You can wonder why in Oxford, only 24 per cent of rape trials result in conviction.
Judge Mary Jane Mowat’s recent (late August 2014)comments to the media are a collection of intellectual dishonesty and bad law that reflect on her poor record of achievement.
It is one thing to have disdain for drunkenness, but attacking women on alcohol abuse as a cause of rape or as the cause of the judiciary’s failings, is more than stupidity, it is a travesty.
She says perhaps in defence of her poor rape conviction rate that the rate of conviction of rapists will only improve when women ‘stop getting drunk’. She just retired.
Aristotle, the great philosopher believed that femininity is an incomplete version of masculinity. He believed that women are defective by nature and incomplete in comparison to men. But Mowatt seems to think they are all just a bunch of drunks.
Certainly it is valid to say that getting convictions without corroboration evidence and without a good survivor-witness on the stand is difficult. Here is another notion. The accused before the court is innocent until proven guilty and the burden of proof should therefore be a ‘burden’. All the officers of the court must do their jobs.
Passing off the failure of the courts on ‘female-drunkedness’ sounds more like senility. We certainly hope that is not the case and that her honour is healthy and simply misspoke herself. Her Honour’s retirement has our blessings in any case.
Mowat’s concern, she says, centers on women’s drunkedness leading to the rape-crime’s victim having no recollection of the event therefore lowering the probability of convicting the rapist.
Writing under an assumed name, an Oxford student known as ‘Maria Marcello’ says she was raped in her second year after passing out in her own bed due to the effects of alcohol. She says the man bragged about it at dinner the next day, but police pressured her into dropping the charges and advised her to drink less in the future.
This is an epic failure of intelligence, logic and law.
Rape so often happens to persons who are vulnerable and that includes those persons losing some or all of their faculties due to consumption of Ketamine, Extasy, Rohypnol, GHB, LSD, alcohol or because of illness like epilepsy, B12 deficiency, concussion, toxic shock syndrome, anemia, or because of trauma like war, coercion, beatings, choking, strangling, injury, shock, fear, panic, you know… all the usual things that lead to women being vulnerable to a rapist. A person under any of these conditions is not able to give consent therefore if in the absence of consent there has been penetration there has been a rape crime.
Mowatt’s 11th-century British-traditional way of thinking is fine for cottage-dwelling tea ladies in Oxfordshire’s retirement clutches but not for a judge. Those ancient streets and architecture of Oxford must ooze memories of long frocks and daintiness of a sort that wouldn’t allow a woman to burp or fart let alone get drunk. Mowatt was permanently stuck in a moment she didn’t get out of somewhere back in time when women’s place in society was secondary and marginalized. Don’t be swayed by bad judges and bad law.
Safety of the person is an inalienable right and her job was to defend that right. Perhaps she failed on the job, we haven’t looked at every case, but certainly her ‘swan song’ is a flop.
There is no doubt that alcohol abuse is a societal problem.
Hard day at the office; too many bills to pay; too much responsibility; whatever the feeble excuse for alcohol abuse, it is the same pretty much for men and women alike. It is equally wrong and equally harmful no matter the gender. The substance abuse of the criminal’s victim does not mitigate their guilt of the crime.
The sophisticated human beings within our species care for and protect the weak and vulnerable among us. Those that prey upon the weak and vulnerable have no legitimate place in society. That’s why we have courts, judges and prisons.
To suggest that rape convictions are dependent on women’s sobriety is disingenuous crap–just plain stupidity.
People, please don’t be swayed by bad judges and bad law.
