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When I was newly married in the 1970’s, it was not a crime for a man to rape his wife. Legally, whatever he did to his wife, sexually, was not rape. Many men beat their wives with no legal percussions, and many women lived fraught, miserable married lives, never knowing when her husband was going to claim his ‘conjugal rights’, regardless of her state of health or how she was feeling, as my then-husband did. It was generally accepted and legally deemed that the fact of marriage vows ‘implied consent’ and as a married woman she had no right to withdraw consent at any time. Violence within marriage was seen as something of a joke, in both directions. Besides the general acceptance of a husband beating his wife, especially on a Friday night, Punch and Judy shows were widely popular and consistently violent and the postcard depicting a large woman standing in the doorway, holding a rolling pin and berating her hen-pecked husband was commonplace.
Time has moved on but only in one direction it seems, and men are, rightly, being held to account for their behaviour, though violence perpetrated by women is yet to be taken seriously.
The current situation is that much is said these days about rape, sexual assault and rape ‘myths’, much of it emotive, gendered and frankly, misleading, without any thought of defining the terms.
To begin with ‘rape’, the dictionary definition is ‘forced, threatened or coerced sexual intercourse’, and is not gendered.
The legal definition in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act requires 3 elements – that they (a man) intentionally penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of another person with their penis. The other person does not consent to the penetration AND they do not reasonably believe that the other person consents. As it involves a penis, it is gendered, so that only men can commit rape from a legal point of view.
The modern (feminist) definition appears to be ‘any sexual intercourse that the woman decides, during or after the event, that she did not enjoy, or has to explain away to a third party, eg a jealous boyfriend. Additionally, a third party can make this decision regardless of the wishes of the woman concerned. Again, this is entirely gendered – only women can be raped according to feminists and feminist-appeasing media. Female sex abusers ‘had sex with’ their victims, even if they are minor children.
For sexual assault, the dictionary definition is basically ‘touching someone in a sexual way when they do not want you to’, though the wording varies slightly between the Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam and online dictionaries.
The legal definition in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act is ‘sexual touching without consent’, with the difficulty of not actually defining ‘sexual’.
The modern (feminist) definition appears to be ‘any unwanted touching that a woman deems to be sexual in nature even it’s as innocuous as touching an elbow to attract attention.’ SHE is the one to decide if there was sexual intent or not, not the man touching her, as for example, illustrated in Jamie Griffiths’ conviction in 2019, which renders many an awkward encounter criminal.
And speaking of definitions, what exactly is a ‘rape myth’? According to the Oxford dictionary, a myth is ‘a widely held but false belief or idea’. The prominent women’s organisations, Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis, along with the CPS, make a good deal out of ‘rape myths’, by which they mean ‘things we say people believe about rape which are untrue’, but they do nothing to demonstrate that people do actually believe the things they claim are myths. Myth 6 on the Women’s Aid website for instance, claims ‘Domestic abuse is a private family matter and not a social issue’.
They provide NOTHING to back up the assertion that anyone believes such a thing any longer, if a significant number ever did, or that it has any detrimental effect on current general perceptions of abuse.
As another example, myth 16 is equally problematic, stating ‘Women are more likely to be attacked by strangers than by those who claim to love them.’
This much is true, and they then go on to say that ‘women are far more likely to be assaulted, raped and murdered by men known to them than by strangers’. HOWEVER, this is in stark contrast to the wealth of information on women’s organisations websites, instructing women on how to keep themselves safe at night, even in some cases referring to ‘predators’, with, it seems, the express purpose of promoting fear and dread, totally ignoring the fact that men are twice as likely to be a victim of violent crime than women (2.4% v 1.3% in 2022) and 70% of the total murdered were men.
For 2021 figures in England and Wales, only 15% of women’s reports of assaults involved strangers, while 43% of reports made by men involved strangers. Yet, the pressure is on women to see perpetrators round every corner, to take strenuous attempts to avoid being alone - ever - and to follow a long list of ‘instructions’ detailing ‘how to keep themselves safe’ generating a state of living in permanent - artificially engendered - fear. Much of the information out there for women from women’s organisations themselves serves to confirm the ‘myth’, not dispel it.
The ‘rape myths’ detailed by Rape Crisis are no better, as they talk of ‘rape culture’ and spread the idea that ‘the criminal justice system almost never brings perpetrators of sexual violence and abuse to justice’. Meanwhile, the courts are clogged up with around 25% of their caseload relating to sexual offences and around 70% of trials result in a conviction.
In fact, sexual crime is so ‘ignored’, that only rape, domestic abuse and hate crime feature in the CPS breakdown of statistics, and their ‘rape myth’ section on their website amounts to over 80 pages!!
Rape Crisis claim, for instance, that it’s a myth that ‘women lie about being raped because they want attention or revenge, or regret having had sex with someone’ because ‘false allegations are extremely rare.’ There is no correlation between those two statements and neither are they mutually exclusive. What IS rare is that false allegations are prosecuted in a misguided attempt to not deter women from reporting rape and sexual assault. There are many women who have been shown to be liars when trials fall apart, but they are not prosecuted, so organisations like Rape Crisis claim that because few are prosecuted, they are rare.
Frankly, ‘rape myths’ appear to be nothing more than propaganda, spouted to promote a specific (skewed) viewpoint and to follow a specific agenda with nothing given to indicate that anyone actually believes them these days. They focus on old stereotypes that may or may not have ever been commonly believed. If it were not so seriously distorting and damaging to women and girls, (not to mention the men and boys caught up in the hostile environment and negativity directed towards them), it would be risible and best ignored.
The CPS states that ‘Rape is a devastating crime, which can have a lasting impact on victims, their families and the wider community.’
It is, or rather, it can be. Is it controversial to ask – is it always, given the flexible definition of rape in our society?
Let’s go back to the situation for wives pre-1992. The very same behaviour between boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife, could be rape on the one hand and not on the other. Girlfriends had a choice whether or not to have sex. Wives did not.
Now let’s compare that to now, when two people, married or otherwise, can have a lovely evening, imbibe some alcohol, go to bed together and enjoy consensual sex, only for the woman to be told the next day, ‘You were impaired, you couldn’t give legal consent. You were raped!’ If she, or someone on her behalf, makes a complaint to the police, the full force of the law can be invoked and the man can find himself arrested, charged, tried, serving a prison sentence and on the SOR, regardless of the fact that HE had been drinking too, and by all reasonable logic was no more capable, (or just as incapable), of making an informed decision and giving consent as she was. How can what was enjoyable the night before become ‘devastating’ a day or weeks later? If a woman cannot ever legally consent to sex if there is alcohol in her system, are we really expected to believe that rape is occurring in hundreds of thousands of homes almost every night of the week, after the pubs and restaurants close and after every adult celebration where alcohol is served? Does that make any sense to any sensible person?
And why are we being presented with the insistence that what has been normal social interaction for centuries is now ‘rape’ and ‘rape is a devastating crime’? And if it only ‘can’ be devastating why is it treated, promoted and perceived as a crime worse than murder? (Some people say that they would rather live next door to a convicted murderer than a convicted rapist, and there are government moves to make sex offenders serve their full sentences; not so murderers.)
As a wife of the 1970’s who led one of those fraught and miserable lives and has no issue making love after a glass or two of the red stuff, (and I believe many others think likewise), I say ‘not necessarily; it depends and the present hysteria surrounding it has an agenda far removed from concerns about women’s welfare.’
The fact that my ex-husband’s behaviour wasn’t legally rape, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t in actual fact and to all intents and purposes. I FELT raped, many times. I WAS injured, several times. Was my ex-husband guilty of rape because I FELT raped? No, he wasn’t. I would not presume to accuse him of rape because a crime, even rape, takes intent (mens rea/a ‘guilty mind’), a legal concept that seems to be missing from current cases before the courts. My ex-husband, and many like him, was doing what he genuinely and reasonably believed to be his right. It was not a crime, and because of that, because I knew that he was doing what the law said he could, I was not ‘devastated’. Note that I am not saying that I was not damaged. I was, and in a number of ways. I was physically injured on occasion, I earned myself the insults of ‘you’re frigid’ and ‘you’re no fun’, my self-esteem as a woman was shot to pieces, and it was a long time before I was comfortable in any man’s company other than my father’s. Mistakenly, I spent a long time judging other men by my ex-husband’s actions, which affected potential friendships.
It took a long time for me to recover fully, but all the time I knew that worse things might have happened. I knew that if I’d have been raped by a stranger in the dark, it would have been far more traumatic for me. I knew that, had I been murdered, my family would have suffered immeasurably more.
I have been happily remarried now for nearly 25 years with a full and active (fully consensual) sex life, but I know that, on any occasion I’ve had a few drinks before retiring to bed and my husband and I have made love, that has NOT been rape, just because I said so later. As a grown woman, I am perfectly capable of and have the responsibility to say no, and to make it abundantly clear if necessary. I know that if in a morning, my husband kisses me awake and we make love sleepily, that is not rape, just because I change my mind later, unless I have told him, clearly and while fully awake, ‘NEVER do that, I don’t like it.’ I know that if I badgered my husband into making love to me when he didn’t want to, that it wouldn’t be legally defined as rape, but it would be as violating of him – or indeed any man – as it would be if I felt badgered.
If, as a society, we say that rape is such a heinous crime that we will send people to jail for life if guilty of it, we need to be VERY clear about what constitutes rape and what does not.
Playing about with ‘rape myths’ to promote the ideological agenda that all sexual crime is committed by men (it’s not), all men are a danger to women, (they’re not), only women are the victims of sexual violence, (they’re not), that men can never be the victim of a sexual crime as devastating to him as rape is to a woman, (they can), and campaigning ferociously to hog all the resources that the country can provide, reserving them only for women (men get virtually no resources made available to them and no refuge places to escape violence), and treating the definition or rape as a moveable feast, distorts everything about rape, it’s place in the public mind and its effect on those who are genuinely raped. This does no-one any favours, not even women and girls.
The insistence that juries believe rape myths is equally problematic, and the only research, (conducted by Professor Cheryl Thomas KC (Hon) of in 2018 and 2019), which was allowed to question actual jury members immediately after the verdict was given rather than conduct mock trials, overwhelmingly found that hardly any actual jurors believe any of the common ‘rape myths’ as described by the likes of Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis, and by default, the CPS who appear to be in thrall to such organisations. She concluded that research involving only volunteers is necessarily flawed because of that. However, the women’s organisations continue to focus on ‘mock trial’ research, arguably because it suits their agenda better.
In 2009, Susan A. Clancy wrote a book entitled The Trauma Myth, in which she controversially suggested that, in many cases, children subjected to abuse were traumatised more by the adult reaction to the abuse than the abuse itself. She posited that children involved in abusive situations often approached them with confusion and bewilderment rather than overt distress because they trusted the adults abusing them and ultimately, were less damaged by the experience than non-abusive adults thought they should be.
I believe there is a strong argument to say that the same/similar applies to women in our society today; that an industry regarding rape and sexual abuse has been created, one that thrives on inventing new forms of sexual assault and more situations defined as rape, in order to ensure that all women are victims, the more traumatised and for the longer the better. Further, that rape is something that exists or does not at (a woman’s) will, and sometimes the will of a third party if a woman won’t cooperate in making a complaint.
There is not one word on the women’s organisations’ websites that I have found so far that mentions anything about recovery from being the victim of a sexual crime; it’s more ‘once a victim, always a victim and your live is ruined forever’. It is possible to live a fulfilling and enjoyable life, to recover from the experience of rape without looking over one’s shoulder every day, cowering in the fear that sexual violence is inevitable.
I would go so far as to say that men are far from being a threatening factor in most women’s lives - the vast majority are a delight and a joy. The experience of one man, or even a few, need not and should not colour the attitude to all of the male sex.
When it comes down to it, more men have helped me in my 70 years of life than have harmed me, and more women have harmed me than helped me. In fact, more women have harmed me than men have harmed me, so logic suggests women are more to be feared. Or does it make more sense for everyone to be fearful of neither group as a whole, for ‘rape myths’ to be recognised as the ‘fairy stories’ that they are, and to take each individual as exactly that, an individual, as we would wish for ourselves?
By Felicity Stryjak
Felicity Stryjak is retired having worn many hats in her life so far, teacher and paralegal among them. She was born in Torquay in 1953 and has lived in a variety of interesting places both in the UK and abroad. She intends Scotland to be her final place of abode.
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