Alec Salmond
Nicola Sturgeon must have been absolutely furious that her old friend Alec Salmond was found not guilty of the majority of the dozen-plus sexual assault allegations against him a couple of years ago - plus one 'Not proven' verdict.
This nuanced possible outcome simply means evidence failed to pass the 'Beyond reasonable doubt' test that most Western legal systems follow. This nuance, however, doesn't fit into the binary good/evil narratives beloved of some sexual assault (SA) policies, mostly imported from US universities at the start of the 2010s in the wake of the Title IX 'Campus rape' hysteria.
Have you ever wondered why there seemed to be a massive increase in SA stories in the media between 2011 and 2014? It's essentially because the transatlantic culture activistas working in academia and the media successfully industrialised these sorts of allegations. The 'Not proven' verdict doesn't fit into this tidy, media-friendly victim-perp narrative, so must be expunged in order to get conviction rates up.
As opposed to being celebrated (as you'd suspect they might be) low conviction rates are a perpetual 'Cause for concern' on the BBC and other agenda-setting platforms. So, there is a vaunted pilot scheme in Scotland to have trials without juries in alleged rape/sexual assault cases.
The best way to take a big beast like Salmond down is to throw a bunch of minor allegations at him in order to put the idea of a pattern in the minds of the jury. Problem is that these juries – especially in a historically no-nonsense place such as Scotland – aren't having any of it and can see a politicised set-up coming a mile off. Edinburgh is a long way from Portland Place, let alone Harvard.
This simply will not do for the savvy, legally-minded Sturgeon; so the solution? Remove the juries, replace them with professional jurors who've had their thinking checked after decades of bias training about approved 'Rape myths', and ramp up the spurious allegations in order to create some sort of media-hyped moral panic.
If the traditionally very serious crime of rape has been as decriminalised as power feminists - like Michele Dauber in the US and her proteges such as barrister Charlotte Proudman in the UK - relentlessly attest, it is they that made it so. If you're going to call Salmond's 'Sleepy cuddles' testimony rape, only for him to be exonerated for the lot, then you really do only have yourself to blame.
Sturgeon and the new Scottish National Party are nothing if not determined though, so in order to tackle the rape myths that surely got Salmond off, these soft-minded old dinosaurs clearly need to be replaced by professional jurors: the professionals of whose class increasingly consists of the overwhelmingly female filled field of criminology.
There are always unintended consequences though – the real decriminalisation of rape – and for those supposedly 'Getting away with it' there is no 'Walking free' following such an allegation. It'll stay forever, and the really dangerous predators-with-intent are far too clever to get caught. There's good evidence that it's the low-hanging fruit who are clogging up the prison system for alleged sex offences convicted throughout the 2010s - a convenient way to get conviction rates up in a time of austerity and when targets are pressing.
By Sean Bw Parker
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