Good Old Courts

A Crown Court judge has been overridden this week on his decision to sentence two rapists to less than 2 years in prison. Apparently he didn't really want to imprison the boy who just held the girl down, as he had not actually had sex with her (the boy got a fiver for doing so, therefore it would be better dealt with under a breach of Working Time Regulations or Health and Safety).

I think it is disgraceful that these prestigious icons of our community are overridden in this ham-handed way. After all, there is good precedent for this lenient decision. In recent years we have discovered many previously unknown facts about rape:

• if you can't remember saying yes to sex, you may well have done so nonetheless.
• if a psychologist says your rape of a baby was a one-off, it was.
• if you were wrongly sentenced to a too-short term for raping an ill old lady, too bad.
• you might be proved as an abusive sexual police predator who redefines the term "batoning", but unless someone was sitting about witnessing your rapes, a charge of sexual assault is just fine.
• if you are a cool enough customer to answer your police radio during sex, it ain't rape.
• many raped women asked for it, so that defence is always worth a try.

The good effects of these discoveries cannot be underrated. Let us not forget that if you are a female officer on duty and a rape comes in, it means the following:

As the only female on shift, you rush to the scene. You then spend two hours with a weeping woman, interrupted constantly by phonecalls from the sergeant, CID and possibly some guy from a department responsible for emailing. You do your best to comfort her but you are solely in charge of all enquiries as it isn't appropriate for her to have to talk about vaginas in front of a man, in case he collapses, so you have a lot more to think about than just her welfare.

You have to make sure she will press charges, otherwise she hasn't really been raped. She has to consent to a medical immediately, or she hasn't really been raped. She has to give you all her clothing or she hasn't really been raped. If she's showered, urinated, eaten or brushed her teeth, you've got to ask yourself if she's really been raped. If it happened three days ago, or three months ago, you KNOW she hasn't really been raped. If there aren't any bruises or visible signs of attack, well, she pretty much definitely consented. If there isn't any sign of DNA, she is a lying whore who probably gets off on spending fourteen hours with the police alleging all kinds of things.

You will then call CID back. They are busy with the gucci arrest of the offender, so you have to seize all her clothing, make notes of her first account, organise a doctor, get her to the rape suite, try to get some overtime authorised but fail. No DC will come and the wait will start to make you feel unprofessional in front of the victim, so the best thing is to crack on with the doctor and get all the relevant swabs taken and booked in. You haven't received any training for this, but no one likes a whinging WPC who doesn't know what she is doing so just muddle through the best you can. Most big cases are lost over lack of continuity with exhibits anyway, so you will be in good company.

This is also where these recent trial decisions can help. Use them to help assess the credibility of your job. You can try to drum up a couple of witnesses, as if no one heard or saw anything, it isn't really a proper rape. If it happened behind closed doors between two adult parties, you can bet your paycheck it was consensual sex. If it is too hard to prove, falls under one of the categories where offenders were previously acquitted, and will take up too much of your time, it is "a Blandmore rape" which did not really happen, and although we have to charge the guy to get the detection, it can be binned without too much more effort.

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