The new wording of the law means that any man paying for sex with a prostitute who is being exploited through force, deception or threats can expect to be prosecuted – regardless of whether or not he knows she is selling her body against her will. Hopefully this will put the breaks on men using women as objects without concern for their health, safety and willingness.

I have yet to see anything about an increased support network for trafficked women or women being forced into prostitution in anticipation of more arrests — if you have drop your comment in the links.

Some Links

Walk in a Punter, Walk Out a Criminal – Cath Elliott @ Too Much to Say For Myself

A Small Blow to the Sex Industry – Kat Banyard @ Prospect

Men cleared as rape woman’s group sex fantasy revealed where a young woman’s accusation of gang rape has been undermined by her online fantasies about group sex.

But the trial at Preston Crown Court collapsed when computer evidence was produced showing her entertaining the prospect of group sex.

Judge Robert Brown ordered the jury to return not guilty verdicts

This is a very old trick of discrediting the witness, something you may know as “she was asking for it” The prosecutor was so convinced dirtying her virtue would make it acceptable for a woman to be raped that he presented no formal evidence, he simply read out msn transcripts.

He said: “It is right to say that there is material in the chatlogs from the complainant, who is prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers, where to use her words ‘her morals go out of the window’.

Neither is the fact that she agreed to meet one man for sex an opener to be raped by his friends. I’m devastated, but not surprised, that the judge fell hook line and sinker for this line, after all we all know how ridiculously low the conviction rate for rape is in this country. But it sets a really dangerous precedent to rifle through a victims internet usage, much like her knicker drawer, and use her own sexuality and independent thought against her. It takes he said, she said to a whole new he thought, she thought level.

As part of the review a special work group has been set up to look at sexual disorders. This is relevant because the DSM is used in law enforcement both in USA and the UK as a guide to mental disorders that can prove reduced capacity, or merit hospitalisation on conviction rather than imprisonment.

Coercive Paraphilic Disorder is a mental ‘disorder’ being considered for DSM-V, used to describe a disorder some think is connected with propensity to rape.

Karen Franklin, Ph.D., of the forensic science blog In the News explains:

“Currently, the propensity to rape is not considered a mental illness. Proponents of adding a rapist diagnosis to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) claim it was only excluded the last time around due to pesky feminists’ objections that it would excuse rapists from criminal consequences. However, that turns out to be something of a myth. The main reason it was excluded, says psychologist and lawyer Thomas Zander, who conducted primary research into the history, was because it was not scientifically supportable. And, according to [Raymond] Knight’s* article, it is even less supportable now than it was back then.”

Feminists have long claimed that men who rape are not ‘different’ or mentally ill but normal men (friends, partners, fathers, colleagues) who do bad things – and evidence supports this. In her blog post Franklin refers to Knight’s review of evidence from a long line of research that suggests “there is not a separate category of men with a propensity to rape. Rather than being a distinct “taxon,” rape propensity exists along a continuum.”

I’m with Karen in hoping that good science defeats these pseudoscientific categories, which she describes as “weak at best”; and this ‘rape mental illness’ is kept out of DSM-V in this review, as it was last time around.

*Knight is considered to be a premiere researcher into the etiology of rape. His article ‘Is a diagnostic category for Paraphilic Coercive Disorder defensible?’ Archives of Sexual Behavior is available online, but requires a subscription. You can view the abstract here.

Hat tip to Karen Franklin Ph.D. and her blog, In the News