A word of advice, chaps. The next time you head off for a night out on the tiles, don’t forget to take everything you might need with you.
Wallet, phone and, if you hope to get lucky later on, maybe a packet of condoms and, of course, a legal consent form, an alcohol breath test kit, two independent witnesses, preferably female, and a lawyer to verify that the lady in question has indeed consented to sex and also that she was in a condition to give that consent knowingly and soberly.
Thanks to the newly announced overhaul of how the Crown Prosecution Service should treat rape cases, this is what a typical Friday night out will soon involve for any man who doesn’t fancy facing rape charges the morning after the night before. According to Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the concept of “No means No” just doesn’t hack it anymore.
It turns out that Yes sometimes means No too, particularly when a woman is judged to be too inebriated to be capable of making a conscious decision. If she’s three sheets to the wind, then the new rule is that she is not capable of consenting to get between the sheets.
Even if she has said Yes and has even undressed herself or initiated the sexual advances. Even if she at no point suggested she had changed her mind or asked the man to stop. Even if she blatantly enjoyed herself at the time.
This is patently absurd. And yet this is precisely what the DPP has announced.
Unlike any other offence, where the onus is on the prosecution to prove that the accused is guilty of a crime, this puts the responsibility squarely (if not fairly) on the shoulders of the accused to prove that he is innocent. In one fell swoop, Mrs Saunders has turned a fundamental principle of our justice system – the presumption of innocence – on its head.
Instead of requiring evidence of non-consensual sex, the CPS will now look only for the absence of evidence that there was consent.
Under these new rules, without a legal consent form being signed in front of witnesses (unlikely in most circumstance, I think we can all agree) a drunk man will be held 100% responsible for anything he does during any sexual encounter with a woman. From the first kiss to the zipping up of his trousers, he is culpable for all of his actions – and hers too.
A drunk woman, by contrast, will have zero responsibility and culpability for anything that happens between the two of them simply by virtue of her consumption of alcohol.
