Does a woman have ANY responsibility for her own welfare?

On Tuesday, a young woman, who was raped five years ago after a night out, succeeded in overturning a decision by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board who originally cut her compensation by 25% 'because her excessive consumption of alcohol had been a contributory factor in the rape'.

She was raped by a stranger on her way home - the man was never caught - and, in this case, I whole-heartedly support the appeal findings in restoring her full compensation. It was as ridiculous to suggest that she was part responsible for her own rape through alcohol as it would be to suggest that someone beaten up and robbed was responsible because they'd had a few and were incapable of fighting back or seeing danger.



I am a little more wary, though, about the conventional wisdom -echoed in this current case by the Ministry of Justice - that a woman never has any responsibility for her rape. My concern is primarily in the area of so-called date rape. Now let me be clear. I have no sympathy or tolerance for the man who takes a woman on a date, deliberately plies her with drugged drinks -roprynol or the like - or physically forces her into a sexual act she clearly did not want. Men like that deserve the full weight of the law brought down on them.

We seem to have extended the interpretation of rape, however, to cover the circumstance where a woman claims she was too drunk to give consent. Now this has been used in circumstances, most recently I believe in a case at a Welsh university, where a young woman admitted she went out with a guy from the college who she liked. She admitted that she consumed alcohol of her own free will. She also admitted behaving in an uninhibited fashion in the nightclub, the drink freeing her libidinous instincts to a degree where she was seen to be 'all over' her boy-friend. He took her back to the college and what happened after that became the subject of a court case.

She claims to have woken up in the morning aware that sexual congress had taken place but to which she was not in a state to give consent. The boy was found guilty of rape and his life has consequently been ruined.

I think it's fine that we are sending out messages to young men, particularly, that a woman is not to be treated as a sexual prey and that her full consent to sex is required before intercourse takes place.

I do worry, though, in these women's rights driven times, what message we are sending out to the hordes of young women I see every weekend lurching down the main clubland street in my city by the absolutism of the women's rights lobby and the Ministry of Justice. It seems that, no matter how they behave, no matter how intimate, clinging,and uninhibited their behaviour might be with their partners, occasioned by ridiculous quantities of alcohol willingly consumed, they can wake up in the morning and say 'I was too drunk to know what I was doing'.

Well I don't want women to suffer the horrors of rape - but I don't want men to suffer for the rest of their lives for an experience which, in my view, was in many cases, a shared responsibility. Women's rights groups are very quick, in the cases of pregnancy and abortion, to leap to the argument that a woman's body is her own and thus she owes no explanation to partner or anyone else about what decisions she makes. They are not so quick to support the rights of women to drink copious amounts of alcohol, lose all sense of self control and then have sex with whoever happens to be available. This is the point at which a woman, apparently, is no longer responsible for her own body and what she does with it - it's all the fault of the men.

Well I'm sorry but I feel these are circumstances which should result in a little more investigation before criminal proceedings are brought. I believe there is just as much need for a nationwide campaign to remind women that they do bear some degree of responsibility if they drink themselves into a stupor. It would be a good wake up call to their sense of responsibility - not to mention their health. Rape is unlike any other crime. Few willingly submit to being shot, stabbed or burgled. There are few comparitive situations where the same physical act can be either an act of love or an act of criminal abuse. I think the law needs to be very very sure what exactly took place before ruining a man's life on the say-so of a woman who may be feeling very remorseful and very ashamed of her own lack of self-control.