Radshitzy Feminism, Police Investigative Technique: Identity Politics Deconstructing Law and Sense.

…  the Left is always hardest on its elderly: Chris Trotter, Brian Edwards, Rosemary McLeod, and Martyn Bradbury, all forced to limp bravely through their after-careers, the twitter-latte sniping at them down their noses from the high towers of the margins and the cafes.

Looking at New Zealand’s high profile criminal court failures, particularly murder trials - and there may well be another one coming with Mark Lundy - has any other amateur sleuth noted a problem with police investigative technique?

I assume a police investigation starts with an open mind to all the facts, but at some stage in the process a decision is made on charging a single suspect, and then for reasons unknown, perhaps something as inane as budgetary constraints, perhaps the way police career advancement is attained, the entire process narrows down to making the case against that person, and seemingly, nothing else. At that point, only the facts that bend toward the police line are included; facts, including new evidence, that prejudice their case are either put to the margin, or in some atrocious cases, tampered with or destroyed. What Peter Williams QC calls 'the striving for conviction'.

That investigative process needs total overhaul surely from a closed system to an open one. It has to remain receptive to all new facts, even those, no, especially those, that might go against the course of the enquiry. Investigation must be without prejudice and flexible enough to withdraw from an untenable, or even unlikely, position, and start again from a new matrix of data. And a deaf ear needs be turned to public opprobrium vis a vis accusations of time wasting, incompetence, or whatever on long enquiries: to the investigators only the truth must matter, politicisation of their function cannot be allowed to interfere, particularly by the Fortress of Legislation.

This blog post about the continued troubling uptake of a Left feminism, starting as it did from a personal prejudice, almost made the same mistake. Chasing the wrong approach despite the facts, even when I knew better. This was my original, imprudent opening:

If you put the words radical, bat-shit, and crazy together you get radshitzy. This post pertains to that small cool clique standing loudly atop a soapbox anonymously yelling their foul mouthed invective, in an otherwise sane and important debate on feminism, which I am heretofore going to call radshitzy feminism. Last week radshitzy feminism managed to storm the bastion of a necessarily dispassionate and gender/race/religion-blind rule of law by contending that women who make false rape complaints should not be prosecuted by police.

The ‘radshitzy’ creation was of course designed to be incendiary because it was born of that radshitzy form of feminism that did once reach out to touch me in the form of Thorny. Her anonymous hate site with its wall of scum continues still. But such an approach applied to the authors’ of a piece published last month would be a mistake, because I don’t believe either author has malice, per se, they are just rightly angry as hell about rape. Albeit the end point of what they wrote would be, even if unwittingly, evil. So let’s start again, navigating my way fearfully through the vicious battleground that is becoming the closed system of feminist discourse 2013; vicious because one such as myself must crawl on their belly across barbed wire to avoid the poison pill loaded bullets of mansplaining, privilege, and being a patronising git that have taken even some of New Zealand’s Left stalwarts off the field, because the Left is always hardest on its elderly: Chris Trotter, Brian Edwards, Rosemary McLeod, and Martyn Bradbury, all forced to limp bravely through their after-careers, the twitter-latte sniping at them down their noses from the high towers of the margins and the cafes. (Although did Martyn ever have a career?)

The contention that women who make false rape complaints should not be prosecuted by police was made in a co-authored piece published in The Guardian by Lisa Longstaff, spokesperson for UK group Women Against Rape, and Lisa Avalos, assistant professor of law at the University of Kansas. The paragraph in question comes at the end of the article, so I’ll start with it, then work backwards to the context and the intention of Lisa squared – squared, because in the language used by Lisa and Lisa, the notion of an individual human being has been dispensed with, which ultimately, is the problem:

But the prosecution of women for alleged false reports strengthens the myth that women frequently lie about being raped and discourages victims from coming forward. It diverts law enforcement away from thoroughly investigating rape and lets rapists loose on the public. It is not in the public interest, and must be stopped.

I don’t need to check my privilege – that is, impose a gagging order on myself – to say this is wrong on every level. Even if privilege is tortured from my words by the post moderns, I’d still rather speak my mind, thanks, because free speech is the very definition of freedom in just two words.

First, the face value argument put forward that police should never prosecute women who make false rape complaints, because a) that may discourage future rape complaints, and b) we can’t have police time wasted on serving justice over false, and one must assume, malicious, complaints. All police time should be devoted solely to catching rapists.

Taking each of the limbs separately, it is incontrovertible from the statistics given that a high level of rape goes without prosecution. That’s appalling. However the fix for that is greater resourcing of police, not to commit the further wrong of advocating freeing up police time by not prosecuting known crimes, such as the serious false allegation of rape. On this basis why not also free up police time for prosecuting rapists by not prosecuting the lesser misdemeanours of house burglaries or car thefts? Once you’ve made the decision to ignore one set of crimes to police a ‘greater’ crime, where do the police start drawing the line of what laws not to police? It's a mirror image of how many rights of each individual does the state abrogate in chasing the greater common good – (the answer to that is none, incidentally).

An extension of this argument was that Lisa squared quoted the cases of three woman falsely found guilty of making false claims, allowing their rapists to commit further rape crimes. Again, appalling, and bringing my post back to where it started: deeply flawed police processes. But such miscarriage of justice is not confined to the prosecution of rape complaints. Do the numerous instances of false verdicts in murder cases mean we don’t prosecute murder cases? Of course not, that would be absurd.

More worrisomely, Lisa squared in their report admit that the three false convictions cited would not have occurred if police had done their job correctly:

IACP guidelines were clearly not followed in the three cases above. In each, police decided early the woman had lied, disregarded physical evidence of the rape and investigated her rather than her rapist. They also put severe pressure on each woman to retract. DM and Patty did, and the police then used the retraction to charge them.

IACP guidelines also state that a report of sexual assault can only be considered false "if the evidence establishes that no crime was committed or attempted" and "only after a thorough investigation". If this one guideline had been followed, all three prosecutions would never have happened.

The authors identify this is again a matter of police resourcing and in the event, police deficiencies in the investigative process, perhaps even corruption, yet don’t choose the answer as addressing this, but the fantastical notion police should not prosecute woman making false rape complaints. Why was this? The answer to that is why Lisa squared are so important. I believe they are looking to deconstruct the very concept and operation of Western jurisprudence itself.

The contention women not be prosecuted for making false rape claims is anathema to the classical liberal foundation of Western jurisprudence. But that classical liberal position is itself the enemy of a feminism bound to, and bound by, collectivism. [Flak jacket on] My explanation following is not mansplaining to the associate law professor on the philosophy of the rule of law she is supposedly teaching, because that would involve me telling the professor what she already knows, which would appear to be nothing of consequence. Our Western rule of law cannot operate outside the central tenet of individual responsibility for one’s actions, and therefore taking the consequences of those actions. It’s the flip side of rights which similarly must only attach to individuals.

A just justice system has to be founded on acknowledgment of individuals as volitional actors responsible for their actions, and thus taking the consequences thereof. The only rightful defence against this being the plea of insanity. Furthermore, only on this basis can a legal system also seek to change an individual’s behaviour and rehabilitate them. Allowing a group arbitrarily consigned by gender, race, religion, et al, to be freed of the consequences of their behaviour, for any reason, turns a legal system into a mechanism for vendetta and politicking, as well as denying the possibility of rehabilitating an individual’s criminal behaviour (because the underlying logic is individuals are not responsible for their behaviour, or at least don’t have to be; as with Thorny blogging her invective anonymously). Enforcing such a system would be a total abuse of the already inappropriate powers of our modern nation states. Justice has to be blind to gender, race, religion – that is, to group identity and to any agenda toward identity politics. That fact is self-evident: how could a law professor fail on such a basic premise?

Worse, this contention of Longstaff and Avalos thus effectively turns feminism on its head. An identity based ethic as proposed by Lisa squared in this article, ironically the wellspring itself of the ‘isms that sadly still afflict our societies; especially racism and especially sexism. In this instance, stereotyping an individual by identity with a group, objectifying a single woman before the court as a unit of gender only, denying her uniqueness, thus allowing her to slip out from under her responsibility for what she says and does.

For proof, let’s get Socratic. Explain to me how the following conclusions misstate the logic of the no-prosecute proposition:

The contention that women should not be held responsible for their actions in making false rape complaints is also the contention that women must not be viewed by a blind justice, but in terms of identity as that group, women, and thus of needing a lesser capacity before the law.

How could it not mean this?

Furthermore, a lesser capacity before the law, must therefore infer a lesser competency outside of the law.

How could it not mean this?

Based on this Lisa squared would appear to defy the definition, or at least the movement, of a feminism at all, surely? How is not every women belittled by their argument?

And noting, as already intimated, this nonsense doesn’t stop here. If we have to make this special case in law for women, what of concessions for other groupings such as race or religion? Once justice is disposed of, how are we not left only with a system of injustice which will devolve to using the might of the state to advance causes and cliques, consequences be damned?

One more thing about the historical dead-end of radshitzyism, in all its guises, not just this branch of feminism, albeit this instance as applicable to Lisa squared. As this piece destroys Lisa Avalos’s credentials to be teaching law, in my opinion, so it casts doubts on the advocacy of Lisa Longstaff. I’m drawing a direct line from women shouldn’t be prosecuted for making false claims, to it must, surely, be quite alright for women to tell lies about men in court, period. Once language is detached from its concrete legs in semantics and thus veracity, then it becomes a slippery slope indeed. Which is the clue to where we arrive again, whenever I look at feminism: it's always that dictatorial Mr Marx and his group-think. Lisa squared's article is the logical illogical end point of a pointless academic feminist discourse that has finally deconstructed itself to nothing, as in, one’s word means nothing because words mean nothing. Well no, worse than that. A woman’s word means nothing, but a man is still to be held to his, with all the retrograde symbolic inferences that creates for gender relations.

Finally, to widen the frame on the piece to include its context, it started with this opening paragraph; note the language (my underlining):

Every time a celebrity is acquitted of rape allegations, a pernicious media campaign clamours for anonymity for defendants to stop women and children from wrecking vulnerable men's lives. Most recently, we saw this after the [Coronation Street star] Michael Le Vell trial.

I personally have misgivings even with the logic that flows from the issue of anonymity of defendants (men) standing trial for rape, to the argument of not prosecuting false complaints of rape. How actually are they connected? I see them as quite disparate.

Regardless, taking this opening on its own terms, I think there certainly is a valid argument for defendant anonymity in the criminal jurisdiction, and across all crimes, not just rape, including women who are on charges of false rape complaints. This because privacy is what truly marks the march toward the civilised society, which is why the tax surveillance states of the Left and Right in the West have seen the death of a nascent free, voluntary society. As I have written before on this blog:

I believe there should be no cameras in court. I believe that we all are innocent until proven guilty, and that other than in the very rare case of public safety, to be decided by the police, all defendants before criminal trial should have name suppression unless, or until, proven guilty. That’s the civil and civilised society. Yes, we must have reporters in the court, as a check on corruption and to ensure the law is delivered without bias, but that need only be an embargoed print media, with proceedings reported either only after a guilty verdict, or by withholding names in the case of innocence.

Can someone tell me why feminism has tied itself so wholly to the Left? Liberation can only be achieved within an individualistic classical liberal ethic (aka libertarian, or even anarcho-capitalist). Free the individual and you free the woman. The Left politick binds all to the state by force, never liberates. The Left politick is about pure state force required for redistribution, and thus can exact its violence only by the surveillance state. The contention of Longstaff and Avalos further proof. If carried into practice their contention would obliterate the notion of individuality, casting all men as rapists and all women as victims, with the enormous harm to innocent individual men from such false claims supposedly superseded by the ‘greater good’. That is evil. I know feminists aren't man-haters; the problem with Lisa squared being that is exactly what the language they use infers, such inference a pernicious falsehood. Will a reasoning feminism ever pull itself back from the brink of this, and enter into a civilised discourse? And don’t confuse my use of civilised with mainstream. Whatever the case, to do so it will first have to drop any hope of liberation by this too long engagement with Mr Marx; he’s always been a jailer, chaining us to the lives of complete strangers.

Or to simplify all the above, seriously, allowing women to make false complaints of rape with no consequences: neither of these women can see the consequence of this? Because every lawyer who has seen more than a clutch of marital separations and consequent custody battles could. Has Lisa Avalos ever actually practised law in the wild?