… 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?
