Despite three decades of extraordinary discovery about the scale and the consequences of sexual crime there is no consensus about sexism, sexual offences, harassment, abuse, sexual trolling, threats, titillation, sex work and sexual objectification.
The response to the "celebrity abuse" cases confirms the unease and confusion and the impunity enjoyed by offenders. The Jimmy Savile case shows how easy it is for predators to create the context in which they can control victims and witnesses. His story is exceptional but it also confirms the confusion and resistance that confronts the evidence of abuse and the sexism that sponsors it.
Violation of women's bodies is perhaps the most tolerated crime in the world. Despite a crest of reforming laws and police protocols raising consciousness among officers, sexual assault is a crime that enjoys almost certain impunity.
Celebrity abuse will encourage more women to take their courage in their hands and report rape but no one expects better outcomes. More than 80 per cent of rapes will not be reported and no-one expects the rate of cinviction to rise. The radical reform of the criminal justice system since 2006 has yielded little or no improvement in outcomes.
Rape Crisis Scotland tells us that more women are coming forward but convictions in the courts remain around 5 per cent, a dismal outcome given that 85 per cent of suspects are known to the victim.
Of the 14 per cent who go to trial in Britain, only half result in a conviction. The Metropolitan Police fielded one of the biggest team of specialist rape investigators in the world. But research revealed that a significant proportion of reports were "no-crimed". They were not recorded and men were not traced or questioned who, it turned out, had previous convictions for violence against women. After these revelations, surely, outcomes would improve. They did not.
The figures are more or less replicated throughout the world. This universal "procedural injustice" is a virtual guarantee of impunity for men who rape women.In China and India, two cases of sexual violence detonated outrage about impunity and about class, power, corruption, women's victimization and heroism.
Deng Yujiao was working in a hotel in Badong County as a pedicurist in 2009 when an enraged business official threw himself at her, waved wads of banknotes and threatened to "smack her to death with money" after she refused to provide sexual services. Fighting him off, she stabbed him with her pedicure knife. When she was charged with murder, an internet "mass incident" gathered four million hits against ostentatious inequality and lawless government.
A young medical student and her friend were on their way home from seeing The Life of Pi in Delhi last year. Her father worked as a porter. He had sold land to pay for her education. The world would never have known about her had she and her friend not got on a bus, had the friend not witnessed her rape and resistance and her assailants' exterminating revenge. He told her story. India was angry and, for the first time, we heard words like patriarchy being discussed on the streets. Everything about the woman's life and death - her tenacity, the rapists' sadistic excess, the bystanders' indifference, the police failure to respond properly, the hospital's inadequacy - was an affront to the best of India. Had she died instantly and alone, her body would have been just another piece of rubbish to deal with.
Impunity does not derive from confusion but collusion. It is a catastrophe for women and a crisis for democracy because it vindicates pessimism about the possibility of making a difference.
What can democracy mean to women who have no expectation that the law will be enforced and their persons protected? In no society in the world does the criminal justice system take the side of women.
Now is the time they all did.
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