Always willing to take a contrarian stand, Brendan O’Neill refutes the very common meme:
In the words of Salma Yaqoob of Galloway’s Respect party, “rape occurs when a woman has not consented to sex”. Or in the widely reported phrasing of a spokesperson for Rape Crisis, “Sex without consent is rape”.
This sounds correct. It seems simple yet right to assert that if a woman has not consented to sex, then rape has occurred.
But it is wrong. More than that, the idea that all “non-consensual sex is rape”, as Galloway himself has now said in his clarification of his defence of Assange, represents a dangerous rewriting of what rape really means.
Feminists always focus on the state of mind of the woman or women involved in an alleged rape and disregard the state of mind of the man.
This is a terrible error, because in order for rape to have occurred, it is not enough to prove that the woman did not consent; we must also surely prove that the man knows she did not consent, or was utterly reckless as to the question of her consent, and carried on regardless.
That is, rape must involve an intention on the part of the man to commit rape. The man must have a guilty mind — or what is referred to in law as mens rea — in the sense that he knows he is committing rape. In leaving out this key component of rape, feminists are not only undermining the meaning and gravity of this crime — they are also displaying a cavalier disregard for some of the key democratic principles of the modern legal system.
