{"id":16676,"date":"2012-08-29T09:09:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T14:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16676"},"modified":"2012-08-29T09:09:03","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T14:09:03","slug":"brendan-oneill-on-the-rape-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/29\/brendan-oneill-on-the-rape-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan O’Neill on the rape debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Always willing to take a contrarian stand, Brendan O’Neill<\/a> refutes the very common meme:<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n

This sounds correct. It seems simple yet right to assert that if a woman has not consented to sex, then rape has occurred.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> — 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,53],"tags":[343,267,43],"class_list":["post-16676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-law","category-politics","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-justice","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4kY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16677,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16676\/revisions\/16677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}