to this excellent and reasoned opinion...

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/20/did-...use-smear-ted-heath/

"Too often genuine victims were treated with disrespect and disbelieved… From refusing to take assaulted women and children seriously...the police took a hair-raising journey from one extreme straight to the other."

Did the police really treat genuine victims with disrespect and disbelieve them?

Jo wrote:
"Too often genuine victims were treated with disrespect and disbelieved… From refusing to take assaulted women and children seriously...the police took a hair-raising journey from one extreme straight to the other."

Did the police really treat genuine victims with disrespect and disbelieve them?

No, I don't think so. That's a lie repeated by the Wimmin's Stasi until it became true.

Police in the past probably had the autonomy and good sense to put an early kibosh on bullshit complaints.

Defence advocates in the past apparently did play to jury's preconceptions about women's behaviour and motives. Whether the preconceptions are correct or not is certainly not a settled point, despite the frequent repetition of how false "rape myths" are.*

I wonder if, in a few decades to come, it will be the turn of prosecution advocates to have their current little tricks criticised.



* One example is the solemn judicial pronouncement that it is untrue that an unchaste woman is a) less worthy of belief and b) more likely to consent to sex. If we unpack the statement we can see that it's not true in itself. a) depends on the social stigma attached to the status of unchaste and the way the woman reacts to this social pressure. If a promiscuous woman feels it necessary to obfuscate her romantic activities then that is indeed an indication of deceptiveness. And where promiscuity is considered a morally negative quality, one might reasonably surmise the presence of other morally negative qualities, such as dishonesty (assuming that dishonesty is also considered morally negative in the particular social context). b) depends what we mean by likelihood. A simple definition would be that someone who has sex with a new partner every 10 days is more likely to consent than someone who fucks a new partner every hundred days. But then there might be a monogamous couple who have sex (consensually!) every day. It just depends what we mean by the word. Also, do past patterns or frequency of behaviour have a predictive value for future behaviour? Yes and no: it depends. What behaviour, in what patterns, in what conditions, compared to what future context. Anyway, within a paragraph, I've demonstrated that the wise judicial pronouncement is not a useful piece of guidance for juries. It's just a replacement preconception.