Male violence and harassment of women

[IvanV]

Using deception to get sex is being proposed as a new crime

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... -deception

What this makes me think of in particular is the controversial case of Gayle Newland. Although she was found guilty of several cases of sexual assault, in effect it was about deception. She successfully got the initial conviction (8 years sentence) found unsafe at appeal, after serving several months. She was then retried, found guilty again, and given a 6 year sentence. In brief, Newland was found to have impersonated a man to have sex with a woman, who claims she was deceived for an extended period during which they had sex repeatedly.

As the UK Human Rights Blog points out, this was not a unique case. CPS have in effect prosecuted for "gender deception" on a number of occasions. And trans activists in particular have not been happy about it. Here one commentator interested in such things indicates a few things that are troubling about this case.

This proposed law would make such prosecutions rather easier. Currently they have to be prosecuted as sexual assault. The "difficulty" with that for the prosecution is apparent consent. Though they eventually "succeeded" with Newland.

To the extent this is used to further prosecutions on "gender deception", I'm afraid this risks becoming in part like spending scarce parliamentary time on a law that would be relevant only in a small number of cases, being done mainly in furtherance of culture wars. Like when they proposed bringing in specific new laws on causing death by dangerous cycling.

[jimbob]

Grim article in the Guardian about Andrew Tate in Romania.

Lots of red flags.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/f ... dApp_Other

[Fishnut]

Grim article in the Guardian about Andrew Tate in Romania.

Lots of red flags.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/f ... dApp_Other

This section has really stood out to me,

Young, disaffected men began to follow him in their droves. They wanted more. Tate responded by ramping up the controversy. On social media, he talked about beating women, about grabbing them by the neck. Then in 2017, he declared that women who were raped bear some of the responsibility. Unsurprisingly, he was banned from all the major social media platforms in 2022. [my bolding]

He publicly talked about beating and strangling women in 2017 yet it took 5 years for him to be banned from social media. The ‘Unsurprisingly’ seems to indicate that it was inevitable this action would lead him to being banned but it’s clear that it wasn’t at all, because if it was it wouldn’t have taken so long for it to happen. It feels like a savage indictment of social media and it’s inability to take misogyny and violence towards women seriously.

[jimbob]

This seems obvious to me

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... dApp_Other

Given the implicit threat often inherent in indecent exposure.

[Fishnut]

This is a great piece that looks at the missed opportunities in capturing Couzens before Sarah Everard's murder.

Valentines Day two years ago. Wayne Couzens exposed his penis to staff at the drive through window at the McDonalds. If only the female staff had reported it. If only there was ANPR data. If only Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer, who had his cock out had paid with a credit card in his own name. If only the ANPR data and his credit card for the f.cking McDonald’s matched the serving police officer in the Diplomatic Protection Order.

OH WAIT. HE DIDN’T EVEN PAY CASH. HE GAVE THEM HIS NAME ON HIS OWN CARD IN HIS OWN CARD AND IT WAS IGNORED.

After nothing happening to him after February 14th, 2021 he returned and did it again on the 27th. Once again, credit card and ANPR data and female staff that were shaken and angry.

The police didn't bother investigating and three days later he killed Sarah Everard.

The piece notes that, astoundingly, even if they had bothered investigating and got Couzens' name, nothing would flag that he was a police officer. The Chief Constable of the British Transport Police points out that,

If I was to commit a crime, get arrested and give my details, there is no obvious system check that would flag that I’m a police officer if I didn’t choose to tell them. Yes, you read that correctly. On arrest, my DNA and prints would be taken and checked against national forensics databases. Even though I’ve provided my biometric samples to the police (my employer), the datasets are not run together to identify a match. As it stands today, I could be arrested by the police and nobody but me would know I am the police. In my view this is a priority issue for our attention. Otherwise, others could fall through the cracks and go on to do harm.

This seems like a major oversight.

Indecent exposure definitely needs to be treated more seriously. The Guardian piece that Jimbob highlighted quotes Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, the deputy director of the child and woman abuse studies unit at London Metropolitan University,

Because [indecent exposure] is so underreported, we can’t use criminal justice statistics to give us any reliable sense of prevalence.

Couzens was reported in 2020 for exposing himself and m.st.rbating at a woman in a woodland in Kent, and was reported in 2021 twice by McDonalds employees for exposing himself. If you acknowledge that a tiny proportion of indecent exposure incidents are reported then this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Couzens. And, as the original piece points out, it's highly unlikely that Sarah Everard was the first person he physically harmed.

Through his position of power in the police he had access to thousands of women that would never be missed.

[Fishnut]

I haven't had a chance to read the actual paper [pdf] yet but wanted to share it and give others the opportunity to have a read too.

Some interesting research has been published on rape convictions in the UK.

From the Nuffield Foundation who funded the research,

Professor Cheryl Thomas from the Faculty of Laws at UCL is undertaking the first empirical research study of the impact of special measures and digital presentation of evidence on jury decision-making. She is using a rigorous, multi-method approach to understanding jury decision-making and is working exclusively with real juries at court.

Joshua Rosenberg has a summary and analysis.

The conviction rate in rape cases has increased from 55 per cent to 75 per cent over the past 15 years, according to groundbreaking new research that contradicts widely-held assumptions about jury trials...

Charging levels have fluctuated during the 15-year period. But what the research describes as a “precipitous” fall in rape charging from 2016 to 2020 turns out have been part of a systemic fall in all charging rates for this period.

[snoozeofreason]

I haven't had a chance to read the actual paper [pdf] yet but wanted to share it and give others the opportunity to have a read too.

Some interesting research has been published on rape convictions in the UK.

From the Nuffield Foundation who funded the research,

Professor Cheryl Thomas from the Faculty of Laws at UCL is undertaking the first empirical research study of the impact of special measures and digital presentation of evidence on jury decision-making. She is using a rigorous, multi-method approach to understanding jury decision-making and is working exclusively with real juries at court.

Joshua Rosenberg has a summary and analysis.

...

It's a very thorough piece of research. Understandably Thomas focusses on jury conviction rates, and it is interesting that they are higher for rape than for other offences. If you look at overall conviction rates (including guilty pleas) it's the other way round, with rape having a somewhat lower conviction rate than other offences. The reason for the difference is that the proportion of defendants who plead not guilty, and therefore end up in front of a jury, is significantly higher for rape than for other offences.

It's worth bearing in mind that, if a case ends up before a jury, at least two assessments about the probability of conviction have been made. Before the defendant is charged, the CPS must decide that the probability that a properly instructed jury will convict is greater than 50%. After that, the defendant also has to make a guess about the probability of conviction. If they decide that a jury is likely to find them guilty then - assuming they are acting rationally in their own self-interest, which they might not be - it is better to plead guilty because this will result in a less severe sentence. To a certain extent, conviction rates depend on how accurately the CPS and the defendant can judge the chances of conviction. If both were given crystal balls that allowed them to see the future, then the overall conviction rate would be close to 100%, because the CPS would know which cases to prosecute and which to drop, whereas the conviction rate at trial would be close to zero (and based only on a small number of defendants who decide to plead not guilty even though they know that the jury will disagree with them).

[snoozeofreason]

... whereas the conviction rate at trial would be close to zero (and based only on a small number of defendants who decide to plead not guilty even though they know that the jury will disagree with them).

That didn't come out right! What I meant to say was that, if both CPS and defendant had perfect information then the conviction rate at trial would, like the overall rate, be close to 100%, but it would be based on a tiny number of cases because no sensible defendant would opt for trial.

If the defendant could predict the result of a trial, but the CPS were still in the real world and could only estimate it, then the conviction rate at trial would be close to zero because the defendant would already know the result before pleading.

[Fishnut]

I may be misunderstanding or extrapolating incorrectly, but given that the conviction rate for rape trials is higher than other offences, does that support the fears of some people that the CPS has a higher bar for taking rape cases to trial than other offences?

[snoozeofreason]

I may be misunderstanding or extrapolating incorrectly, but given that the conviction rate for rape trials is higher than other offences, does that support the fears of some people that the CPS has a higher bar for taking rape cases to trial than other offences?

Thomas is looking at the jury conviction rate, i.e. the conviction rate at trial. When the CPS make a decision to charge they don't know whether there will be a trial or not. The defendant might agree with their assessment of the likelihood of conviction, and plead guilty in order to get a lower sentence, or they might take the chance that the CPS are wrong and plead not guilty. It is only in the latter circumstance that you get a trial.

If you wanted to judge whether the CPS are calling it right, a better statistic to use would be the overall conviction rate, which includes the guilty pleas, and which is somewhat lower for rape than for other offences.

However even this would not be a particularly good guide, because the conviction rate will also be influenced by the distribution of the conviction probabilities. For example, if cases tend to hinge on undisputable forensic evidence then it is likely that they will divide into those that are certain of conviction, because such evidence exists, or those that have no hope of conviction, because it does not. In such a scenario, if the CPS judge as they should, and prosecute only when the probability of conviction is greater than 50%, the conviction rate will end up being close to 100% because, if the probability of conviction in greater than 50%, then it is probably close to 100%.

What you possibly could conclude from Thomas's data is that a lot of defendants are being overly optimistic about their chances in front of a jury, because there seem to be a lot of cases where the defendant thinks that the jury will acquit them, only to find that it does not.

[discovolante]

Re the last para of your post, it seems to be that rape is one of those crimes that people really really do not want to be found guilty of, so would prefer to plead not guilty and take their chances.

[dyqik]

Re the last para of your post, it seems to be that rape is one of those crimes that people really really do not want to be found guilty of, so would prefer to plead not guilty and take their chances.

It's possible that the accused are also being told/thinking that the extra delay until a trial could work in their favor, with the victim (or other witnesses, although the victim is key witness) getting cold feet about testifying or other information coming to light that would discredit them. And that this is more likely in rape cases than most other cases.

[Woodchopper]

However even this would not be a particularly good guide, because the conviction rate will also be influenced by the distribution of the conviction probabilities. For example, if cases tend to hinge on undisputable forensic evidence then it is likely that they will divide into those that are certain of conviction, because such evidence exists, or those that have no hope of conviction, because it does not. In such a scenario, if the CPS judge as they should, and prosecute only when the probability of conviction is greater than 50%, the conviction rate will end up being close to 100% because, if the probability of conviction in greater than 50%, then it is probably close to 100%.

I agree, as far as I'm aware the most important reason for the low overall conviction rate (ratio of guilty verdicts to reports) is that in many cases there isn't useful forensic evidence. If the accused states that both had consensual sex and there isn't any useful forensic evidence then its difficult to get to a point at which the jury agrees with each other that they are certain that the accused is guilty. It could be that the CPS is filtering out such cases.

[snoozeofreason]

However even this would not be a particularly good guide, because the conviction rate will also be influenced by the distribution of the conviction probabilities. For example, if cases tend to hinge on undisputable forensic evidence then it is likely that they will divide into those that are certain of conviction, because such evidence exists, or those that have no hope of conviction, because it does not. In such a scenario, if the CPS judge as they should, and prosecute only when the probability of conviction is greater than 50%, the conviction rate will end up being close to 100% because, if the probability of conviction in greater than 50%, then it is probably close to 100%.

I agree, as far as I'm aware the most important reason for the low overall conviction rate (ratio of guilty verdicts to reports) is that in many cases there isn't useful forensic evidence. If the accused states that both had consensual sex and there isn't any useful forensic evidence then its difficult to get to a point at which the jury agrees with each other that they are certain that the accused is guilty. It could be that the CPS is filtering out such cases.

You seem to be using "overall conviction rate" in a different sense to the one I was using in my post. My "overall conviction rate" referred to the ratio of convictions to charges made by CPS. In other words it is calculated after the CPS has filtered out cases where they decide that the probability of conviction is less than 50%. The "jury conviction rate" referred to in Cheryl Thomas's paper is the ratio of convictions to trials, so it filters out the cases where the defendant pleads guilty, as well as those where the CPS do not prosecute.

If you take calculate conviction rates as the ratio of convictions to reports you get low values for virtually all offences, and particularly low rates for rape. There are lots of reasons for this. An important factor is that complainants often withdraw their support for the prosecution. The extraordinary delays in bringing cases to trial, which I have been banging on about in the Criminal Barristers thread over the last year, really don't help with that.

BTW I am not trying to claim that there is a correct and an incorrect meaning to the phrase "conviction rate". One of the reasons why it gives rise to confusion is that it doesn't seem to have a "correct" meaning.

[Woodchopper]

Female journalist pretends to be drunk. Man follows her back to her hotel room. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comme ... ame=iossmf

[Grumble]

Female journalist pretends to be drunk. Man follows her back to her hotel room. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comme ... ame=iossmf

I presume she stayed outside the room to avoid being trapped in there with him. Scary stuff.

[Woodchopper]

However even this would not be a particularly good guide, because the conviction rate will also be influenced by the distribution of the conviction probabilities. For example, if cases tend to hinge on undisputable forensic evidence then it is likely that they will divide into those that are certain of conviction, because such evidence exists, or those that have no hope of conviction, because it does not. In such a scenario, if the CPS judge as they should, and prosecute only when the probability of conviction is greater than 50%, the conviction rate will end up being close to 100% because, if the probability of conviction in greater than 50%, then it is probably close to 100%.

I agree, as far as I'm aware the most important reason for the low overall conviction rate (ratio of guilty verdicts to reports) is that in many cases there isn't useful forensic evidence. If the accused states that both had consensual sex and there isn't any useful forensic evidence then its difficult to get to a point at which the jury agrees with each other that they are certain that the accused is guilty. It could be that the CPS is filtering out such cases.

You seem to be using "overall conviction rate" in a different sense to the one I was using in my post. My "overall conviction rate" referred to the ratio of convictions to charges made by CPS. In other words it is calculated after the CPS has filtered out cases where they decide that the probability of conviction is less than 50%. The "jury conviction rate" referred to in Cheryl Thomas's paper is the ratio of convictions to trials, so it filters out the cases where the defendant pleads guilty, as well as those where the CPS do not prosecute.

Yes, I should have been more precise. I was thinking of the different ratio of the number of reports to the number of convictions.

If you take calculate conviction rates as the ratio of convictions to reports you get low values for virtually all offences, and particularly low rates for rape. There are lots of reasons for this. An important factor is that complainants often withdraw their support for the prosecution. The extraordinary delays in bringing cases to trial, which I have been banging on about in the Criminal Barristers thread over the last year, really don't help with that.

That's correct, but there are different reasons for low rates for different offenses. Most importantly, for many crimes there is no identified suspect. If someone's car is stolen there may be no information available on who stole it. Rape is different in that we know from surveys of victims that the majority of perpetrators are known to the victim.

We do have some idea as to why people who make reports of rape withdraw their support, criminologists have studied this for many years. I don't have time to do a literature review but as far as I remember some of the most important factors are fear that appearing in court would be a traumatic experience, and belief that there is a low chance that there would be a successful prosecution. On the latter this would also apply to the cases that the CPS declines to prosecute.

Excessive delays in bringing cases to trial certainly are a problem. But there are other probably more important explanations. The very low ratio of prosecutions compared to reports or actual rapes has occurred for a long time, and as far as I know occurs in other developed countries.

BTW I am not trying to claim that there is a correct and an incorrect meaning to the phrase "conviction rate". One of the reasons why it gives rise to confusion is that it doesn't seem to have a "correct" meaning.

Yes, its used in different ways by differnet people.

[Woodchopper]

Female journalist pretends to be drunk. Man follows her back to her hotel room. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comme ... ame=iossmf

I presume she stayed outside the room to avoid being trapped in there with him. Scary stuff.

Yes, its difficult to watch. She looks shaken despite presumably having a crew nearby.

[jimbob]

Female journalist pretends to be drunk. Man follows her back to her hotel room. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comme ... ame=iossmf

I presume she stayed outside the room to avoid being trapped in there with him. Scary stuff.

Yes, its difficult to watch. She looks shaken despite presumably having a crew nearby.

Yup

[Grumble]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... SApp_Other
Campaign to get flashing taken more seriously as an offence. Is sending a dick pic flashing? If not, why not? I don’t know how many are sent anonymously, never having received one, but there must be a high chance of identifying senders and at the least cautioning them, getting it on record.

[Woodchopper]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... SApp_Other
Campaign to get flashing taken more seriously as an offence. Is sending a dick pic flashing? If not, why not? I don’t know how many are sent anonymously, never having received one, but there must be a high chance of identifying senders and at the least cautioning them, getting it on record.

As far as I know sending an unwanted dick pic is illegal, but a different crime than flashing in person. Yes, it should be possible to identify the sender, especially if they are known to the victim. Difficult though to get a prosecution if the sender and victim live in different countries.

It would be good if more effort were used to investigate and prosecute flashing and of course other sex offenses. I am though not sure about the call in the article for men to be able to refer themselves for treatment. That would be great if it were to work, but I doubt that many sex offenders are likely to admit to themselves or others that they need help.

[Chris Preston]

A follow on from Lehrmann rape trial is an official inquiry into the police handling of the case. A story with only a few details here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-17/ ... /102230938

Other information that has come out suggests the situation was a lot worse then this. The inquiry arose because the DPP penned an official letter of complaint about the police. In that letter, among other claims, was that the police provided selective cherry-picked evidence to the DPP, withheld evidence from the DPP and yet provided constant, and at some times exclusive, engagement with the defence lawyers.

[Tessa K]

There's a man at my gym who has twice been aggressive to me. One time I asked how many sets he had left on a piece of kit. He stared at me for a long time in a really hostile, threatening way and refused to answer. That's the second time.

I mentioned him to another woman today who said he's been aggressive and threatening to her too.

Both our reactions were - oh so it's not just me. We shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable in the gym even if there is no actual physical threat.

The trouble is, he hasn't (yet) done anything bad enough to get banned. I know the manager will believe me but doubt that reporting him will change anything.

I'm not looking for advice, just posting this as a personal experience.

[Grumble]

There's a man at my gym who has twice been aggressive to me. One time I asked how many sets he had left on a piece of kit. He stared at me for a long time in a really hostile, threatening way and refused to answer. That's the second time.

I mentioned him to another woman today who said he's been aggressive and threatening to her too.

Both our reactions were - oh so it's not just me. We shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable in the gym even if there is no actual physical threat.

The trouble is, he hasn't (yet) done anything bad enough to get banned. I know the manager will believe me but doubt that reporting him will change anything.

I'm not looking for advice, just posting this as a personal experience.

Does the gym have a code of conduct for members?

[Tessa K]

There's a man at my gym who has twice been aggressive to me. One time I asked how many sets he had left on a piece of kit. He stared at me for a long time in a really hostile, threatening way and refused to answer. That's the second time.

I mentioned him to another woman today who said he's been aggressive and threatening to her too.

Both our reactions were - oh so it's not just me. We shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable in the gym even if there is no actual physical threat.

The trouble is, he hasn't (yet) done anything bad enough to get banned. I know the manager will believe me but doubt that reporting him will change anything.

I'm not looking for advice, just posting this as a personal experience.

Does the gym have a code of conduct for members?

Not that I can find but it is part of UCL and they should have.