Rape sells papers

Rape and sexual abuse just aren’t what they used to be. They are – in the sense that what was regarded as rape since the abduction of the Sabine women (circa 750 BC), still is. But the concept has been expanded to include things that in the past were seen, at worst, as boorishness.

This means there are more cases for our newspapers to describe in every salacious detail so beloved of their panting readers. And boy, do they ever. One can’t open even a formerly respectable broadsheet without seeing stories of lusty males forcing themselves into chaste females.

Forensic rigour is nonexistent: the hacks don’t even notice that their stories include contradictory facts. Take today’s hit: a student describing himself as a ‘choral scholar’ allegedly raped a fellow student. The victim is female, which has made me upgrade my general assessment of choristers.

The way the case is covered, however, hasn’t appreciably shifted my view of hacks. Here I go by only what I read in the papers, and it doesn’t make much sense.

The half-dressed victim and the perpetrator were in bed together, engaged in heavy foreplay. Even at the time of the Sabine women, that was regarded as the first stage of a sex act – hence the name. “He started kissing me, then more passionately,” said the girl. “I was reciprocating at that point but then he got out of bed and manoeuvred himself on top of me”. The libidinous chorister then pulled her pyjama bottoms off, and nature took its course even though she said no.

The facts one can infer from this description is that the couple were in bed. It’s not immediately clear why the man had to get out of bed to ‘manoeuvre himself’ back on it, but that detail isn’t significant. The other details are, and not because I think that a young girl who goes that far issues a carte blanche to full-pen hanky-panky.

Alas, as one walks through life one does run into unsporting women who echo Job 38:11 (“Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further…”). They may be only prepared to remove some or all of their clothing and indulge in what used to be called heavy petting, leaving the man frustrated and often in physical pain.

If he refuses to stop, he’s a brute and, according to the current definition of rape, probably a criminal. Hence I don’t think that the girl has only herself to blame just because she let the chorister into her bed, and reciprocated his passionate kisses.

What interests me here isn’t so much the case, but the way it’s covered. And the article says that, “Jurors were told that [the chorister] had forced himself on her on at least two other occasions the previous month, in similar fashion.”

Do I smell a contradiction? After the first time she was raped, the girl didn’t report the crime to the police. Instead she found herself in the same room with the same man again, and got raped again. Yet though bitten twice, she didn’t get shy even once. Twice the victim of a violent crime, she found herself in bed with her attacker a third time, engaged in voluntary foreplay. Can a university student be so stupidly devoid of any self-preservation instinct?

There may be crucial details that the reports omitted. Yet apparently the hack felt the details were sufficient to describe the case as an out-and-out rape, without mentioning the incongruities that caught my eye.

One gets the impression that the piece was written for purely commercial purposes: sex sells, and coerced sex sells even better. Moreover, reporting of this kind is a gift that keeps on giving. The more coverage such cases get, the more cases there will be: women are being actively encouraged to come up with any stories of abuse, even if it happened half a century ago.

That’s another thing: one gets the impression that it’s not so much blondes as dead men who have all the fun. No sooner a celebrity, especially one known for his questionable morality, dies than a swarm of OAPs claim having been abused when they were still teenagers.

This week’s raping savage is Sir Clement Freud (d. 2009), and his shenanigans are being reported in every lurid detail. Personally, I’d expect any beastliness from the grandson of that grandfather, but it’s journalistic standards that excite me at the moment.

Three rapes have already been reported and lovingly described, but last night a fourth victim raise her hand and said ‘me too’. Apparently Sir Clement kissed a nubile 19-year-old without permission. That’s a bit naughty, but only in our time, where faked prudishness is liberally mixed with real pornography, would it be seriously considered newsworthy.

What makes the case grotesque is that the nubile 19-year-old is now 62. Let bygones be bygones, I’d say. I hardly know a woman who hasn’t had a kiss forced on her, and none of them claims, as this grandmother does, that the incident left her feeling “repulsed, numb and shocked”.

What memory you have, Grandma. But you inadvertently left out ‘traumatised for life’. You must read the papers more regularly.