Law chief attacks attitudes to rape

Published on Sunday 4 November 2007 00:14

SCOTLAND'S top law officer has attacked public attitudes to rape victims.

The Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini QC said that rape victims were sometimes regarded as being responsible for the crime if they had been drinking.

However, she said the public did not blame assault victims who had been drinking before they were attacked.

Angiolini also claimed jurors often had misconceptions about sexual assault cases.

She said: "I see cases where a male victim in Buchanan Street [in Glasgow] is hit over the head with a bottle. He is not indicted by society for having had 10 pints of beer when he's the victim.

"But the rape victim will be. There is a view of contributory negligence which is not there in law."

And she claimed many people assumed rape and sexual assault cases involved "the Doris Day-type woman taken down a dark street by a stranger".

The Lord Advocate said: "It is crucial that the law resonates what is happening in the 21st century.

"You cannot look at the law in isolation. If you have 15 jurors who all think if the victim was wearing a mini-skirt she was not deserving of having the protection of the law, then they are out of sync with the law."

She added: "You have to have a system where not just the prosecution or the police or judiciary, but also... juries understand the dynamic of sexual abuse."

Her comments come three months after a survey showed that 27% of people believed that a woman was at least partially to blame for being raped if she was drunk, while 26% thought a woman was partially responsible if she had been wearing revealing clothing.

A review was launched in 2004 amid public concern about the way such cases were dealt with.

In June last year, when she was Scotland's Solicitor General, Angiolini said 50 recommendations from that had been accepted, but that the changes would take three years to implement.

The Scottish Law Commission said in a report published two months ago that a definition of consent in rape cases should be included in Scots Law, closing a loophole which allowed thousands of accused people to escape justice each year because their victims had been drinking.

The definition will state that a victim cannot be deemed to have given consent if unconscious, asleep, incapacitated because of drink or drugs, or if they were threatened with violence. Rather than the Crown having to show that a victim refused to have sex, it will be up to the defence to demonstrate that the accused obtained consent.