A female judge is leaving her post after 18 years. As well as getting a nice cake and a card and a send-off from her other judge colleagues, Judge Mary Jane Mowat has given a farewell interview to The Oxford Mail, her local paper. And in the interview she's taken the opportunity to upset women who drink, women who've been raped and women who live in fear of being raped. So that's a whole load of women, potentially including yourself.
'It is an inevitable fact of it being one person's word against another, and the burden of proof being that you have to be sure before you convict. I will also say, and I will be pilloried for saying so, but the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk.
'I'm not saying it's right to rape a drunken woman, I'm not saying for a moment that it's allowable to take advantage of a drunken woman.
'But a jury in a position where they've got a woman who says "I was absolutely off my head, I can't really remember what I was doing, I can't remember what I said, I can't remember if I consented or not but I know I wouldn't have done". I mean when a jury is faced with something like that, how are they supposed to react?'
Well, according to clarifications made to rape legislation by three Court of Appeal judges in 2006: 'If, through drink – or for any other reason–- the complainant has temporarily lost her capacity to choose whether to have intercourse on the relevant occasion, she is not consenting, and subject to questions about the defendant's state of mind, if the intercourse takes place, this would be rape.'
(They were clarifying that sex after 'heavy drinking' can of course be mutual, but basically if the alleged victim is too drunk to consent, then it's rape).
READ MORE: The Number of Women Reporting Sexual Assault On The Tube At A Five-Year High
So maybe, jurors should react by following the laws of the land, understanding that if a woman is incapacitated, she can't consent. The best way to deter people from doing something is to make the punishment real, and higher conviction rates will certainly do this. But what Mowat, 66, needs to remember is, well… the law? Maybe the real problem here isn't that women are being so bold as to get a little drunk every now and then, but that juries aren't being told that being too drunk to consent counts as rape.
The positive we can take from this story of a woman – who should really know better – blaming other women for their own sexual assaults and rapes? That she's no longer working as a judge. Rape apologist is a full-time job, after all.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.