Why do You Think What You Think?

I had a small revelation yesterday. No the earth did not shake, nor did voices call out to me from the sky. I just understood something very simple that had eluded me till now.

 

I am always taken by surprise when people attack me by suggesting that I hold my opinions for the sake of it, or to attract attention, or because of some sinister, concealed worldview such as I am from time to time accused.

 

And now I know why. The people who make these accusations do so because they themselves hold opinions for reasons of conformity and convenience, rather than out of conviction. These opinions, as was well-demonstrated last week during BBC3’s ‘Free Speech ‘ programme, have absolutely no bearing on any actual arguments or facts.

 

 

Look at the way I was accused by one audience member of supporting ‘rape culture’ because I defended the presumption of innocence. The idea that anyone accused of rape might conceivably *be* innocent seemed wholly baffling to her.

 

 And then there was the unfortunate person who (as far as I could make out)  simply couldn’t conceive that I might favour the death penalty put of compassion rather than cruelty. If this is your approach to the world, then you will think everyone else is up to the same thing,. If you yourself don’t hold your views out of conviction, but only out of conformity, you will be angry with the person who breaches that conformity. He is making you look like a conformist by doing so. And while many are ready to conform, few like to admit they are doing so.

 

None of my critics will believe me when I say that hold my opinions because they seem true and morally correct to me. And I suppose there may well be commentators who do take positions for effect or career reasons, which makes it easier for them to believe this of me. But there it is, I just hold them because I think them correct. My assailants are the ones who lose by this.  If they  believed that I might be sincere, they would themselves find it easier to argue for their own views. As it is, the simplest logical or factual challenge can usually derail them hopelessly.

A Visit from the Thought Police

I have received another visit  from the Thought Police, who have claimed my remarks about police advertisements, making us by implication responsible for being robbed, are inconsistent with my views about rape. As is clear below, my views are entirely consistent. But it is an interesting example of how 'liberals' hunt and worry at the writings of dissenters, looking for opportunities of this kind.

 

A Mr or Ms R Godfrey originally wrote ‘Your views on mugging differ to those you previously expressed on rape. You were blaming women for wearing scanty clothes previously comparing it with leaving valuables in a car, but when it comes to mugging..it's the police’s fault suddenly?’’

 

I replied : ‘Perhaps this person could cite the supposed statements on rape allegedly made by me, to which he alludes’.

 

Mr or Ms Godfrey replied: ’Certainly: You said, on the 16th of August 2008, in this column entitled ‘How The Left Censored the Blindingly Obvious Truth About Rape: ' Women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk. No, this does not excuse rape. Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been. But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy. Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.' On the 13th of November 2007 you said: It is a breach of trust and honour and it ought to be punished. I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her. But is this always rape, for instance where the two are well-known to each other and have been in a sustained sexual relationship for some time?’

 

‘In both cases you claim that the Victim’s previous behaviour makes them more culpable for the violence perpetrated against them, yet you take the opposite view on being mugged. Waving an expensive phone about, late at night while drunk, get mugged? Police’s fault. Get raped late at night while drunk: you question whether that is even rape. So which is it? Maintain consistency does conspicuous display of wealth or attractiveness make you more culpable or not? You cannot claim that being attractive and drunk makes you less deserving of sympathy if attacked sexually than being rich and drunk does if robbed, It also begs another question: Do you or do you not believe that rapes is possible within a marriage.’

 

Try as I may, I am condemned to be misrepresented on this subject by people who don’t read what I say, which is why I have sworn to avoid this topic in future. It is futile to use reason on this subject, especially against the ultra-feminist Thought Police who will invariably misconstrue any dissent from their view , which is basically that all men are rapists, all accused persons charged with rape are guilty, and the normal safeguards and presumptions protecting defendants against wrongful conviction should be dispensed with in trials of those accused of rape.  Only the dwindling minority in this country, who can recognise this attitude as oppressive and dangerous, will be interested in what I have to say.  I am only commenting on this for the purpose of self-defence, and in case silence is misconstrued as consent.

 

However, for any genuinely interested readers, here is my reply to Mr or Ms Godfrey.

 

Mr or Ms Godfrey blusters to cover up for the fact that he or she has failed to substantiate his or her  allegation that I was ‘blaming women for wearing scanty clothes previously comparing it with leaving valuables in a car’ .  Before I go any further, I would say that I frequently mock the police for their defeatist campaigns telling people not to become ‘victims’ of crime, instead of preventing those crimes, and mistakenly equating crime prevention with living our lives in fortresses of fear, alarms and locks.  And the Metropolitan Police advertisements which I have seen in central London do not as Mr Godfrey suggests, target people who are ‘Waving an expensive phone about, late at night while drunk’, but target sober people going about their normal business.

 

He or she also, rather significantly, does not reproduce this passage from the 2008 article, , which *directly contradicts* his/ her claim that I was ‘blaming women for wearing scanty clothes.

 

How can he or she square that claim with the words which follow, some of which (’thanks a lot to those who do’) got me into trouble with quite a lot of my more conservative readers who were shocked that this was my view : ‘If women want to dress provocatively, then they should be free to do so, and I say thanks a lot to those who do. Our society is based on self-restraint. We can be provoked and still behave ourselves. We do not need to compel women to dress like bats, as many Muslim countries do, so as to curb the unchained passions of hot-blooded menfolk.

 

‘All the above is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet, in the main forums of public opinion, such views are becoming harder and harder to express because of the unreasoning storm of fury that will follow.’

 

 

 

What he or she does find, and even quotes because it is impossible to give any sort of honest account of what I said without doing so,  is a series of unequivocal statements in which I make it plain that the rapist is entirely to blame for his crime.

 

Here they are:

 

. This *does not excuse rape*. Men who rape women, *drunk or sober* should be *severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action* *however stupid the victim may have been*. *I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her*.

*It is a breach of trust and honour and it ought to be punished. I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her*.

 

 

And then *But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy. Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.'*

 

Which of these statements does Mr or Ms Godfrey disagree with, and why? How can he or she possibly claim, in the light of these unequivocal words,  that I suggest women should be *blamed* for being raped? I have never suggested it, and the claim is false.

 

For any remaining doubters on this matter, you may go to the index under ‘Rape’ and find several articles, the most sustained, comprehensive and detailed of which is here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/rape/

 

 

Here is a central quotation from it:

 

‘Now to the question of what difference it makes if they are drunk. Now, here's what I never said. I never said that it was their fault if they were then raped.  Rape, as I made clear, is entirely the responsibility of the rapist. I am not one of those who blames the victim for being attacked, robbed, or otherwise harmed by crime. On the other hand,  I would guess that  many of my ultra-feminist critics, being conventional leftists, would tend to blame the victim and sympathise with the attacker in the case of crimes other than rape.  Their militant punitive views are reserved for crimes against ultra-feminism, crimes they regard as political offences against the New Order they want ( more of this later).

 

‘Unlike them, I am consistent. I think criminals are wholly responsible for their misdeeds and should be punished for them. That very much includes rapists. The fact that a victim was drunk shouldn't reduce the sentence by a single second. In fact, on reflection,  I rather think it should increase it, since the treachery involved was greater.

 

‘But the issue here was never whether rape should be punished, or by how much. That wasn't in doubt.  I made my position on this completely clear in the original article - so clear that a large number of correspondents simply ignored what I said, so here it is again: "Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been." As the ultra-feminists themselves like to ask "What part of this don't you understand?"

 

‘The issue was whether the state should pay the same compensation to a sober rape victim as it should pay to a drunk one. In this, the question of 'culpability', that is to say not responsibility for the crime against them, but responsibility for needlessly putting themselves in a position of danger, arises. "Culpability", the thing which Bridget Prentice maintains does not apply to drunk women who get raped,  refers to a responsibility in civil law for taking care of yourself. It is not the same as "guilt' which refers to criminal responsibility for a criminal action. Try it another way. The rapist is not culpable for the rape. He is guilty of it. The victim may or may not be partly culpable for creating the conditions in which the rapist could strike.

 

‘Tax-funded compensation for being a victim of crime is a new concept in Britain, and I do not know if it exists anywhere else. As I said in my original article it is probably a side-effect of the failure of the British system to catch and punish criminals. I can't think of any other way in which it could be justified, except as a tacit admission that the state has failed in its duty to protect the victim.  Instead of justice, I said, the state offers a cheque. It strikes me that a cheque for £11,000 (who worked that figure out?) would be scant compensation for having been raped, and that what has been lost in the rape could not be restored by any amount of money. I should have thought that a serious feminist might actually have made this point. Call me old-fashioned.

 

I will make one confession of fault.  I must admit to having been too vague when I sought to come up with a non-gender-specific parallel to being raped while drunk.  My road-accident comparisons weren't good enough. The alternative comparison, of being mugged, put forward by "Rachael" was far better.

She asked: "Would you have been any less deserving of sympathy if [you had been drunk and] someone had mugged or injured you?".

 

Well, the answer to that is that yes, absolutely, I would have been much less deserving of sympathy if I had been drunk and someone had mugged or injured me. I would have contributed to my undoing by being needlessly and obviously vulnerable, ie partly culpable in civil law for the consequences for which I was claiming compensation.  Would that make the crime against me less heinous? No. Would it mean that my assailant deserved a lesser punishment? No. But, if there were any compensation involved, I would be entitled to less than someone who had been identically attacked while sober.

 

I can't see anything surprising or inconsistent in this,. I  fact, I cannot imagine what other answer I could give. Yet for some reason 'Rachael' seems to assume that my motives for taking this view are selfish, pro-rapist and anti-woman.  She insisted "Whatever language you choose to use, it is blatantly obvious that you are placing a degree of responsibility with the victim of rape who is drunk."

 

In other words, "Even though you say quite clearly and unequivocally that rapists are entirely responsible for their actions, whether their victims are drunk or sober, I will nonetheless conclude that you mean the opposite of what you say, and too bad". Well, how can civilised people argue if one side assumes that the other side is lying,  presumably because it has already dismissed the other side as wrong and evil? No free society can last long if disagreement is based on this level of contempt for opponents. This is how opponents become enemies, and argument is replaced by force.’

 

 

Oh, Mr/Ms Godfrey asks if rape can take place inside marriage. It most certainly can . It would be ( amongst other things) a serious breach of the first part of the Marriage Oath in the Prayer book, in which the husband promises to ‘honour’ his wife.

 

 

Crime ISN'T falling, it's just that we've given up trying to combat it

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Has anything been happening while much of our media have been obsessed with a foreign contest between two mediocrities for a post that isn’t as important as it looks?

Well, how about this blood-freezing statistic? More than 50 rapists have been let off with cautions, without ever facing a trial.

No doubt you thought that cautions were the sort of thing they gave to teenagers found drunk and flat on their faces in the street. But rape? Isn’t that important?

In fact, isn’t it – thanks to political correctness – one of the few crimes that everyone still takes seriously, even Guardian readers? And more than 50 rapists, who have admitted the offence, have been given cautions for it? Shouldn’t the Government have fallen?

You might expect the Tories  to make a fuss about this  but – now of course you remember – the Tories are in this  Government and, in fact, dominate it.

Actually, this is only a small part of a much bigger problem uncovered by the Magistrates’ Association, whose members had begun to wonder why business in their courts was getting so slack. Had crime stopped?

No, it hadn’t. Something else had happened. Criminals, the Government and the police were co-operating in a vast project which benefits everyone except the British public.

The police benefit because they look as if they’re doing something, when they’re not. The criminals benefit because they get let off so they can go and commit more crimes. And the Government benefits because it does not have to build the hundred or so huge new prisons that would be needed to house malefactors if we still took crime seriously.

Actually, it’s far worse than I can fully state here, a horrible catalogue of unpunished evil, under which severe violence, child cruelty, burglary and even blackmail have been dealt with through the law’s equivalent of a shrug.

I plan to put a much fuller version of this scandal on my blog in the next few days, drawn from the jaw-dropping report by the Magistrates’ Association which should by now have been on every newspaper front page in the country.

When you read – as you often do – that ‘crime is falling’, you must understand what this really means. It means that large numbers of wicked acts are no longer considered as crimes by the authorities. If we had the standards of 60 years ago, half the young people in the country would be locked up.

If the police and courts of that era had judged crime by our standards, their prisons would have been empty.

It is not crime that has fallen, it is partly our own moral standard, our expectation of good, considerate, honest behaviour from our neighbours that has fallen.

But it is also that the police and the Government, seeking a quiet life, have found it easier and cheaper to ignore wrongdoing until it gets out of control.

Like all appeasement of evil, this policy invites a reckoning in the future.

Bowing to a despot? That’s an odd way to promote freedom, Dave

The happiest picture of the week comes from Saudi Arabia, where our Prime Minister was festooned by King Abdullah with the King Abdul Aziz Al Saud Excellence Medal.

I do hope it was the First Class kind, rather than the Standard Class. After all, Mr Slippery has been incredibly busy promoting so-called ‘freedom’ in the Arab world, almost everywhere except in Saudi Arabia itself,  one of the most secretive, sectarian and repressive despotisms on the planet.

Please note that this ‘freedom’, often achieved and sustained through terrible violence, has invariably suited the foreign policy objectives of the Saudi Kingdom.

If we are going to sell our souls for oil and arms sales, I’d rather we said so openly than pretended it was a struggle for Arab liberty.

Propping up an army of addicts

If you deliberately and openly injured yourself, for instance by breaking your own fingers, and made yourself unfit for work, would you seriously expect the taxpayer to keep you?

Of course not. In that case, why are millions of pounds of my money and yours being spent on benefit payments to  so-called ‘alcoholics’ and ‘drug addicts’?

Roughly 34,000 such people receive Employment Support Allowance, and more than 21,000 receive Disability Living Allowance. I get into terrible trouble with Guardian readers and the Twitter mob for saying that I don’t believe in ‘addiction’.

But why should I, and  why should you? The word ‘addiction’ simply assumes that human beings have no will of their own. But they do. Nobody forces anyone to start drinking too much, and it takes quite  a lot of effort to become a habitual heroin user.

Even assuming it was true (which  it isn’t) that such people  cannot stop if they want to,  why would they want to stop  if they are told by society that their gross appetites are a disease, and they are paid unearned money because of their alleged sickness?

This is an insult to the  truly ill, whose problems  are not their own fault, and  who in many cases deserve more generous treatment than they actually get from the welfare state.

A weird development on the ‘Did Edward Miliband receive private tuition while at his comprehensive school?’ question. I first put this to  a so-called ‘source’ a month ago. The ‘source’ stopped answering his telephone for several days. Then he sent me a text message from an airport lounge saying he was ‘going on holiday’.

Even after his return from his politically correct beach, the silence dragged on. Then on Friday the source responded to a text message to say that  Mr Miliband ‘didn’t have a private tutor’. I rang  him. ‘When did you put the question to Mr Miliband?’ He wouldn’t say.

I asked: ‘Did you actually put the question to  Mr Miliband?’ He said: ‘Mmm.’ Under pressure,  he converted this ‘mmm’ into a hesitant ‘yes’. He emitted only a reluctant ‘yes’ when I asked if I could write that the Labour leader had personally said he had not been privately tutored. I suggested to the source he would look much less silly if he gave me a straight answer, but he declined.

Thus do we pursue the truth, in an age when politicians have never been so infested with aides and press secretaries. Perhaps I have misunderstood the function of these people.

In the old days, unscrupulous students used to take dangerous, illegal amphetamines to help get them through tough exam revision.

Now they use  . . . Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride), the legally prescribed and very potent pill which is increasingly given to children, some of them very young.

Would doctors or parents give amphetamines to small boys and girls? Of course not. Why then do they give them a drug that has such similar effects?

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Our 'A-grade' children can't even manage a paper round

How we used to jeer at the Soviet Union for claiming record tractor production, record wheat production and record economic growth.

These fatuous lies were obvious falsehoods, in a country where the fields were full of weeds, the factories rusty museums of incompetence and waste, and life a series of queues for rare, wonky consumer goods and unfresh food.

But our own official figures are now just as laughably false. The worst of all are the annual claims that our schools are producing a new generation of brilliant wonder-children.
Tory MP: Graham Stuart said 'the standard of performance is better than it's ever been, the teaching's better and the children are cleverer than ever before'

A Tory MP called Graham Stuart, who as chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee ought to know better, actually said on the radio on Thursday: ‘The standard of performance is better than it’s ever been, the teaching’s better and the children are cleverer than ever before.’

Presumably that’s why my local newsagents now employ pensioners to deliver papers, and most of the hard-graft jobs for young people in this country are done by migrants from Eastern Europe. Our own children are just too clever to do paper rounds, or work on a building site.

If Mr Stuart is typical of our lawmakers, it strikes me that they too could all be profitably replaced by pensioners or Poles.

Does he really believe what he says?

For more than a decade, people like me have been abused and denounced because we dared to point out that British school standards were falling, and that our benchmark examinations were being watered down.

There was good evidence for this. The Engineering Council noted 12 years ago that maths standards at A-level had fallen by objective measures. They blamed a softer syllabus.

Durham University, by equally objective methods, found a similar rise in grades – unmatched by a rise in standards – in other subjects.

Now our case is absolutely proved, by the sudden halt in ever-improving grades. This was caused by a simple warning from the government, requiring the exam boards to show that any more ‘improvement’ was justified by better-quality work.

And yet the lies continue.

The BBC, which in my view rightly doubts George Osborne’s pitiful economic policies, has never questioned the absurd Stalinist claims of our education industry, or our equally ridiculous crime figures, apparently compiled in Toytown by Noddy and Mr Plod.

That is because the causes of our wretched education standards, and of our ever-increasing disorder, lie in the failed Left-wing policies of the Sixties.

The BBC passionately supports these policies, and the Tory Party has adopted them just as their utter failure has become evident to anyone with a spark of intelligence.

Trust me, this is much more fun than Las Vegas

I thought we were now agreed that what people did behind their bedroom doors was none of our business.

In that case, it seems to me that all of us, reactionary dinosaurs like me, and the wildest liberals, must accept that what Prince Harry does in a hotel room is his affair. I’m much more distressed that a member of the Royal Family should visit that smelly, tacky, Godless colony of tat, brand worship and false hope.

I’d rather spend a week in Novosibirsk than endure another night in Las Vegas.



If you want to know where all the police are, who once patrolled the streets but do so no longer, you can find them hanging about outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

If they really want Julian Assange to come out, why don’t they arrange for the sort of roadworks that everyone else has to put up with?

You know – they dig the road up for six weeks, and then resurface it. Then the gas people come and dig a hole, then the cable people come and dig  a trench, then the electricity people.

By then the water main should have sprung a leak which needs fixing in the middle of the night. By then it’s time to resurface the whole thing. He’d come out.



Forget Moscow, is spying for Brussels the new treachery?

In the days of Kim Philby, British traitors worked for Moscow. Do they now work for Brussels?

Alan Judd, whose clever spy novels suggest a close knowledge of the subject, recently published Uncommon Enemy, in which a Briton is caught telling the French about British negotiating secrets in EU talks. He also points out that this  may well have happened in  real life.

The distinguished U.S. academic, Peter Schweizer, some years ago quoted a retired French spook as saying that a British official spied for the French between about September 1985 and the June 1987 Brussels Summit.

He allegedly passed ‘invaluable’ intelligence to the French on British negotiating positions and was also said to have had his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission.

Is this true? And is our foreign service in any case as penetrated by Eurofanatics as it once was with Soviet fellow travellers?

It would explain a lot.



Can I put in a plea here for Ken Clarke? Mr Slippery should certainly not sack him as Secretary of State for Injustice.

The great thing about Mr Clarke is that he does not pretend to be what he is not. He is a great big soft soppy liberal who doesn’t believe in punishing criminals and doesn’t care who knows it.

Far better have him doing the job than some slick fraud who makes ‘tough’ speeches about how prison works, while letting prisoners out even more quickly than Ken does.

Maybe if people realise what sort of Government this really is, they’ll do to the Tory Party what really needs to be done to it... provided we can find a big enough wheelie bin.



If people still got married, and sorted out the basics from the start, then we really wouldn’t need George Galloway or anyone else to explain what is and what isn’t rape.

George is cleverer than he gets credit for being, but I suspect bedtime etiquette is not his strong point.



Did you notice that the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has quietly abandoned his carefully leaked and spun plan to bring back O-levels?

He told the BBC (who else?) that he doesn’t want a two-tier system. Back to one-size-fits-all, and no hope for excellence.

As I said here exactly two months ago: ‘The return of O-levels in England and Wales is as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger.’



Here’s the real reason why the BBC can’t host a statue of George Orwell (Orwell himself would have loathed the idea of such a graven image).

Orwell was neither of the Left nor of the Right, but dedicated to truth at any cost. The BBC, by contrast, can and does distort the truth to serve its Leftist ends.

Another big push, another procession of coffins... another unwinnable war

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Politicians are so vain and stupid these days that they don’t know any history, let alone learn from it. But why can’t they even learn from events in their own lifetimes?

Watching this week’s vaunted big push in Afghanistan has been infuriating beyond belief, not least because of the latest procession of soldiers’ coffins, driven in the rain through sad shires, valuable and irreplaceable lives honourably lost in a rotten cause.

Gordon Brown and many senior Tories must be old enough to remember the Vietnam War, with its talk of ‘Vietnamisation’, just like today’s ‘Afghanisation’, and its bombing raids that unintentionally slaughtered civilians in pursuit of an elusive enemy. 

They might also recall its use of modern firepower to capture ground that was lost again within months to an enemy who melted away, leaving booby-traps behind, and returned when things had gone quiet again.

It even had its own fairy story about how, if we left, the communists would take over the whole of South East Asia - our equivalent is the piffle that if we pull out of Helmand - Islamist terrorists will immediately fan out across Britain.

Many of us laughed at this rubbish 40 years ago. And we were right to do so.

The war in Vietnam achieved nothing for that country or for the world. It was the cause of many terrible crimes committed by both sides.

It did lasting damage to the United States and its people.

Soldiers have to believe in what they’re doing, at least publicly, because they must stay out of politics and they are asked to do such terrifying things that they need to convince themselves they are worthwhile.

But there is no such excuse for the journalists and politicians who talk the braggart’s pseudo-masculine language of offensives and victory, in a battle that was lost before it ever started. 

We will leave Afghanistan sooner or later, no better than we found it and probably worse. 

Who will tell the families of those who die or are maimed between now and then that their sacrifice was made to save the face of a gutless Government and a useless Opposition?

* Since the politicians are so intent on ensuring that soldiers are injured in shockingly large numbers, mainly concealed from the public, might they not at least reopen the Haslar Hospital at Gosport in Hampshire?

I have a personal attachment to what was our last military hospital, since my father once worked there and I was christened in its chapel.

When its closure was announced I was sad but I never imagined it would be needed again as much as it is, since the Afghan war had not properly begun at the time.

A nation that claims to be a major military power, as we do, must surely have a dedicated military hospital - and will need one for years after this conflict is over.

Only a FULL time parent could have said No to F-word Lily 

David Cameron obviously needs to draw attention away from his policy chaos, his feeble Shadow Chancellor, his weird donors and his dictatorial grip on candidate selection, odd in a man who claims to be all for decentralisation. 

So he reveals an egalitarian taste for canned Guinness and darts (I bet the Bullingdon club were great stout drinkers, and ended every evening round a dartboard). And he invades the privacy of his daughter, Nancy.

Well, I’m against the premature, inappropriate politicisation of tots. The poor mite can’t possibly be old enough to be dragged into an Election campaign. 

And it also strikes me that if this little girl has already been exposed to the F-word screeching of Lily Allen, left, thenMr Cameron isn’t in much of a position to lecture advertisers on exploiting the young.

Someone should have protected Nancy from this aural slurry. But experience shows that only a full-time parent can be relied upon to say ‘no’ to a child’s demands.

Paid strangers will always take the easy option. 

The Camerons, being a fashionable modern couple, have no time for the cause of full-time mothers, though it’s an option they could easily afford if they wanted. That sort of thing is for dinosaurs.

Don’t let the BNP disguise its bigotry

As far as I am concerned the Equality and Human Rights Commission is the first step towards a National Thought Police, and should be shut down. 

The ‘Equality’ it pursues is the agenda of the cultural and sexual resolutions.

The ‘Rights’ it enforces are the shopping lists of politically correct lobbies.

But it is also dangerous in other ways, as it proved this week.

Patriotic conservatives such as me, who loathe the BNP and its cynical pretence that it cares about this country, used to have a killer argument.

When BNP members insisted it wasn’t racially bigoted, we could point to its constitution, which was openly racialist.

Now, thanks to the EHRC, which has forced the BNP to change its rules, we can’t.

What on earth was the point of using public money to do that?

With the exception of one or two deluded twits, such as the Sikh Rajinder Singh, non-white people do not wish to join the BNP, and if they do they will quickly realise that the party’s conversion is not a genuine one. 

If Mr Griffin’s louts and their dupes (whose violence was on display again last week) wish to have a racial clause in their constitution, they should be free to do so. 

And we should be free to despise them for it.

 

Truth is, Europe doesn’t want juries

Why do you think the official report on juries was commissioned, with its damaging claim that they don’t understand what judges tell them? I will tell you.

The British Establishment knows that, if we stay in the EU, we will sooner or later have to abolish jury trial because it does not fit in with European law and we will be forced to give it up in some sordid deal.

So it is softening us up for this moment, a potentially disastrous loss of liberty.

That is also why they have been holding the first non-jury trial in England for 400 years, on the grounds that they supposedly couldn’t prevent the jury from being nobbled.

Couldn’t be bothered to prevent this, more likely. One of the allegedly dangerous defendants in this trial was given bail and so lightly watched that he has apparently vanished during the lunch hour.

Yet he is now said to be so dangerous that we mustn’t approach him if we see him - but he was let out for lunch? Excuse me? 

I wouldn’t trust the people responsible for this to do a night’s babysitting, let alone protect a jury from tampering.

 

* As a man, and a conservative too, I’ve learned from experience that I am not allowed to have any views on rape.

My enemies will distort what I say, and pretend I have said things I haven’t. So I hereby declare that I have no thoughts on this subject any more.

But I notice that an opinion poll last week showed that quite a lot of women felt that there were circumstances in which rape victims had to accept some responsibility for what happened to them.

Getting into bed with someone was seen as one such circumstance. I couldn’t possibly comment.

 

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Actually Ms Mirren, we should name the date rape victims...

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

Helen Mirren, the living spirit of the Sixties, is wrong when she says that victims of date rape should not go to the police. They should. But they should not be allowed to conceal their identities, and they should be obliged to face proper tough cross-examination like any other accuser.

The reason for this is simple. No most certainly means no. But, where there are no other witnesses, and where the two people involved give completely different versions of what happened, a jury must be able to see the accusation properly tested.

What’s more, it goes against the most basic principles of justice that an accusation can be made in secret, and that the accuser – even if she cannot prove her case – can slip away into the shadows while the accused is permanently damaged. This is made even worse by the fact that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority pays out compensation to rape victims of up to £11,000 – even if nobody has been convicted or the person accused of the crime is acquitted.

There were 1,453 payments of compensation to rape victims last year, totalling about £15million of your money and mine. The CICA says it doesn’t know how many of these were paid where nobody had been convicted, or where the person accused had been acquitted.

I think Ms Mirren does make an important point that driven, anti-male ultra-feminists need to grasp about this crime. There is a significant difference between a rape that happens between two people who know each other and a rape where a woman is attacked by a stranger. Juries understand this. And that is one of the reasons why they are so reluctant to convict in such cases.

If trials were fairer, and if the law distinguished between date rape and stranger rape, there might be more convictions and fewer rapes.

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School till 17: So daft even the copycat Tories won't go near it

Some disasters can easily be predicted. Here’s one. Keeping teenagers in school until they are 17 by law will make State education in England even worse than it already is. It will make bad schools more chaotic and sullen. It will threaten order in many good schools. It will also lead to increases in truancy. It will do no good of any kind at all. Yet we in England are stuck with it.

Alex Salmond’s canny Scottish statelet has wisely not joined in. Nor has Wales, which usually marches pretty much in step with England in school matters. Nor has Northern Ireland. The Irish Republic is likewise staying with 16. The general view elsewhere in these islands seems to be that forcing teenagers to sit in classrooms when they don’t want to be there won’t work.

Either they will stay and sullenly ruin everything for everyone else. Or they will refuse to turn up, giving them an early experience in the powerlessness of authority and helping them into lives of ‘anti-social behaviour’. I should have thought that was pretty obvious. Even the Tories, who normally copy New Labour in almost all things, have objected.

The suspicion grows that the ridiculous Ed Balls, the privately-schooled Education Secretary (or whatever silly title he has this week) is doing this for one of two bad reasons. Either he’s in the grip of some forgotten, glowering Thirties ideology (like his master, Gordon Brown). Or he thinks it will be another good way to hide the alarming level of youth unemployment. This seems to be one of the main purposes of Government policy. Many of the laughable new ‘universities’ set up by ‘Sir’ John Major serve almost no other purpose, as their graduates increasingly find when they emerge after three years amassing debt, waving degree certificates that employers scorn. They’d have been better off doing a proper course in hairdressing or plumbing.

The Education Maintenance Allowance is, in effect, a weekly bribe of up to £30 to persuade the young to stay in education when they would otherwise leave.Education is the biggest single failure of government in this country since the war. Almost every decision taken since about 1960 has been a bad one and has, predictably, made things worse. Our ‘one size fits all’ comprehensives betray everyone who goes to them, failing both the academic and the non-academic. But the biggest learning failure of all has been among politicians such as Mr Balls, who are so consumed by dogma that they are entirely immune to facts.

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2,000 limos is waste on an Olympic scale

I have been trying all week to discover the details of plans to create privileged special lanes for Olympic potentates to sweep through our capital city during the 2012 Games in London. No luck. The various bodies involved have shown me a route map on such a small scale that it looks like London viewed from space, so you can’t tell anything useful from it.

But it seems that almost 2,000 chauffeured cars will be available for the 4,500 people in the top three tiers of something called the ‘Olympic Family’, in which some members are a lot more equal than others. There will be (for instance) 750 cars for the top 745. I don’t think these are athletes, but officials.
Meanwhile, on the busiest sections of the ‘Olympic Route Network’ special traffic lanes will be reserved for Games vehicles. Maybe this sort of thing seemed normal in the Chinese police state, where the supreme leaders routinely thrust aside normal traffic. But in London? Do we really want this?
Why can’t these officials use buses, trains and bicycles, rather than unhealthy, unathletic cars?

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Isn't he just a foul-mouthed old Trot?

I can understand why Alistair Darling couldn’t say that voters were ‘Browned off’ in his rash interview on how terrible everything is. But what was wrong with ‘Cheesed off’ or ‘Hacked off’? He is Chancellor of the Exchequer and he didn’t need to use lavatory language to make his point.

One other question about Mr Darling. Labour Left-wingers have long claimed that he was mixed up with Tariq Ali’s Trotskyist International Marxist Group in the days when his beard matched his hair and his eyebrows. Given that the IMG was a conspiratorial organisation whose comrades all had secret codenames, actual membership would be hard to prove.

The claim was repeated in Private Eye magazine last week. ‘Whitehall Sources’ assure me that the Chancellor never supported Tariq Ali’s outfit. Does anyone out there actually know? It seems to me that a huge chunk of ‘New Labour’ were Communists or Trotskyists not that long ago. Most are still very embarrassed about it, because secretly they still think like Marxists.

The rape of reason

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Many of the people who write to me, and many who comment on this site, are would-be censors who would silence me if they had the power to do so.  Their mails, phone calls, letters and comments are based on the belief that it was wicked of me to express a view that the writer does not like.

They do not wish to disagree with what I say. They object to my saying it at all.

Such letters contain no actual facts or arguments, only denunciation. Try as I may, I find it difficult to learn anything from most of them except that free speech and thought have seldom been so endangered. This is an ever-growing problem in a society where people are not embarrassed to be intolerant, or ashamed of hating free speech. My article about rape, and compensation for rape victims who admitted to being drunk, was in fact in itself a plea for free speech. My opinion is perfectly legitimate and wholly justifiable. It is grounded in a loathing of crime in general, and of the crime of rape in particular, which I clearly said was a despicable act of treachery which deserved to be severely punished.

The view I set out ( although British government officials had originally taken it)  had not been expressed or defended by the government for fear of the tempest of abuse and misrepresentation from the militant ultra-feminist lobby that would howl around the ears of anyone who dared to say it.  In the media discussions which I heard, nobody stood up for what the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority had originally done, or even suggested that they might have had a point.

Therefore government ministers and officials were reduced to saying things that were not true - specifically that ‘a victim of rape is not in any way culpable due to alcohol consumption’.   They simply caved in, presumably out of fear. In my view, people who cannot stand up for logic and reason, in the face of hysteria , misrepresentation and unreason, should not be paid large salaries out of taxes to be ministers, or given the privileges and powers that go with office. 

This week I plan to give the fullest possible answer to those who commented, here and elsewhere, on this article about rape and compensation. Time and space prevent me from answering every single individual remark, but I will try to respond to every sentiment expressed and every major fact produced. If anyone feels that I have missed an important argument or fact, I ask them to point this out to me. It is not intentional.

Let me start, though, with an aside aimed at the amusing site known as 'Christopher Hitchens Watch'. This is normally devoted to denouncing my brother Christopher for straying ( as they believe he has) from the Shining Path of leftist orthodoxy.  Its authors like me even less than they like him because I am a right-wing monster who deserted the Left when they were presumably at play-school or yet unborn. They cannot really cope with the fact that their former hero is (for instance) in favour of the Iraq war, whereas I am (for instance) against it. I am right, yet I am bad.  It does not compute for them, but even so this confusion is another weapon with which they can wallop their lost leader. So I occasionally feature as a walk-on character.

Last week, amid much abuse of me on the rape article  (mainly of an uninteresting  and repetitive kind), a contributor to 'Christopher Hitchens Watch' proclaimed "Let's face it, both brothers like to drink to unconsciousness." Now, wait a minute here. This is certainly not true of my brother, though he can drink a great deal and makes no secret of it. But it's even less true of me. This isn't a claim of moral superiority. I have no choice in the matter.  I have never been able to drink alcohol in any quantity without becoming horribly, memorably (and soberly) unwell, something I discovered in my teens, when my capacity was slightly less small than it is now. I wouldn't physically be able to drink myself unconscious as I'd be too ill to lose consciousness. I don't want to be pious about this. It's just so. I can cope with about half a bottle of wine as long as I eat a meal with it, and that's it, though I find that even that's stretching things a bit these days. I get far more pleasure from arguing than I do from drink.

Does this make me less sympathetic to drunks than I might otherwise be? Perhaps.  I can't say I'm jealous. But I hardly think it has much bearing on the matter. If I could get drunk, I wouldn't be fool enough to claim that it didn't put me at greater risk in certain important ways.

Several of those commenting, seeking to avoid the actual point of the article, headed for this part of the argument and abused me for my own alleged boozing habits, some purporting to believe that half a bottle of wine was some sort of knock-out dose and that i was a hypocrite. This was just an attempt to avoid the point by ignoring the argument and going straight for the person, a well-known cheap trick that proves nothing.

But the word I used was 'drunk' and the example I used was 'several' ( which I would take to mean at the very least four or five) 'Bacardi Breezers', a drink consumed , so far as I know, with the sole intention of making the drinker drunk. Aren't concoctions of this kind , sickly sweet and 5% alcohol, aimed at people who don't like the taste of alcohol but still want to consume it?  Isn't there a risk from them that, because the taste of alcohol is masked in syrup, they are not aware of how much they are drinking? Women, as is well known, generally have a lower tolerance of alcohol than men and so are at more risk of becoming drunk. And if anyone really wants to claim that drunkenness is uncommon among modern British young women, good luck to them.

Now to the question of what difference it makes if they are drunk. Now, here's what I never said. I never said that it was their fault if they were then raped.  Rape, as I made clear, is entirely the responsibility of the rapist. I am not one of those who blames the victim for being attacked, robbed, or otherwise harmed by crime. On the other hand,  I would guess that  many of my ultra-feminist critics, being conventional leftists, would tend to blame the victim and sympathise with the attacker in the case of crimes other than rape.  Their militant punitive views are reserved for crimes against ultra-feminism, crimes they regard as political offences against the New Order they want ( more of this later).

Unlike them, I am consistent. I think criminals are wholly responsible for their misdeeds and should be punished for them. That very much includes rapists. The fact that a victim was drunk shouldn't reduce the sentence by a single second. In fact, on reflection,  I rather think it should increase it, since the treachery involved was greater.

But the issue here was never whether rape should be punished, or by how much. That wasn't in doubt.  I made my position on this completely clear in the original article - so clear that a large number of correspondents simply ignored what I said, so here it is again: "Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been." As the ultra-feminists themselves like to ask "What part of this don't you understand?"

The issue was whether the state should pay the same compensation to a sober rape victim as it should pay to a drunk one. In this, the question of 'culpability', that is to say not responsibility for the crime against them, but responsibility for needlessly putting themselves in a position of danger, arises. "Culpability", the thing which Bridget Prentice maintains does not apply to drunk women who get raped,  refers to a responsibility in civil law for taking care of yourself. It is not the same as "guilt' which refers to criminal responsibility for a criminal action. Try it another way. The rapist is not culpable for the rape. He is guilty of it. The victim may or may not be partly culpable for creating the conditions in which the rapist could strike. 

Tax-funded compensation for being a victim of crime is a new concept in Britain, and I do not know if it exists anywhere else. As I said in my original article it is probably a side-effect of the failure of the British system to catch and punish criminals. I can't think of any other way in which it could be justified, except as a tacit admission that the state has failed in its duty to protect the victim.  Instead of justice, I said, the state offers a cheque. It strikes me that a cheque for £11,000 (who worked that figure out?) would be scant compensation for having been raped, and that what has been lost in the rape could not be restored by any amount of money. I should have thought that a serious feminist might actually have made this point. Call me old-fashioned.

I will make one confession of fault.  I must admit to having been too vague when I sought to come up with a non-gender-specific parallel to being raped while drunk.  My road-accident comparisons weren't good enough. The alternative comparison, of being mugged, put forward by "Rachael" was far better.

She asked: "Would you have been any less deserving of sympathy if [you had been drunk and] someone had mugged or injured you?".

Well, the answer to that is that yes, absolutely, I would have been much less deserving of sympathy if I had been drunk and someone had mugged or injured me. I would have contributed to my undoing by being needlessly and obviously vulnerable, ie partly culpable in civil law for the consequences for which I was claiming compensation. . Would that make the crime against me less heinous? No. Would it mean that my assailant deserved a lesser punishment? No. But, if there were any compensation involved, I would be entitled to less than someone who had been identically attacked while sober.

I can't see anything surprising or inconsistent in this,. I  fact, I cannot imagine what other answer I could give. Yet for some reason 'Rachael' seems to assume that my motives for taking this view are selfish, pro-rapist and anti-woman.  She insisted "Whatever language you choose to use, it is blatantly obvious that you are placing a degree of responsibility with the victim of rape who is drunk."

In other words, "Even though you say quite clearly and unequivocally that rapists are entirely responsible for their actions, whether their victims are drunk or sober, I will nonetheless conclude that you mean the opposite of what you say, and too bad". Well, how can civilised people argue if one side assumes that the other side is lying,  presumably because it has already dismissed the other side as wrong and evil? No free society can last long if disagreement is based on this level of contempt for opponents. This is how opponents become enemies, and argument is replaced by force.

I suppose there may be some confusion here among people who have not read the article carefully, and think that the compensation is paid by the rapist himself.  If this were the case, the argument would be wholly different, since the compensation would form part of the punishment, and lower compensation would mean a reduced penalty. But this isn't the case.

Let me stress this central and relevant fact.  The compensation forms no part of the rapist's punishment. The compensation is paid by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority out of money raised from taxes,  levied on hard-working, wholly innocent people.  The rapist does not pay it himself (Nor should he, in my view. The idea that a rape could be expiated with a money payment verges on the obscene.  Compensation direct from criminal to victim should be reserved for property crimes).

Even more interesting, the money can be paid when there has been no conviction and  even when the person accused of the crime has been acquitted. The standards of proof that rape has been committed (for the purposes of compensation) are significantly lower than those required for the conviction of the alleged rapist. Does this extraordinary fact provide a clue as to why the issue is so sensitive?  How many alleged rape victims, whose assailants have been acquitted, have even so qualified for such payments? I shall be looking into this.

Someone called "JW" took a position similar to "Rachael's", assuming that my position was solely aimed at women. "JW" enquired:"Would Mr Hitchens's views have been the same if it was a drunken man who was raped?"  Well, of course they would. Why on earth shouldn't they be? What would be the difference? The mind staggers and reels that anyone could imagine otherwise. Once again, we here meet the conviction that I am evil in myself, and concealing secret unspoken views behind the ones I actually express, and quite different from them. I am not allowed to think what I actually think. because I am not orthodox, I must therefore be the embodiment of evil. This is just a way of closing your mind to thought. A conservative who wants rapists punished? Why, that's like a conservative who's against the Iraq war. It doesn't make sense. So he must be lying.

Peter Preston made a more uncomfortable point. He said :"It (my argument) seems to suggest that stupid people deserve less sympathy than others. Certainly some women - and especially some young women -, nowadays released by our national culture from the natural inhibitions of more civilised ages, seem to see no personal risks in foolishly aping the excesses of their menfolk, sometimes, it is reported, paying a very high price of personal trauma for their stupidity."

"Stupid people". Who are they? I don't think 'stupid' can be applied to people in general, only to their actions. Highly intelligent people do stupid things, all the time.  Supposedly unintelligent people often do very clever things. It is the action that should be judged, not the person who does it.  A person who might be dismissed as stupid by the well-educated could well turn out to be far more use in a real crisis than any of them. Princess Diana,  not exactly an intellectual,   outwitted the Rolls-Royce minds of the British establishment and nearly destroyed the monarchy in an elaborate and well-planned revenge for slights real or imagined. Was she stupid?  I don't think so. 

My point remains. A victim who suffers bad consequences which were made more likely by his or her stupid behaviour deserves less sympathy than a victim who behaved wisely and still suffered bad consequences. Anyone disagree with that?

"Medbh" asks "Are women supposed to expect that all men are rapists who will rape as soon the opportunity is there?"

I don't see how my argument leads to this conclusion. Once again, men are responsible for the rapes they commit, not their victims. We are talking about nationalised cash sympathy for the victim, not justice for the culprit. Nobody can know if an apparently civilised person will attempt rape under certain circumstances. All men are obviously not rapists. Some obviously are. The point is, you are more likely to find out if they are rapists if you are drunk and wholly at their mercy than if you are sober and slightly less at their mercy. And anyone with any intelligence can work that out for herself, even if her mother never told her. 

The same "Medbh" goes on to ask: "What if a drunk woman goes home with a man she is friends with? Is it still her fault if she gets raped?" What does "Medbh" mean by "still" her fault ? I never said it was her fault under any circumstances. Rape is the fault of the rapist. I said she would be entitled to less sympathy ( and compensation) for her plight if she were drunk. Why does "Medbh" obdurately seek to deny the difference between the two separate statements?

Someone calling himself or (less likely)  herself "Fed up from Coventry" asked :"Surely if the woman carries no blame for being raped whilst drunk, the same must apply to the man? Thus, being drunk should be an adequate defence for the perpetrators." I'm so sorry, but I really cannot see what this person is driving at. First, and yet again,  the question is not one of blame for the rape itself, but one of the amount of sympathy and compensation for the victim. Why? Because the victim, by behaving irresponsibly, has made it easier for her assailant to behave wickedly. The rape victim is not in any way to blame for the rape, which is wholly the responsibility of the rapist. Rape is an act carried out by the rapist, using force on a weaker person who (in some cases) has trusted him. The point is actually quite different. Drink makes it easier for people to do stupid and wrong things, because it removes the inhibitions that conscience and moral training have placed on us. People who get drunk, and then rape, murder, steal or drive dangerously are not excused their crimes because they got drunk, and nor should they be. The law says that they knew the risks when they decided to get drunk in the first place. Wouldn't it be inconsistent to say that tis applied to civil culpability just as much as it applies to criminal guilt?   

But we are getting closer here to what may be the real issue - what actually is rape? Most of us were brought up to believe that it was a violent attack by a male stranger on a female victim, generally in an isolated place. However,  thanks to the collapse of marriage and the disappearance of the old courtship rules, it has now been redefined so as to include a much wider range of behaviour. And drink plays an important part in quite a lot of the circumstances which lead to rape in its modern shape. But I'm not going to go into that here, as it would be a whole new article.

Victoria Smith said " It is reasonable to expect that women, as sexual beings, should be able to express sexual availability and interact as active rather than passive sexual beings. Asking them to do otherwise to avoid rape is like asking people to stay indoors after 6pm to avoid being mugged, or asking men to stay celibate in order to avoid false rape accusations, on pain of any compensation being cut. It's not reasonable in a way that, say, asking people not to scream abuse at strangers who might thump them is. Or, say, asking men who drink half a bottle of wine a night to keep their counsel about who the drunken idiot is might be."
Up to her final sentence, I entirely agree with her that this is reasonable, though I also think this state of affairs is regrettable . There's little point in pretending that we are going to reinstate marriage and courtship any time soon.. First, she seems to have an inflated idea of the effect of half a bottle of wine. And second, since when did 'expressing sexual availability' mean being drunk? 

This brings to mind one fascinating attempt to codify the new relations between men and women, made since the early 1990s at the campus of Antioch College in Ohio. Here's an extract from what is now the Antioch "Sexual Offence Prevention Policy":

"Consent:
Consent is defined as the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexual
conduct. The following are clarifying points:
-Consent is required each and every time there is sexual activity.
-All parties must have a clear and accurate understanding of the sexual activity.
-The person(s) who initiate(s) the sexual activity is responsible for asking for consent.
-The person(s) who are asked are responsible for verbally responding.
-Each new level of sexual activity requires consent.
-Use of agreed upon forms of communication such as gestures or safe words is acceptable,
but must be discussed and verbally agreed to by all parties before sexual activity occurs.
-Consent is required regardless of the parties’ relationship, prior sexual history, or current
activity (e.g. grinding on the dance floor is not consent for further sexual activity).
-At any and all times when consent is withdrawn or not verbally agreed to, the sexual
activity must stop immediately.
-Silence is not consent.
-Body movements and non-verbal responses such as moans are not consent.
-A person can not give consent while sleeping.
-All parties must have unimpaired judgement (examples that may cause impairment include
but are not limited to alcohol, drugs, mental health conditions, physical health conditions).
2
-All parties must use safer sex practices.
-All parties must disclose personal risk factors and any known STIs. Individuals are
responsible for maintaining awareness of their sexual health.
These requirements for consent do not restrict with whom the sexual activity may occur, the type of
sexual activity that occurs, the props/toys/tools that are used, the number of persons involved, the
gender(s) or gender expressions of persons involved"

Please note that it insists that all parties (including the woman)  must have "unimpaired judgement".This document, especially in its early stages, has been laughed at quite a lot in the past, which I think is unfair. It's a genuine attempt to deal with a big problem that a lot of people don't even want to acknowledge.  By trying to deal with it, it admits that a problem exists in the post-Christian world we now inhabit. There's quite a lot more (Google it).  The trouble is that an attempt to codify sex in this way is immensely difficult, because it assumes an almost total absence of trust and mutual support. In the end, you could draw up a document  on the rules of sex which was as long as the EU Constitution and it still wouldn't have the same force as the Church of England's 1662 marriage service - which is founded precisely upon trust and mutual support,  and on permanence -  its most crucial and binding clause being "till death us do part".

"Tamara' compared being drunk, a voluntary act, with being mentally ill, which is involuntary. This is slippery, in my view. She also asked "So a man or woman who is killed whilst walking down a street at night is responsible for putting themselves in a dangerous situation? ". To which I would reply, that would depend a bit on the street.  In many African cities, the hotel management place guards on the doors after dark to prevent guests leaving the building on foot. If someone ignored these guards, would he be partly culpable if he were then attacked or mugged? Yes, of course. I do not think we yet have anything this bad here. She added "I'm sick of men trying to blame women because they can't admit to the fact that a large proportion of men are sexual predators." Well, so am I, Tamara, though I wonder what you reckon a 'large' proportion is, and what the basis of your claim is.  Perhaps your experience is untypical.  I would refer you to Wendy Cope's couplet "Write it in fire across the night. Some men are, more or less, all right".

Responsibility for the crime, and culpability for making the crime more likely, are two separate things. Just as prison and compensation are two separate things.

Someone styling herself "Rape Victim" writes :"I'd like to see how you would feel reading this article if you had indeed been raped!
So let me ask you, even though I had had a few G&T's and gone home.... and some sick pervert followed me and waited till i got inside my front and then forced himself inside and then raped me... that i do not deserve sympathy because i had had a few drinks?? You are out of order... i am so angry at reading your article." It is difficult, and it is meant to be, to give any response to such a contribution.  We must accept that this is a true account of an actual event. But in that case it is not the sort of incident we are talking about. I don't see how the 'few G&Ts' involved in this case have any bearing on the amount of risk. If the rapist was unknown to the victim, followed her home and forced his way into the house, then an entirely sober person would have faced exactly the same danger.  I very much hope that I should have written the same article,  though perhaps with even more conviction,  had I suffered such an outrage.

Greg Clarke wrote :"Your logic follows that a raped fit woman deserves less sympathy then a raped obese woman as fit women are more likely to be raped."
No it doesn't, and what a crude way of putting it, too. Do try to read what is written before telling me what my logic leads to. I specifically ruled out any defence based on the idea that a man believed he had been in some way provoked into rape by the attractiveness, allure etc of the woman. I think this is a miserable excuse for an argument and would hate to live in a society where men were presumed to be uncontrollable bundles of animal lust  ( as the Prayer Book puts it , 'brute beasts that have no understanding') who couldn't be trusted alone in a room with an attractively-dressed woman .Though such societies do exist, I do not make excuses for them or seek to fall to their standards. Men are obliged to restrain themselves.

A person calling himself/herself "Just deflated" asks : "Where in this article is any blame apportioned to the rapist? To the man who purposefully takes advantage of a woman's drunken state to forcefully violate her? ". Well, "Just deflated", it's right there in the second paragraph, thus : "Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been." Couldn't you read even that far before condemning me without evidence?

"Englishgirl" opines :"Well if you agree with Peter then wow, i guess you're no different than Muslims who think women should cover up and do everything not to tempt men who will rape them any opportunity they get. i guess we should all hide locked up with chastity belts hmm?"

This is another person who condemns without reading.  I clearly said as follows :"Nor is being drunk – which makes you miss danger signals, make bad judgments, lose consciousness in unsafe places and then lose your memory, too – comparable with ‘dressing provocatively’ as the feminist thought police would like to pretend.

If women want to dress provocatively, then they should be free to do so, and I say thanks a lot to those who do. Our society is based on self-restraint. We can be provoked and still behave ourselves.
We do not need to compel women to dress like bats, as many Muslim countries do, so as to curb the unchained passions of hot-blooded menfolk."

I got into trouble with someone else for that "thanks a lot" remark. Lighten up, is my response. 

AS for "Emma", who wrote "The comments agreeing with peter make me so sad as a young girl. I see now all men want to rape me and are waiting for the moment to do this. This makes me never want to date or marry. Men are all just potential monsters", I really cannot identify any comments which suggest that all men want to rape her, or anyone else. Where does she get this from?

It was heartening to read the comment from Shan Morgain. It is easy for men to agree with my position. But for a woman it's much, much harder. It will get you into trouble with the sisterhood if they even suspect you of thinking  this sort of thing. What she says is a sad summary of the unhappy position women find themselves in . But its a realistic and an honest one.

As I said at the beginning, if anyone feels that I have not responded to an important argument, I would ask them to point this out and I will try to do so. It is physically impossible to reply to or acknowledge every single message, but I am grateful for the serious purpose of those contributors who have joined the debate with constructive intent, and also for those who, even if they have been intemperate and intolerant, have given me the opportunity to defend my position.

Rape is a very dirty word

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Especially in politics, the word 'rape' has become very dangerous and unclear.

I suspect that in most people's minds, it means a violent sexual assault by a total stranger, clearly a hideous crime so foul that the harshest deterrent punishment is required.

But the thing now prosecuted as 'rape' is often nothing like so clear cut.

Now, let me say to start with that I think it a low and immoral act for a man to take advantage of a drunken woman.

It is a breach of trust and honour and it ought to be punished. I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her.

But is this always rape, for instance where the two are well-known to each other and have been in a sustained sexual relationship for some time?

For our criminal justice system has very special rules for rape cases, yet another case of unintended consequences and good intentions gone astray.

The accuser is anonymous. The accused is not. The accuser's anonymity is not waived, even if her case fails lamentably.

Yet no man's reputation will ever recover from a public trial in which he is accused of rape, even if he is acquitted.

I know why these provisions were introduced, just as I know why it is increasingly difficult for the defence to cross-examine a woman who has accused a man of rape.

In effect, the presumption of innocence is laid to one side. And as a result it is entirely possible, and legally risk-free, for there to be a malicious prosecution against a man by a woman.

A lot of this is the result of the collapse of older courtship rituals and rules, and above all the collapse of the view that sex ought to take place only inside marriage.

Those rules, which the sixties generation thought it had outgrown, existed for many very good reasons.

One of those reasons was that, without that protection, women became vulnerable to the events now often depicted as 'rapes' which are in fact not rapes at all - many of which involve men and women who have been engaged in a sexual relationship for some time, or men and women who are, to put it mildly, not specially chaste in their personal lives.

I tend to think that people are having it both ways here.

David Cameron says he wants more convictions in this kind of case. There are several ways in which this might be achieved.

Abolishing Jury trial would be one, since it is level-headed juries who often refuse to despatch a man to prison for several years on evidence that cannot, by its nature, be corroborated.

Does Mr Cameron wish to knock away this prop of our liberty, so as to please political correctness? I hope not.

In which case, let me suggest a couple of other possibilities.

One, the introduction of a lesser offence of 'second-degree rape' attracting much lower sentences, with which men could be charged.

Two, the abolition of the accuser's anonymity, which is an offence against justice anyway, and which would surely deter frivolous or malicious prosecutions.

Third, of course, a serious attempt to create the conditions in which lifelong marriage could once again be encouraged to flourish, and the nasty era of sexual licence, which is the real cause of most of this misery could be brought to a welcome end.