Cure, kill or castrate the perp?

In 1982 the British Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, declared, ‘Rape is always a serious crime. Other than in wholly exceptional circumstances, it calls for an immediate custodial sentence…’²⁴ His reasons were five, to mark the gravity of the offence, to emphasise public disapproval, to serve as a warning to others, to punish the offender, and to protect women. In the same document we read, ‘sex without consent is readily acknowledged as being rape’. Heaven knows what Lane would have had to say about the suspended sentences given to one in ten of the men convicted of rape in the state of Victoria between 2011 and 2016. Given the reality, that non-consensual sex is possibly commoner than the consensual variety and that only a tiny proportion of it ever comes before the law and most of those prosecutions do not result in a conviction, Lane would appear to be living in cloud cuckoo land.

Penalties for rape are wildly inconsistent. In China, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and North Korea, the penalty can be death. In the United Emirates the rapist can face a firing squad; in Iran he can be hanged. There are those in the twittersphere who are happy to declare that they ‘actually think rapists should be executed’ because ‘rape is the worst of all crimes; worse than murder…’ Another recommended putting ‘a bullet between their eyes’. Yet another recommended blinding a rapist to remove the source of temptation.

Given the admitted prevalence of sexual assault at about one in five women over a lifetime compared with the rarity of convictions, we have to wonder why rape sentences are so long. Lane believed that harsher sentences would encourage more raped women to come forward, but it is the savagery of the sentence that pushes juries toward extending the benefit of the doubt. No one has to my knowledge considered the possibility that harsher sentencing could persuade a man guilty of sexual assault that he might as well kill his victim, because his sentence is likely to be shorter for murder than it would have been for rape, with the added bonus that his victim could not give evidence against him.

The first husband of TV executive Vivian McGrath grabbed her round the throat and squeezed till she lost consciousness, then dragged her across the floor over glass from the lamps he had smashed. She came to when he was looking for something in the kitchen and ran for her life to the police station. She made a statement—‘My husband tried to kill me’—and was taken to hospital. He was charged with assault; a restraining order was issued. When he was later convicted he was given a suspended sentence as a first-time offender.²⁵ If he’d raped her he’d have got five to ten years, first-time offender or no. How can that make sense?

Compare it with what happened to homeless illegal immigrant Ashraf Miah. In June 2017 Lillian Constantine was walking home in Ramsgate, England, in the dark because the streetlights had been turned off in an economy drive, when she was attacked by Miah. She had been lighting her way with her phone and turned on its camera. When Miah continued to wrestle with her even though she told him she was videoing him, she decided that he had to be ‘an absolute maniac’. She reported the event to the police. In court Miah pleaded guilty to attempted rape and was convicted as well of ‘sexual assault by penetration and sexual assault without penetration’. (If he actually understood the verdict he is a better man than I am.) He was sentenced to nine years in jail, plus four years on extended licence to be followed by deportation back to Bangladesh.

The idea of castrating convicted rapists has been around for years and never quite seems to go away. These days it is most often invoked as a way of controlling those guilty of the rape of children. In some cases the acceptance of chemical castration is made a condition of parole. In Britain the chief architect of the Ministry of Justice’s ongoing programme of voluntary chemical castration is Professor Don Grubin; the drugs used are of two kinds, serotonin uptake inhibitors and anti-androgens—in use since 2007, their use is now to be massively expanded. Turkey, Argentina, Moldova, Poland, Portugal, Macedonia, Estonia, Israel, Australia, India and Russia all use chemical castration. In Western Australia and Victoria the drugs are administered by quarterly injection.

Meanwhile in the Czech Republic, ninety-four surgical castrations have been carried out between 2000 and 2012. Repeat sexual offenders in California have been known to ask for surgical castration as a way of avoiding indefinite incarceration. Contributors to online debates have suggested penectomy as well, with the proviso that ‘the offender must be absolutely guilty without any shadow of doubt’. As if.

Just as it is not the penis that commits rape, and not testosterone that drives it and not overwhelming sexual desire either, castration whether surgical or chemical will not eliminate men’s hatred of women. Rape is not a sex crime, but a hate crime. When the jock tells his adoring fan ‘no kissing’, turns her face down and penetrates her from behind, his aim is to leave her ‘fucked’ and good for nothing.