Should there be a separate criminal offence of date rape?

[sippincoffee]

 

So-called ‘date rape’ or ‘acquaintance rape’ is rape carried out by someone known to the victim, whether in the context of an ongoing sexual relationship or in a context such as a date (hence the name) in which the man may wrongly expect sexual intercourse to be on offer, and fails to comply with (or, perhaps, misunderstands) the woman’s refusal. Following some high-profile cases in which men have been cleared of raping women who were known to them, in which the non-conviction turned on the question of the reasonableness of the alleged rapist’s belief in his alleged victim’s consent, there have been calls for a separate offence of date rape, carrying a less severe penalty than rape by a stranger, in order to recognise the unique problems posed by cases like these. Note that so-called ‘date rape drugs’ such as Rohypnol, which render women unconscious and/or incapable of giving consent to sex, have absolutely nothing to do with date rape as it is defined here – there is no question mark in such cases over the rapist’s reasonable belief in his victim’s consent, and the widely reported difficulty in obtaining convictions is a result of the fact that the victim cannot remember anything.