Serious Stuff
Listening to Radio 4 this morning and hearing Keir Starmer, the current DPP, I thought how unrealistic when he said that the behaviour of those complaining of sexual abuse should not be taken into account when deciding to prosecute.
I was defending a sixteen year old on a charge of raping a fourteen year old. She said he had come to her home, uninvited when her mother was out, and had dragged her into her bedroom and raped her. His case was that she had invited him to visit her and had taken him to her bedroom where they had sexual intercourse to which she had consented.
English: Engraving of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. Français : Gravure basée sur Trial by Jury de Gilbert et Sullivan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Now obviously no witnesses to the event, so how is a jury to decide who is telling the truth about the incident?
Let’s call them Joe and Lindy. They had met at their local youth club. Joe was a good-looking boy, doing well at school and hoping to go onto college. Lindy instantly took a fancy to him and followed him around all the time. The youth worker at the club, confirmed that she always made a bee-line for him when she came to the club, and he thought Joe found her a bit of a nuisance, but was too polite to tell her to go away.
After a few weeks she invited him home to the flat she shared with her mother. When Joe got there, Lindy’s mother had cooked dinner and the table was set for two. Lindy and Joe were left alone to enjoy a candle-lit supper. None of this was in the statements either Lindy or her mother had made to the police, but they admitted it was true when I cross-examined them. Joe said she had given him a note at the youth club inviting him to visit her on the evening in question. Again the youth worker confirmed Lindy had given him an envelope at the club. Something she denied.
A few nights after the alleged rape, Joe refused to talk to Lindy when another young woman who he liked came to the youth club. It was then that Lindy told her mother that he had raped her and her mother went to the police.
If you were on the jury, wouldn’t you like to have known all that? Wouldn’t you have asked yourself why Lindy kept all the background secret? Was it because she consented to the sexual intercourse? In order to prove a case the prosecution have to make the jury sure of the defendant’s guilt. The jury didn’t take long to acquit Joe and I think rightly on the evidence.
Of course I had to call Lindy a liar as part of the defence case is to put the defendant’s account to the witness. There is no way of doing it without saying she was lying on the crucial issue of consent. As an aside, rape is not having sexual intercourse when you don’t want to – it’s without consent and there is a difference. We all do things we don’t want to but still consent to. When I said that to a jury I found most of the women nodding in agreement.
And what about taking responsibility for you own actions. Lindy really shouldn’t have invited Joe to her flat when her mother was not there. If a juvenile takes part in a criminal activity they are not excused because they are too young (unless they are under 10) they are meant to understand they were doing something wrong. Similarly drunkenness is no excuse for committing a criminal offence that you would not commit if you were sober. The law expects you to be responsible for your actions. If you left your handbag on a bus and it was stolen, you would say to yourself, I’ve been very silly, and most people would agree. Are we encouraging young women to be reckless, by telling them it’s not their fault?’ I don’t know, but my experience with these case leaves me feeling very uneasy that we are following some feminist agenda on the lines that ‘all men are rapist.’
It’s also worth saying that although the legal age of consent to sexual intercourse is sixteen, that is a decision made by Parliament and is often broken by young girls. Of course the law is there to protect them, but it can’t stop puberty happening much younger and both boys and girls becoming sexual aware.
The current debate appears to me to be very one-sided, and sometimes I feel very sorry for young men, whose own sexual experience and behaviour is often uncertain and where they risk seven or eight years imprisonment if they get the signals wrong.
Writing a Blurb
In between telling the various authorities, banks etc where I now live, I have finished the first set of amendments to the Printers Proof copy of Crucial Evidence. The next stage is to write a blurb for the back cover. Trying to condense a 90,000 word novel into 120 is really difficult. Which bit to include, which to leave out. Are the bits I think important the true turning points in the story? This is my first attempt;
English: The word “blurb” was coined by Burgess, in attributing the cover copy of his book, Are You a Bromide?, to a Miss Belinda Blurb. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Lenny Barker pleads not guilty to a charge of murdering prostitute Shelley Paulson. Cassie Hardman, junior barrister for the defence, believes he is just another defendant trying to avoid responsibility for his crime. Then, just before the trial begins, she discovers he has an alibi. Cassie is determined he will have a fair trial and risks her career to locate the crucial witness.
Will he be found before the jury retire to consider their verdict and will his evidence establish Barker’s innocence? If Barker is not the killer then who is? Can Cassie help Detective Constable Alexis Seymour in her efforts to solve the crime?
Is this enough? I don’t say where the novel is set or that the story follows Barker’s trial at the Old Bailey, which is an important part of the book. I could do to look at the blurb on other books, but all mine are in store at the moment until we get some bookshelves built.
The Dysfunctional Hero
Laid low with flue over the past two weeks, has given me the opportunity to do more reading than normal and I have completed a trilogy of
Cover of Black and Blue
novels by Ian Rankin. They were Let it Bleed, Black and Blue, and The Hanging Garden and are collectively described as ‘The Lost Years.’ In Black and Blue Rebus goes on the wagon, and it made be wonder why it is that so many ‘heros’ are dysfunctional being either alcoholics, or drug users or mentally unstable. In real life, our experience is that with any of those problems, the individual’s ability to process information, to act rationally are impaired. We only have to think of the effect on driving abilities after drinking alcohol to understand that. Yet these fictional characters seem highly competent. Why do we, as readers’, accept behaviour in fiction that we would deplore in our friends and family? Has anyone any thoughts on this?
Cathi Unsworth: women and noir | Books | The Guardian
Cathi Unsworth: women and noir | Books | The Guardian.
Cathi Unsworth writes about her novels which are described as noir. Unlike many crime novels she does not write series. In this article in The Guardian she writes about the difficulty of getting published and says her first manuscript was rejected by many editors who wanted her to turn it into a series. In the end she did get a publisher who told her she might have done better if she had used a man’s name as a pseudonym. Really that’s too much. She also says that to get published you must write what the agents say, ‘fit into the Christie corset’ are her words, and accept the compromise or do your own thing and take a chance with e-books. It seems to me she is saying what I said in my last post about making your novel fit an agent’s view of what you should write or you write what you want and self-publish. To use an overworked phrase, publish and be damned.
The Unexpected 2
Having described what happened when Alan and I were attacked in our garden, I have tried to examine how I felt at the time and why I acted as I did. The image that comes back to me now is the moment when I realised one of the two men walking into our garden had a knife. I can see his face, dark-skinned but not black, round head, close-cropped hair and stubble round his chin and cheeks, the arm in dark clothing pointing forward at waist level and the glint from a dark metal blade. Then I can remember nothing until I felt the blade on the left hand side of my neck and realised the man was behind me. The overwhelming feeling was that I must escape to get help. I stood up and ran, screaming for help. As I banged on our neighbours’ doors, I was afraid of what was happening to Alan. I had visions of the two men standing over him while blood dropped to the ground. I began to panick when no one answered my cries.
Next one of the men ran out of our front door and along the small street, carrying my handbag. I continued to run in the same direction still seeking help, but as I did so , I became aware the robber was running towards a car parked round the corner of a a garden. I followed him, determined to get the number of the car, wanting something that would help to identify our assailants. I continued to repeat the number out loud, as I ran back towards our garden, Then a sense of relief finding Alan on his feet by our front door. He wrote the number in our visitors book. Our neighbours by now were all outside and the incident was over.
Those few seconds seemed like a life time, cancelling my credit cards and barring my mobile phone took more time. Putting my identity back together, obtaining new cards, new driving licence and getting a new phone working properly has taken the last two weeks. No doubt it will take longer before the assault becomes a distant memory. I don’t think I will ever forget it. It’s ironic really as I spent a lot of my working life representing similar young men, but then again I’ve witnessed so many violent kids snivelling in the corner of a cell, because they are about to go to prison and that gives me the strength to fight back at them. I know they are bullies who crumble as soon as someone stands up to them, but it is a risk and one better taken when there is an escape route for both you and them. Luckily we were uninjured.
On a positive note it gave me an insight into how the victim of a crime might feel and the range of emotions they might have, so I can use that in my writing.
The Unexpected
The last two weeks have been so fraught that I have been unable to think straight never-mind being able to write on my blog. The ten days spent in our little bit of France, a maison du village close to the super-cute town of Uzes in southern France ended on a sour note. The market in Uzes is an amazing experience- this is how people shopped before department stores. Stalls selling everything, clothes, shoes,table clothes, cooking utensils and of course food. At this time of year the cherries are in season. They are a speciality of the region, dark red burlat cherries, not too sweet but not too sour. We bought a large punnet of them along with other fruit and vegetables.
After we got home, we made coffee and went to sit in our small garden, which is across a narrow lane. As I drank my coffee, I struggled to read Le Figaro, while my husband read the Times on his Kindle. A few minutes later, two men walked into the garden. At first I thought they were kids acting the fool, and I said to them, in my best French, that the garden was private. The two men kept on coming towards us, and I then realised the one leading had a knife pointing at me. Before I could move, he was stood next to me with the knife at my throat. Without thinking, I pushed my chair back. This must have suprised the man because he let go and I was free to run from the garden screaming ‘Help, Help’ (my French had totally escaped), into the square, and then along the narrow street to the door of one neighbour, where I banged on the gate and rang the bell, and then to another where I knocked frantically on the window, making the dog bark, but no one came out. At some stage whilst I was doing this, I saw one of the men come out of our house carrying my handbag. He must have gone onto the kitchen door and run through the house to the front door, where he emerged into the same street. I continued to run towards the gite at the end of the street where I knew about six young men were staying, with visions of my husband being attacked by two men, when I realised the man with my handbag was running towards a blue Renault parked around the corner. I followed him and saw the registratioin number of the car, which I kept on repeating aloud (it was CC 108 LT, if you want to know) To my relief as I turned back into our street I saw my husband on his feet, I was afraid I would find him in a pool of blood, and on a neighbours telphone to the police. More of the locals arrived on the scene as we tried to deal with the police and make calls to cancel credit cards and have my mobile barred.
I have had my handbag snatched before, but being in real danger of harm was a very unnerving experience and I am still very shaken. Sometimes life is not a bowl of cherries.
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