There should be no such law as rape.

You heard me.

In ancient times, when men were men and sheep were nervous…

Sorry,
In ancient times, when men conquered other nations and raided and rampaged abroad in their battle for tribal supremacy and survival, rape had a broader meaning than the sexual one we see applied in UK law today.
Theft, despoiling of property, kidnap, looting and pillaging, - all were included in the poetic licence held by the word rape.
There is a historical record of rape being seen as a crime against a man’s property, particularly if it was the rape of a virgin daughter in a household - the male head of that household was the offended party, the victim of the crime, and financial compensation to him was a common form of punishment.

Perhaps this is somewhat surprising to modern ears but the surprise needs to be tempered with the knowledge of the context of those medieval days.
- Worldwide, your likelihood of dying violently at the hands of another was at least 300 times higher then than it is today, violent death may well have overshadowed rape in the eyes of these survival driven societies.
I won’t go into the persistence of rape as a weapon of war, which remains a horror and terror device to this day, (I’m looking at you Hamas), that perhaps belongs in a separate, and a real historian’s, approach to the history of warfare.

Even so, I would persist in saying quite seriously that the law of rape has become an ass…
I first pushed this idea when I was a “male feminist” (yes - back in the 1980s) and I studied the issue of rape and sexual assault, in the context of the number of rapes that I knew about. It struck me then that the law failed rape victims dramatically (and yes, it still does), mainly in the arena of victims seeking justice and either being laughed out of police stations for wearing a short skirt, or being put off the whole idea of seeking justice by the nature and degree of trauma they had suffered.

I felt that in order to put more guilty men behind bars for this heinous offence we need to take away the attached emotional mess that drove victims, prosecutors, lawyers and public alike. So I started to dig into the history of rape in the UK and by chance I came across a famous 1972 test case - that had me laughing along with a group of law students I shared a house with…

The point in law that “stood out” for me, was that burglary was defined as trespassing with intent to steal or to rape…
all jokes about significant penetration of the property aside, this showed me that the law of rape was clearly still associated with property law, with the rape of a woman of the household being paralleled with theft from that house.

My theory concerning the bad nature of this law was also shaped by my knowing that men too can be raped, and that trauma can vary very widely in both female and male victims due to a range of circumstances.
The law however, and people’s perception of it, led society to believe that the point of penetration by a penis was when a lesser crime of assault of some form turned into a “fate worse than death”.
My women friends who had suffered rape in their lives agreed that at least this aspect of the law was ridiculous, as one friend put it to me at the time, (paraphrased), she described her ex boyfriend coming round to their flat to collect some things and it blowing up into an argument and sexual attack - “the bastard was determined to humiliate and dominate me and my resistance just made him get rougher, so I gave in, but remained as angry as Hell…”
she added later, “if it had been masked strangers in the street it would have been very different and I would have screamed my fucking head off…”

From what I saw, heard and read, I could see that dangerous rapists were indeed getting away with heinous assaults but that sometimes the legal definition would influence a jury one way or the other, and not help with cool judgement of the evidence and getting to the right verdict.

So I put an argument to the Law Commission (as you do) that we should repeal the law of rape and instead alter the law of sexual assault so that the degree classification reflected the level of trauma likely to be caused to the victim, and punishment reflect this new scale. For the sake of simplicity I refer only to offences involving adults.

e.g. Common sexual assault might include pinching a stranger’s bum on the tube, or grabbing a kiss even as someone pushed you away -
punishments could range from being bound over to a suspended prison sentence.

Serious sexual assault or “3rd degree” might include many more forms of unwanted attention that include physical force, but not any form of bodily penetration.
punishment could range broadly but would tend to be custodial reflecting the degree of danger such an assailant represented.

2nd degree sexual assault would include all forms of non consensual penetration, or being forced to penetrate, not gender specific in any way. Custodial sentences would be standard within a range of 1 to 8 years.

1st degree sexual (or “aggravated”) assault would include (the feared and oft fictionalised), stranger rape with violence, abduction, humiliation, etc.
punishments would be as fierce as could be justified now for rapes of this nature.

We could also have an offence of “Sexual misadventure” a decision made where both parties got drunk had a sexual encounter and the next day one of them regretted where it ended up, with consent either way being impossible to judge.
that would attract perhaps an official warning or a bound over sentence at most.

Would juries, lawyers and the public not find it far easier to sit and make decisions with these newly defined offences as their guidelines?
I believe still, that this would lead to fewer wrongful convictions, fewer false allegations and fewer perpetrators walking free or the law failing to prosecute them.

Women’s organisations such as “RAPE ARRGGH!” or “All Men Are Evil” would surely scream/object to, or laugh at this idea - why? because to them it fails to allow them to scream RAPE! at every opportunity (no wonder so many socials block you from using the word) undermining their actual goal of getting more funding for more staff by putting overblown fears into every ally of theirs 3x daily.
The modifications to the law of rape made since the 1970s (e.g. it no longer has to be a penis and the mouth is included) may have appeased some Feminists, though the outcomes of all these changes clearly should not please any of them.

If they bothered to study the implications of what I lay out here, those who were actually concerned with women’s welfare and the law should be very happy with it. More female victims of serious sexual assault would achieve justice, the law would look less like an ass. Their problems, to do with their probable reductions in funding, as fewer scared people meant fewer hostels and support groups, might include the realisation that so many more male victims would come forward, including the schoolboys assaulted by their female rapist teachers where the word rape is currently a sticking point. This might get them seething in the usual whirlpool of “Us first!” whataboutery.

I commend this idea to the house - yet, because gynocentrism and Feminism are so embedded into our establishment, I realise that it stands not a pigeon fart in a hurricane’s chance of reaching establishment consideration.