The Green Machine rolls on. Jan Logie takes her case to gerrymander the law to gain more convictions in Sexual Assault to the Nation, and they did a far better job of this debate than Q+A did. Dyhrberg’s ability to counter Jan directly showed how unworkable the concepts were and that made it a far better debate.
Jan’s position is that victims find a terrible time of the trial and the ideas put forward to pre-record evidence was a good step. Dyhrberg countered that with technical issues that would in fact slow the process down.
The real issue is the sexual history element that removes the only defence to rape. It removes the background and context to a defendants belief they had consent in the hope that this will ensure more convictions.
That’s right, this entire experiment is to ensure a lift in conviction rates for sexual assault, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the accused.
By hiding the past history of the defendant and claimant, the Jury will perceive them as strangers which leads to the Spinoff version of guilt.
Jan had toned down her Q+A performance with slow calm language which didn’t focus on her demand for more convictions to try and slide this under the radar before the rest of the public realise what the Greens are doing here.
The changes put forward amount to an enormous realignment of legal rights and powers with the express purpose of gaining more convictions.
Oranga Tamariki started off with the exact same intentions.
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What a fucking freak show
Good to see the Greens focus on yet another critical environmental issue. Question: why do we even have this Green Party???? Can someone start a real green party so I can vote for that?
True “Green’ conscience is much more common now than it was previously, and i suspect the relevance of the old environmental version of the green party is now gone.. As an example look at the number of farmers jumping enthusiastically into regenerative farming, the awareness of what is needed for good environmental outcomes is gaining acceptance all the time. This stuff is happening DESPITE the green and labour policies which are anti-farming and based on punitive taxation and top-down polices where every farm has to be told what to do by the elites in Wellington, people who frequently do not even own a pair of gumboots let alone who any real concepts of sustainable land management. Why can’t our MPs understand that adding costs to farmers just means the money they might otherwise spend on enviromental issues goes into added tax and compliance costs instead?
There’s a guy down the road from me who a decade ago derided my ‘greenie’ tree-planting organic farm management. I see he has recently joined the regenerative farming movement and is out there enthusiastically pushing ideas that a decade ago he ridiculed me for. This is a great example fo the change in urban environments. But the inner-city luvvies still hate us and still think farmers are doing what we did in the 1950’s.
The current Green Party has zero credibility with those of us actually involved in sustainable land management, and they should have zero value to anyone on the true left. They remain the same as they have been for some time now, a bunch of muppets who appeal solely to a certain class of shallow-minded affluent inner-city chardonnay socialists who believe they are inspirational environmental heros because they recycle, and maybe even have a solar water heater.
Wha?
Okay, what will the carrying capacity of planet earth be after the implementation of a regenerative farming utopia?
Well said Ben. You know, All ACT needs to do is get a few environmental specialists on board and set up 3 or 4 sensible green policies…and they will wipe out these greens in the inner cities and become a 20% party. In Auckland for sure, because there are a lot of ‘nouveau greens’ with conservative leanings, prepared to spend their money on green initiatives.
Don’t vote Greens – just Act green.
Act will be lucky to get one seat next election and that will probably be Epsom. At the moment see-more is sounding like a barking dog trying to remain relevant. His main policies are charter schools, guns and euthanasia not exactly life changing.
Many people misunderstand Green Politics and Green parties underlying prinicples and values.
They, including some Green Party voters, assume Green politics and parties have always been about the environment only. That mistake has probably happened because Greens were the first political groups to include the environment in their manifestos.
Green politics and parties have always included ecological wisdom (wider than just the environment, includes how communities live within their environments); social justice; non-violence and participant democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_politics#Core_tenets
And that’s pretty much always been in the NZ Green Party Charter, which includes Ecological Wisdom; Social Responsibility; Appropriate Decision-making; Non-Violence.
https://www.greens.org.nz/charter
This is given more detail in their Values.
I think the NZ Green Party has moved away from consensus decision making (as in their values) and has become too authoritarian recently. They are not listening to all “new” voices, etc.
But what will the carrying capacity be after a green utopia is implemented???
Let us look at how far we have already come in dealing with rape and sexual assault.
In the 1970s I was a newspaper journalist and a senior Wellington Detective(male) told me that if a woman came to them with a rape complaint they would ask when it happened and if there were any witnesses. What force had been used?
If was more than a couple of days ago ,without witnesses and no physical damage they would tell her there was nothing they could do with no evidence.
This experienced policeman told me that rape usually came down to two people together without witnesses. Even with forensic evidence( semen) the police had to prove that no consent was given, or even implied.
This man was sure that many rapists are not convicted but was also sure many complaints are made in fit of anger or out of malice.
Forward to the last couple of years when my daughter suffered a sexual assault( not a rape). I was struck by the difference in police attitudes.
Her complaint was handled by women officers who closely, but sympathetically, questioned her about the circumstances, time and place.
In the course of their investigation they discovered other women that had been assaulted and they were able to build a body of evidence against her assailant who they also interviewed several times before charging him.
In the end there was a successful conviction and an appropriate sentence.
I am not saying what we have now is perfect but it is way better than what existed before.
Anything can be improved but fixing what is not broken will create a prize fuck up with more people wrongfully imprisoned.
CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING
‘Social scientists of the most varying standpoints agree that human action can be rendered meaningful only by relating it to the contexts in which it takes place. The meaning and consequences of a behaviour pattern will vary with the contexts in which it occurs. This is commonly recognized in the saying that there is a “time and a place for everything”.’ (Alvin Gouldner, 1955)
In everyday talk we often hear people talking about the importance of not taking something out of context. This is wise advice. Nothing exists, and therefore can be understood, in isolation from its context, for it is context that gives meaning to what we think and do.’
‘One definition that might better connect with rational assessment is that context refers to all those variables (z) that influence or could influence the ‘independent’ (x) and dependent (y) variables directly under study – in other words, context is another name for all the intervening variables.
This is, of course playing into the hands of positivism, but at least has the merit of shifting the mindset from simple, linear, one-way, cause–effect ‘chains’ in a closed system to more of an open system, multi-factorial mindset.’
Ergo…
Removing the sexual history element is leading into the wrong legal direction. History, background and context are essential sources for seeking truth and justice.
(Reference to quoted text above to Paul Bate, Emeritus Professor of Health Services Management, CHIME, University College London)
https://www.moillusions.com/wp-content/uploads/2.bp.blogspot.com/_cxmptAPYR-s/Rc8hwHL4cOI/AAAAAAAAALM/OVekhpqp8pM/s400/Spheres.JPG
see Ebbinghaus Illusion
The context is a culture in which women’s claims of sexual assault and rape are too often not believed – in which the accused defence aims to attack the complainant as a liar and to use her past history to discredit her. And the result is women are afraid to report such crimes against them.
It’s a hot topic in NSW at the moment.
This from the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Too many of us believe women lie about rape. In fact, they rarely report it”
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/too-many-of-us-believe-women-lie-about-rape-in-fact-they-rarely-report-it-20210305-p57889.html
“What’s important to remember is that only about 10 per cent of rapes are reported. Of those, while it is very difficult to ascertain exact numbers in different jurisdictions, about 5 per cent are found to be false (a Victorian study found 2 per cent were). It’s a tiny fraction of the whole, comparable to other crimes.
The most important questions are why 90 per cent don’t report, and why so few go to jail. Of those reported, only about 7 per cent result in convictions. So 7 per cent of 10 per cent. Ponder that stat when you think about the rule of law.”
Yes, @Karolyn_IS, thank you.
Naturally, the common ‘culture-of-the-day’ is always setting some of the context. There is no doubt that such context presently can be extremely sexist in a way denigrating women up to the point of accepting physical violation of their body.
Physical power and structural violence are main elements for product marketing and promotion, or for audio/video entertainment.
… just watch the unbelievable junk running through the mobiles of our sons and daughters.
But.
Should this be leading to removing the sexual history element from a potential and specific rape case?
… I think this would be a step into the wrong direction.
Again, history, background and context are essential sources for seeking truth and justice.
Yes, it should. The focus of a rape or sexual violence case should be on the actual alleged incident – that is the immediate context to be .
it doesn’t matter if the complainant was married to the accused for 20 years; worked as a prostitute; has a criminal history; is a drug user; has been a bad mother; was unfaithful to her partner; has committed fraud; wears revealing clothes…etc etc… none of those is a green light for a man to rape or sexually abuse her.
I do also think prevention is better than an ambulance or justice system at the bottom of the cliff.
Many men need to have a better understand of ‘consent’ and many elements of our culture are unhealthy for women – I’m told online porn is full of abuses of women these days; and than there’s a whole genre in rape porn available.
This will be a hard juggernaut to turn around. But currently, the vast majority of women don’t report sexual assault or rape – the idea of going through such an abusive system is off-putting – especially to young women who tend to be the main target of predatory males. Most of us experienced some of it when we were young women, and by the sound of it, it’s got worse in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#cite_note-Zutter2017-7
G’Day @Karolyn_IS,
Thanks again for feedback.
We are not talking about changing the focus of rape but about finding actual inputs into verification/falsification of claims.
This is a basic paradigm of our legal system.
If not, we simply would be talking about some sort of direct revenge. An eye for an eye, or so.
… and if so, can this possibly be expanded to other forms of assault? Why not?
As we are discussing ‘justice’, such acknowledgement is important, as an accuser may eventually have several motivations for false claims.
Especially when sexuality meets morality.
Yes, there are false claims, indeed.
See also related entries in the wiki-link above.
Reference:
de Zutter, André; van Koppen, Peter J.; Horselenberg, Robert (February 2017). “Motives for Filing a False Allegation of Rape”. Archives of Sexual Behavior. International Academy of Sex Research. 47 (2): 457–464.
What else?
To better counter the abuse of women these days, a visit to a garment factory in Dhaka, and the living conditions of her family there, are most helpful, too.
With a bit of luck one may find the fruits of her work in the Warehouse.
(This is not meant to be cynical…)
Comrade Karolyn
Isn’t the issue here context and intent?
Previous sexual history IS relevant if it forms an impression that sexual contact was consensual.
If the male thinks sex is consensual that forms a different intent surely?
Now the male can be legally challenged for believing that, but it does go to intent surely?
If you accidentally kill it’s manslaughter, if you premeditated a killing it is murder.
Intent matters and past sexual history informs that intent.
Maybe a better way forward would be a charge with degrees of sexual violation, because finding someone who believed reasonably they had consent with rape is beyond pendulum shifting, it makes it almost impossible to mount any legal defence.
Kia ora Martyn.
Intent still comes down to what actually happened in the alleged incident. The more important issue is evidence of consent, or lack thereof. That issue needs wider public discussion because this seems to be an area which many men, especially young men, don’t seem to have a clue.
Past history, especially past sexual history, cannot provide the evidence for intent. It only indicates various culturally-loaded assumptions around female behaviour.
The accused needs to prove that there was consent – and ‘intent’ resting on past (sexual) history will not prove that. All it does is retraumatise victims, and result in the majority of sexual assaults and rapes not being reported.
The issue of concerns about alleged false rape allegations has been fairly strongly examined in specialist areas, here and internationally.
Most importantly stats have shown that the concerns with false accusations have been highly exaggerated. Most stats in NZ, US, & UK show the rate of false allegations to be between 1-5%. In fact, given how the vast majority of such crimes are ever reported, it’s very low.
Furthermore, the false allegations are most usually identified by the police and never get to court.
This UK article says that the rate of false accusations are probably lower than most estimates because they include police stats classifying claims as “no crime”. This is often done because there was insufficient evidence.
http://www.open.ac.uk/research/news/false-accusations-sexual-violence
Specialists who deal with rape include police, doctors, mental health experts, etc. They tend to have a pretty good idea of the factors involved in rapes and sexual assaults.
The proposed Bill, and the similar UK one indicate that the result is/will be taking longer for cases to get to court. I suspect this may have to do with the police taking more time to gather relevant evidence – and possibly fewer, not more cases getting to court.
And in court, the accused’s defence should be around what actually happened during the alleged incident – eg if the event occurred, and why they are claiming it was consensual.
sure, but again, the intent of the accused matters and by removing that defence you are gerrymandering the outcome to one that overwhelmingly favours guilt.
Martyn, the system is already strongly biased against women with a strong double standard.
Currently it is not permitted to use the accused’s history, unless they raise it themselves. The accused can be a convicted rapist, but the jury won’t hear that. The complainant’s history is allowed, and so is subjected to sustained personal attack with all past history put under a microscope.
The law says that the accussed’s prior offences are not evidence of the current alleged rape/sexual assault. But it allows exactly that being the case for the alleged victim.
The current system is heavily weighted towards the accused. Before DNA testing the accused almost always said the alleged rape never happened. Now they have shifted to saying it was consensual and that now she has remorse.
The spectre of false allegations being enabled by the proposed Bill is a red herring. The small number usually don’t stand up to investigation.
If the double standards continue to apply – can attack victims past history, but not the accused’s – then it is hard to prove rape/sexual assault.
Intent can only be proved with respect to the alleged rape/assault under examination. It can’t be proved by past history
But intent still contextualises the action! If the bias were as insurmountable as you are suggesting, why do we, as Jack Tame pointed out in the q+a interview – have a 31% conviction rate?
You think the conviction rate is good? You forget all the women who are put off by the whole distressing process and their cases never get to trial.
You are following the lawyers’ line of criticisms. But, of course defence lawyers are not keen on the changes. They’ve had it too easy so far. Try to discredit the complainant on the stand – attack, attack, attack, and try to subjectively influence the jury. It may suggest to the jury some assumptions about intent, but never actually proves it.
Meanwhile, it is not allowed for the background ‘intent’ of the accused to be examined because the law reckons it doesn’t apply to the case in question.
The result of the Bill will be to continue to shift the focus of the defence & prosecution to the alleged incident – on consent; and on the medical and forensic evidence. This is where the defence will need to focus. And this is far more reliable than attacking the complainant’s past.
The forensic exam (AKA ‘Rape Kit’) can show more than DNA – eg may show whether the alleged victim’s or accused version of the event matches with the hard evidence.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/105933366/hundreds-of-rape-evidence-kits-never-get-tested–should-we-be-alarmed
There’s also psychological research developing comparing false allegation stories with actual proved crimes.
This will take more of the investigators’ and lawyers’ time.
I’ve presented a fair amount of evidence. At this point I’ll rest my case and see what MPs have to say in the House as the Bill progresses.
Karolyn_IS. Well then what is guilt? The guilty is who the high court decides, not what Jan Logie says.
Sure you can allow woman to go beyond magna carter but it’s still who the high court decides is guilty.
What the courts have decided is that corporations are people and what Jan is saying is accused rapists ought to be less than a person but nothing about corporate power.
So gradually under the cover of social justice corporations are been given more rights than people and I know it’s a bit of a stretch to say that bank profits are assured at no cost while discussing rape it’s the overall debt pool that touches every aspect of life.
Martyn said: “The real issue is the sexual history element that removes the only defence to rape. It removes the background and context to a defendants belief they had consent in the hope that this will ensure more convictions.”
If this is what “consent” is considered to be about by some people, then we have a problem. I don’t think law change is the only way forward. There needs to be an community education component about what is involved in ‘consent’ – and that probably needs some widespread community discussion.
A law can’t be based on individuals’ subjective “belief”. Consent is something that can be withdrawn at any time. So past history is not really relevant -current state of relationship might be, but that needs to be legislated carefully.
If the law enables the accused to resort to BELIEF of consent based on past behaviour or relationships of the complainant, that opens the door to re-traumatising the (alleged) victim. And if that happens, even fewer sexually abused people will come forward with complaints of criminal behaviour.
See this article in Sydney Morning Herald:
“‘Too many think silence is consent’: Victim says rape ‘endemic’ in eastern suburbs”
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/too-many-think-silence-is-consent-victim-says-rape-endemic-in-eastern-suburbs-20210220-p5748u.html
‘“It’s endemic in the eastern suburbs – every single one of my female friends has been in a situation where they have been in a sexual encounter where there was no consent,” Ms Brown said. “Too many men think silence is consent.””
This article arose because teenage girls were reporting their first hand experiences of sexual assault, and asking for boys to have better education about ‘consent’.
It is a difficult issue to create laws around, and the correct balance needs to be achieved between weighting it towards re-traumatising victims, as well as enabling a fair defence by the accused.
Women and girls are always in a difficult situation when it comes to these one-on-one encounters: any male who has been through male puberty will be stronger, and have m ore explosive speed than any female. Teenage girls learn early that telling some males “no” can result in scary and physically aggressive behaviour – and it’s never certain who such males will be.
But, education and widespread discussion about consent and sensitivity toward others should also be part of the solution.
“Re-traumatising” is a dark fact of life. Using the law to neutralise emotional responses? Now that is one steep slippery slope. If that were really the goal, pre-trial interview changes could be made instead. The whole approach sounds more like revenge, based on old theories dealing with trauma that says there is stage where the victim has the feeling that “someone must pay”. Why they decided to stop at that early stage of the process, and change laws with it, who knows.
Using overseas social conditions to justify changes in NZ futures is risky. While people are people and have capacity to be all things, the environment the person is in has a strong influence on whether or not certain traits emerge. Australian and American society isn’t NZ society. This is NZ law, not US or AUS. The absolute statements about who men and women are, and how things happen, in the above media links is misinformation based on their preferences. That’s the papers for you.
Two levels of subjectivity: The Complainant, whose subjectivity is more objective than the Defendant, whose subjectivity is much less objective. If the belief of consent did not exist; if the belief that an intimate relationship could exist, did not exist; if the belief of the existence of an existing intimate relationship, did not exist (pre/sexual); then on one hand we have an easy open and shut case, on the other, what on earth would the complainant be doing freely choosing to be in a situation with a possible rapist? Alternatively, why is the complainant omitting the past relationship? We have after all discarded the beliefs of the Defendant as irrelevent. A contradiction emerges – one which enrages the kind of people arguing it. At some point, the complainant has to (ideally does this consciously) cross the line into an area of real life where they think, “ok well everything up to this point suggests this situation is safe”. A belief in context based on the past, and if we’re lucky, intuition in the moment. Two levels of subjectivity begins, using a system that now presumably also measures and then denies intuition. We can go further than that, but already our sense of what the law can do has exceeded our wildest hopes. Situations where the complainant is drunk are already covered by law.
In a non-hostile reality, few people would actually consider the possibility of an intimate moment consciously, or any moment consciously. How then, does a realtionship form? If the situation is potentially hostile, but the aggressor cannot legally be considered to be rational or self controlled, the potential victim must (under this proposed law) be conscious otherwise they freely choose trauma, or incite violence. Here is a point we need to consider instead of thinking changing the law will carry our neglect of conscious action. Do we need a physical ticket system, where before any intimate exchange, a number of people get their tickets clipped (perhaps using a smart phone uploading to a independent storage facility) to assure consent? How would we know when to press “send consent”? We are now told our minds do not progress along any evolution of thought idenpendent of external action. We can no longer “expect” future events, or consent to them, as there is no possible point of consent until after something happens to us. Alternatively, if we want to stay rational, we have to ask potential victims to be fully conscious of their surroundings, and pro-victim ideology collapses in on itself.
In Jan Logie’s first interview she implies romanticism of gender roles blurs everything, then uses the same to place emphasis on her argument. If she believed that, then to change the law in the way she states wouldn’t work. Only her ideological bias becomes apparent. In her world, it seems that the existence of danger exists only in the person who acts consciously, and is transferred without warning from them to potential victims. It is a belief based in an ideal hope, and not reflective of reality. In that context, no relationship can ever or does exist between the two parties.
Whoever a person believes themselves to be, in a relationship their “other” has a behavioural role complimentary/oppositional to theirs. Usually (but not entirely) it is dictated by what they were told or learned, based on some past weird mish mash of things that happened between people. They call it, “culture” – all sub/cultures. In the context of culture, few people would know for sure what happened to them, in an absolute sense, or could effectively place total blame, and would be snookered by blaming themselves, or both parties to varying degrees, and only really know for sure that they don’t like how they feel about things. Culture says it’s the way things are. If culture is wrong, then what else is wrong that culture says is right? The last thing a new victim of sexual assault needs is a dissolution of identity causing a complete nervous breakdown!
Then ideology comes along and says, no you were not wrong, or, no you were to blame because you should have expected it, or that you encouraged it by not openly objecting. Then somewhere a person’s conscience, or sense of identity based on gender roles, maybe even childhood trauma, is saying you definitely played a part, but that voice can’t effectively locate the exact degree, and arbitrarily picking a side is all that is left. People need to relive this in a safe environment (or better still, learn it as more important than aspiring to own a house or any other number of useless things). We need the investigation of events and degrees, ideally without the courts for personal balance, but certainly a criminal investigation when required. It’s the only route, after the fact, to solving the whole problem. Or we could throw people in jail because it’s too hard, too inconvenient, to dangerous to unravel (the collateral fallout would be catastrophic to all existing cultures, not a reason not to, but it would be “bigger than the sixties”), and maybe later in life a person figures it out, and then has to make another decision: were they involved in the wrongful imprisonment of someone? Oh well never mind. Just die of old age quietly. Worse, would be to know you were, only much earlier than old age, and in an effort to cover your guilt you “lived” a life of hate. All for the sake of avoiding reliving trauma, and inviting change. Far easier is to adopt a for-o- against position, ignore the real problem, dig deep into ideology based on absolutes that don’t exist, and do our best to make sure we aren’t a direct victim of our new legal decisions.
Drives me up the wall to watch these people barking stupid ideology at an influential level and destroying everything they touch. They won’t even tackle an easy physical problem like housing, but they reckon they can discover the exact point of gender interface and manipulate it to their preference. What is being sold to people is simply the absolutes of one side. Based on Jan Logie’s argument, it’ll make a fine culture where no intimate relationship can legally exist unless culture as we know it ceases to exist.
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