Yesterday Bill Roach was cleared of the allegations of sexual assault that had been brought against him. I'm not a legal expert. I have no clue as to the details of this case as I didn't even really follow it on the news so I don't feel qualified to comment on the verdict or trial. I am, however, a resident of the United Kingdom and therefore I do have a right to comment on the reaction I saw last night.
The Twitter search function is completely useless so I couldn't find the tweets I read last night that made me so angry to quote so this is probably going to read a bit like story time. But please bear with me. There is a point. Someone re-tweeted a tweet into my time line calling the women who'd brought the complaints against Roache 'disgusting', 'liars', 'the worst kind of people', 'whores' etc. I clicked through to the hashtag and saw that this tweeter was not alone in their feelings.
Because Roache was found innocent it seemed OK to declare open season on the prosecution. Clearly they had to be lying (and 'money grabbing' to boot, although I never found an explanation for this). And because they were lying they themselves should go to prison, have their right to anonymity removed and probably whipped through the streets.
THIS CANNOT BE HOW A LEGAL SYSTEM WORKS!
How anyone can think it is alright to punish people who bring unsuccessful cases to court is staggering. Can you imagine what kind of a world we would live in if that were the case? The only people who would report a crime would be those who were certain of the verdict going in their favour. It would be a tiny minority who had the power and influence to ensure cases were ruled the way they wanted them to be. Everyone else would be terrified to make a complaint in case they themselves were prosecuted. It would be an outrageous way to conduct things. It wouldn't just leave the most vulnerable amongst us without access to the justice system, it would leave damn near all of us without it.
That, and there is a reason it is called 'not guilty' rather than 'innocent'. It means the jury didn't feel the case had been proved beyond reasonable doubt. It doesn't meant it didn't happen (although I feel I should point out it also doesn't mean it did, and Roache may very well be innocent. I just don't know). For what it's worth I think this should be how it works. Any doubt and the jury should go with 'not guilty', but that's a rant for another time. My point is these women could have been telling the truth. A 'not guilty' verdict does not automatically mean the prosecution were lying and it's not up to random upstarts on Twitter to decide that they are.
Incidentally, I noticed a lot of people last night railing against the CPS for bringing the case to trial. This also baffled me. If every case the CPS brought to trial went in favour of the prosecution what would be the point of the trial? It also irked me that these people assumed the CPS 'hadn't done their job'. Who are you, disgruntled avatar, to tell the CPS how to do their job?
The other thing that really made my blood boil is that this was a sexual assault trial. The CPS has recently been criticised for the dwindling numbers of such cases that they refer to the courts. That suggests to me that this would not have gone forward had it not been felt the case was pretty robust.
And now we come to the delightful misogyny these views betray. 'The worst type of people', 'whores', 'money grabbing sluts'. Yet again the myth that being accused of rape or sexual assault it worse than being raped or sexually assaulted. That, my friends, is cast iron bullshit. It must be awful to be accused of such a serious crime if you haven't done it, but it's a whole lot worse to have to life with the aftermath of rape and sexual assault (that, and regardless of what idiots may say, false rape allegations are pretty damn rare). Yet we seem to live in a culture where it's acceptable, even expected, that women in these cases are not believed. That doesn't hold for any other crime, and it is not OK. I can't help but feel these women would not be vilified to the same extent had Roache been cleared of stealing their handbags. Also, I think we can see from the aftermath of Ched Evans' guilty verdict, they wouldn't have been treated any differently had Roache been found guilty.
As for naming the women involved....just read this post at Sian and Crooked Rib because it explains the reasons why those who report rape and sexual assault should remain anonymous far more eloquently than I could.
In short, random angry people baying for the blood of women who may not even have done anything wrong, get the fuck over yourselves.
