Dr Carys Moseley looks at the Crown Prosecution Service’s concern over the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ legal defence.
Last Sunday the Sunday Times reported that the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge a man accused of assault of a woman during a sexual encounter because prosecutors feared that he could claim that she consented to the assaults. This story comes just as the Domestic Abuse Bill, which contains an amendment to outlaw the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey defence’, went to the bill committee in the House of Commons yesterday.
Risk of no prosecution of sexual offences
Labour MP Harriet Harman is said to have written to the Director of Public Prosecutions Max Hill QC warning that this could lead to ‘no prosecutions of sexual offences at all’ as defendants could always claim victims ‘wanted it’.
This is known as the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey defence’, after the notorious blockbuster film based on a novel glorifying and normalising sado-masochism between a man and a woman. Many Christians including Christian Concern protested against the screening of the film in cinemas across the UK. The call for censorship fell on deaf ears at the time but is now increasingly vindicated given the level of concern about the influence of both book and film.
Crooked courts back violent sadists
Astonishingly, the Sunday Times quotes the letter from the CPS to the woman alleged to be the defendant’s victim thus:
“A prosecution could follow in relation to this offence, but the courts have shown an interest in changing the law so that the suspect could say that you consented to these assaults. This would be difficult to disprove…If I prosecuted this offence it is likely to lead to lengthy legal proceedings in which the background to the case would have to be visited as far as the sexual practices that led to and accompanied the infliction of the injuries. In my opinion it is not in the public interest to pursue this charge.”
The prosecutor is hinting that the victim would have to face cross-examination over her sexual history here, and that this might lead to the defendant successfully arguing that she consented to sado-masochistic relations. It looks like a way of shaming her into silence and bullying her into giving up her pursuit of justice.
Have judges normalised sado-masochism?
What all this implies is that corrupt judges in the criminal courts are conniving to undermine objective notions of right and wrong and caving in to the worldview of campaigners for the ‘rights’ of sado-masochists to express their sexual perversion freely. According to such a value-free mentality sexualised violence is fine if the victim ‘consented’ to it.
One suspects that the real reason the CPS does not want to prosecute this man is that it knows that allowing cross-examination of the victim would shine a spotlight on the sheer manipulativeness and deceit inherent to the sado-masochism subculture, and show up the way its proponents have pushed for its normalisation which in turn has undermined objective notions of good and evil in the criminal justice system. This is surely the real purpose of shaming the victim here.
Misogyny at the CPS
The truth is that there is a profound problem with the way the CPS deals with crimes relating to women and girls. The CPS has not apologised for its Hate Crime guidance privileging transgender rights in schools over existing single-sex based provisions, when it was threatened with legal action on behalf of a teenage girl.
Girls are now growing up with a horrifying vision of what life as a woman can be like. They are growing up in a society where the criminal justice system is actively promoting sadism against them and giving them mixed messages which are terrifyingly manipulative. Women who get involved in sado-masochism are more likely to have been survivors of Child Sexual Exploitation.
Complacency about violence fuels female transgenderism and lesbianism
Given that the CPS is too arrogant and cowardly to confront evil but that it rather sit back and enable it, is it any wonder that more and more girls grow up wanting to be boys and men?
The testimonies of women who have detransitioned show how a major motivator in them going down the transgender path in the first place was a history of being physically or sexually abused, especially by men. They seem to have developed the mentality of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. This mentality also extends to some girls and women who turn to lesbianism.
Porn industry part of the problem
Similarly we know that the porn industry is actively involved in promoting both tendencies. The British Board of Film Classification recently published a report which highlighted how increasing numbers of teenage girls are watching porn online, partly because they believe young men want them to learn from it, only then to be repelled by the level of sadistic violence by men against women now mainstreamed. What porn sites then do is to suggest lesbian porn for these viewers, who take the bait as they feel that it would not involve violence by men against women.
The reason this is relevant is that the CPS recently changed the prosecution guidelines for dealing with extreme porn under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. This means it has passively enabled its spread.
Lockdown as God’s mercy
As the news cycle and the contemporary culture is now dominated by the response to the Coronavirus, it is important to look back on what immediately preceded the lockdown. In the months running up to the lockdown we saw some of the most wicked crimes being highlighted.
It is worth asking whether the Coronavirus lockdown has made any difference to the spread of sadistic behaviour in society. For as the lockdown has led to the government reluctantly forcing pubs and nightclubs to shut down, and as social distancing really means sexual distancing, people cannot have sexual relations with strangers at present, or indeed with anyone with whom they are not married or cohabiting. Undoubtedly many women may find the lockdown to be a relief from this pattern of behaviour. Can we see the lockdown as God’s mercy, a call to reformation and revival that would cleanse the population of this evil?
Lockdown as God’s judgment on sexualised violence
The campaign to end the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ defence in cases of assault and murder following sexualised violence started last November. In January the news about the conviction of the most prolific rapist in British criminal history broke. He had used the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ defence against his male victims. It emerged that the press had been told two years beforehand not to report on the multiple trials against him, for fear of him not getting a fair trial. As he was a gay rights campaigner one has to ask whether the authorities feared a public backlash. Likewise in the case of the CPS declining to prosecute a man for assaulting a woman during sex, we have to ask whether the CPS is trying to prevent a public backlash against sado-masochism, now a campaigning movement insistent on its ‘rights’.
Some Christians believe that the lockdown if not also the Coronavirus itself is God’s judgment on our society. I think we should at least consider that the lockdown is God’s way of forcing deeply sinful and rebellious governments across the western world to shut down the culture of sexual sin and violence that has led to this depth of depravity and total corruption of the current generation. It is also good that the Home Office did early on allow victims of domestic abuse to get help.
Reform of the CPS long overdue
It isn’t however enough to believe that the lockdown is God’s mercy and judgment on this culture of sexualised evil, itself a quite deliberate attempt to take over society and make it love evil and hate what is good and right. The Bible never promises us that every evildoer will repent. History shows us that the Bible is truthful about this. Criminal justice is not cancelled by the fact that some offenders repent. It needs to continue until Christ’s return brings history to an end.
The situation we are now in is one where the criminal justice system is not a terror to bad conduct, as Paul says government is meant to be (Romans 13), but is refusing to punish it. This is the outcome of the sexual revolution, of the glorification of sexual perversion and violence, and the deliberate rebellion against God as our Creator. It has had a profound effect on the legal system and corrupted legal training.
The CPS however has shown no remorse for its cowardice and passive enabling of evil. The present government did promise a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in the Queen’s Speech last December. It is past time that the CPS was subjected to thorough scrutiny by a body with the legal powers of a Royal Commission that can invite witnesses to testify freely about its workings.
