What Ken Clarke Doesn’t Get About Rape

If you haven’t heard Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s interview on Radio 5 live yet, it’s worth a listen. In less than five minutes he manages to go from patronising and offensive (not to mention completely ignorant of his departmental brief) to being an outright apologist for rape. Just not ‘real’ rape, you see?

It started as a discussion over Government proposals to half the sentences of those defendants who plead guilty (with no exception for rapists), over which a perfectly legitimate difference of opinion may be held. Personally I’ve always been sceptical of plea-bargaining systems as I feel they often pressure the accused into pleading guilty rather than presenting a proper defence, but given the notoriously low conviction rate for rape and the way long trials can affect the victims I can see the case for doing so. The interviewer, however, had a different angle on the issue, taking issue with the idea of lowering sentence lengths for rape itself. She brought up the fact that as “the average” sentence for rape was five years, and prisoners are typically released on license after completing half of their sentence, a rapist convicted under this scheme could expect to be back on the streets within “a year and a bit” (precisely speaking, fifteen months).

Ken Clarke immediately takes issue with this claim, insisting that this wasn’t true of “serious rape,” and that the interviewer’s figure included “date rape, seventeen year olds having sex with fifteen year olds.” This is where critical listeners start to take issue with his statements as not only does he seem to distinguish between “serious rape” and other rapes, implying that some rape is not serious and as such not deserving of serious punishment, he bizarrely seems to include date rape in this category of rapes that aren’t serious.

It’s also at this point he first demonstrates the extent of his ignorance of the law on such matters, despite not only being the Justice Secretary (and clearly not having done the research for the law he’s proposing) but also having once served as a lawyer in rape trials (as he points out himself during the interview). No doubt the law has moved on since that those days, but the facts today are clear. The recommended sentence for a “single offence of rape by single offender” is “5 years custody if the victim is 16 or over”. The use of the term “average” by the interviewer and subsequent BBC reports is unfortunate, this isn’t some statistical trick obtained by grouping in exceptional cases to bring down the mean, it is the standard sentence.

Regarding the Romeo and Juliet scenario mentioned, the relevant charge in this case is not rape but the separate “Sexual Activity with a Child” which, the perpetrator in Mr Clarke’s scenario being a minor, is likely to result in a much lighter sentence. Regardless, such cases do not contribute towards the statistics for rape sentencing unless one of the participants was unwilling, Mr Clarke’s insistence that “anybody has sex with a fifteen year old, it’s rape” shows he isn’t even vaguely familiar with the Sexual Offences Act, 2003, in which case, how can he be taken seriously when proposing such serious alterations to the carrying out of rape law?

He goes on to repeat his distinction of “serious rape”, now qualifying it as one in which involves “violence” and “an unwilling woman.” Leaving aside the question of why the rape of unwilling men is apparently not a serious offence, one has to ask how many people Ken Clarke imagines are servicing jail sentences for rape in cases where a jury believed that the victim was willing. Forget his lack of familiarity with criminal sentencing procedures, it appears the Justice Secretary doesn’t even know what the word “rape” means – apparently there is both consensual and non-consensual rape!

I’ll finish with a quote, I invite you to listen to the context yourself.

Interviewer: “Rape is rape.”
Ken Clarke: “No, it’s not.”