Does he have an All Black friend?
I'm trying to write a review of Half Nelson (sample in my mind "it's a movie of empathy", "It's a movie about dialectics", "it's a movie about alienation" - I'm going to have to get beyond 'it's awesome' if I'm going to write an actual review). But I was searching for information about the John Dewar trial,* and read about a Christchurch rape trial
The woman who was raped was working as a prostitute and had used drugs. So the defence is arguing that she was ‘confused’ and didn’t know how many men she’d had sex with that night. It’s a little more sophisticated version of ‘prostitutes can’t be raped’. Instead the defence is arguing ‘Prostitutes can be raped, but they have so much sex that they can’t remember who raped them’.
The man who raped her**, was only found when he was training for the police, and his fingerprints matched fingerprints found at the scene of the crime.
I'm too angry to do anything with that information. So I may have something more coherent tomorrow, but in the meantime go read my first post on Take Back the News.
* Can someone explain why the media keeps saying 'John Dewar allegedly gave inadmissible evidence that lead to a mistrial' - the mistrial and the evidence are both fact. Does the allegedly disease hit journalists everytime a court case has anything to do with rape?
** This blog is an 'allegedly' free zone
I hate "allegedly". You seldom read about "alleged burglary" or "alleged white-collar crime", so it can't just be for legal reasons.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed exactly the same thing about the use of the words 'alleged' and 'allegedly' with regard to reports of rape and sexual assault. I've seen some articles where virtually every sentence contained one of those two words. You don't see it in other types of crime reports. It makes me angry. The media loves reporting this stuff and making money out of it, but they'll still imply that the female rape victims are 'whores and liars'.
ReplyDelete