How’s that working out?
I’m reading it. It’s tough going – I’ll be reading it in segments and taking breaks. Here’s one item:
Male violence and rape, and police inaction over these crimes, is also a problem for women and children not in prostitution who live near or enter the Holbeck zone. In 2015, ‘Sally – a young woman with learning disabilities, then aged 17 – was approached at a bus stop in Beeston on a weekday afternoon, bundled into a car, and raped in a nearby home. With DNA evidence, the attacker was quickly arrested and prosecuted in court. However, during a gruelling court case which saw Sally forced into a cross-examination, the defence lawyer argued that his client had simply mistaken Sally for a sex worker, and he walked free’.
Source: E. Carlisle, ‘Holbeck sex zone in the spotlight again’, South Leeds Life (31 August 2018), https://southleedslife.com/holbeck-sex-zone-in-the-spotlight-again/
An honest mistake.
I mean…even if she had been a sex worker wouldn’t it still count as rape if she said no?
That’s one of the reasons legalized sex work is such a horrific idea – no, it wouldn’t. I mean to people who are thinking straight it would, but to the cops, and in court? No.
Well, this is annoying. (Sorry, I no longer have the emotional energy to be saddened or properly outraged.)
Standard economic theory–or simple consideration of how extortion rackets work–says that when you legalize something these kind of problems go away. Yet in Holbeck they seem to have gotten worse.
The immediate problem is that the British have not actually legalized sex work. A better characterization is that they have withdrawn the protection of law from sex work within one small area: Holbeck.
I suspect the deeper problem is that the majority is using this as a way to push sex work (which they don’t like/don’t want/disapprove of) out of their neighborhoods and into someone else’s. If the British really thought sex work was OK, they could legalize it across the whole country, and then Holbeck wouldn’t be such a problem area. Or maybe just move the Managed Approach zone from Holbeck to Knightsbridge. Yeah, that’s the ticket…
Whenever I try to do a root cause analysis of social problems I inevitably find them devolving to the political within just a few steps, and this one is no exception. I mean, what’s in it for Holbeck? Why did they agree to this, and why do they continue with it? I don’t follow British governance very closely, but they do have some kind of democratic process and local control. I don’t think Westminster imposed the Managed Approach on Holbeck. So who did, and why don’t those people answer to voters?
This article is horrifying. I’m trying to imagine that my government had visited a hell like Holbeck upon my neighborhood.
And the excuse “I thought she was a whore” is a universally valid get of jail free card for rape in England now? How is this remotely possible? Can you go out on the street and shoot the “kerb-crawlers” and say “I thought they were foxes?”
Okay, so if it isn’t rape, wouldn’t it be theft? Taking sex without actually paying? In any other field, that would be considered not okay (unless your name is Trump, and then for some reason that gets you elected President).
I would hate to see him convicted of theft in place of rape, but at least…something. Of course, if she wasn’t really a sex worker, I guess it wasn’t theft because she wasn’t charging people for it?
But she wasn’t really a sex worker. So the protections should apply. Just because he thought she was a sex worker…
Try that in some other area. “Sorry, your honor, I thought it was my car, I really did. I mean, can you tell the difference between this shiny new BMW and my old Ford Pinto? No, I’m sure you can’t. It was parked on the same street as my car, so I just sort of assumed it was my car, got in, and drove it 300 miles where I sold it to some dude who thought it was a neat car.”
Well quite. This is why the whole idea is so horrible.
#3 @Stephen – The “managed approach to on-street prostitution” was introduced by Leeds Council and West Yorkshire Police in 2014. There is still a significant degree of local autonomy in the UK. The Yorkshire police forces are notorious for their bungling, dating back decades – cf the way the Yorkshire Ripper case was handled in the 70s, the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, and the impunity with which poor white girls were raped in Rotherham and elsewhere more recently. But just because there’s some local autonomy, that doesn’t mean that ordinary local people have any real say in the matter. If they’re poor and ill-educated and inarticulate and demoralised they have to take what they’re given. The people of Leeds who do vote probably don’t worry too much about what goes on in Holbeck.
Incidentally this appears to have been a jury trial. Without knowing the details – notably, how the Crown Prosecution Service handled the case – it’s impossible to know just where it went wrong.