Is Rape Always Serious?

This week former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross found himself in hot water for suggesting that not all rapes are equally serious.

The presenter said in his new book that it has become ‘sacrilege to suggest that there can be any gradation: rape is rape. The real experts, the victims, know otherwise’. Subsequently, he was criticised widely in the press and social media.

The former Justice Secretary Ken Clarke found himself subject to similar criticism in May 2011, when he appeared to make a distinction between rapes and serious rapes.

So is all this criticism justified? Are all rapes equally serious?

For me at least, the answer is resoundingly no. Not all rapes are equally serious. But all rapes are serious. Rape attacks the very core of an individual. It attacks a person’s right to determine who they will share humankind’s greatest intimacy with. Any attack on that right is serious. But is does not follow, as a matter of logic, that all such attacks are equally serious.

Imagine, for example, that all rapes are punished by a sentence of five years imprisonment. Then imagine a young teenage couple. They have attended a party, consumed copious amounts of alcohol and engage in sexual intercourse. During intercourse the female asks her boyfriend to stop. The female’s consent has been withdrawn. Under the influence of alcohol and in the moment he refuses to do so, although the girlfriend does not resist. This is rape, and it is rightly regarded as rape. He will be imprisoned for five years

Now imagine that the young teenage female from the couple had instead attended the party alone and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. On the way home she is pulled into a car by an unknown male that overpowers her despite her best efforts. She is taken to his property and prevented from leaving. She is then beaten and raped. She is beaten again and pushed out on the street the following morning. The male has raped the female and will also be imprisoned for five years.

Is it right that these wholly different situations are punished in exactly the same way? I am sure that most people would conclude that the male in the second case deserves to be punished more severely than the boyfriend. If he deserves to be more severely punished it must be because his crime was more serious. They were both cases of rape but one was more serious.

The boyfriend’s actions were undoubtedly serious; he violated his girlfriend’s right to determine when she will be intimate. However, the unknown male’s crime was grossly worse for a number of reasons. Firstly, he was entirely unknown to the female victim. She had at least decided to be intimate with her boyfriend. Secondly, she was overpowered despite resisting. Thirdly, she was falsely imprisoned. Finally, she was violently beaten twice. The second example of rape was more serious, even though the first rape was also serious.

To answer the question in the title, all rapes are serious. But some rapes are undeniably more serious. To deny this would be a disservice to those very unfortunate victims of brutal rapes.

What are your thoughts?