Story Here:

I could have told you this was going to happen. Media coverage of an event like the horrible gang rape just a couple of months ago attracts false accusations. It is proof that there are individuals out there who falsely accuse someone of rape jsut fot the attention.

Right. Filing a false police report is a crime. It is not the job of the police to make assumptions of the possible collateral consequences of charging someone with a crime. If that was the case, before arresting anyone they would have to find out if they had children in the home that would suffer as a result of the incarceration. I wish our legal system did an honest inventory of its policies. When will they wake up and see that the country that prides itself on being the most free leads the world in incarcerating people. The police consistently disregard the consequences of their aggressive tactics, but here they decide to take special concern. I wander if Richmond has mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence. If that is the case, they clearly have no problem filing charges even in the lack of any supportive evidence, yet all of a sudden it is not in their interest to file charges even in the presence of supportive evidence.

This kind of twaddle never fails to amuse me. This sort of 'oh, look how bad we've all become; hang your heads!' if I saw a woman in trouble I wouldn't help her if it could incur risk to myself. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever helped me out when I've been in difficulties, and certainly not women. Sure if I was armed I would intervene, having then a reasonable expectation that I could do so effectively, without becoming a victim myself, and no I wouldn't simply 'walk past,' I would at the very least phone the police, but I certainly would not risk myself unless the woman in question were a friend of mine.

This whole 'some took pictures,' effort to shame the general public is simply insulting. Without knowing these people we cannot know what their motivation was; perhaps they were attempting to take evidence which could later be supplied to the police? No doubt these pictures have been used as evidence, either freely given or obtained via a subpoena otherwise how else do the police know they exist? Further more, how do we know this is a gang rape? Those accused have entered pleas of 'not guilty,' despite photographic evidence and many eye-witness accounts. Is it not likely then those who witnessed these events, and the photographs of it, are not incriminating? Perhaps it appeared like consensual group sex - an unusual thing for a young girl to do in public, I won't doubt, but hardly any more unusual than gang rape itself. I’m not trying to assert that these things were so, but they are possibilities which a free, unbiased media should, at the very least, explore; of course it should be done with delicacy and care so as not to malign the possible victim if it should be proven she was indeed one, but such objectivity is not to be had, not now.

Nevertheless, the media has already come to their decision, and it was arrived at along familiar lines of reasoning i.e man bad woman victim. The fact that one of the false accusers in the following cases will not even accept that her actions were wrong shows us what many women today feel about the idea of personal responsibility.

I could have told you this before. Many women, upon recanting false accusations, freely admit they did as much for no more than attention. Of course such blatant disregard for the legal system and for the safety and well-being of men incurs nothing in the way of stiff penalties, and so it will continue.

A point so very rarely made.