How can you tell me there's no such thing as rape culture?

Philippa Willitts writing @ The F-Word Blog draws attention to three incidents that illustrate the problems society apparently has with understanding what rape is, and what consent is.

To Boris Johnson, rape is exactly the same as having a work colleague talk you into donating to charity.

To the residents of a house in Leeds, sexual assault is not a crime, it's a spectator sport.

And to a judge in a statutory rape case, consent to sex is something that an eleven year old is fully capable of giving, such that society is best served by giving a sentence of less than four years each to the men who raped her.

How can you turn around and say that these are unconnected, that there is not an underlying culture that, while wagging its finger severely for show, underneath on some level celebrates and champions sexual assault? You might question that Boris Johnson's remarks do that, but how else are we to read such a blasé and frivolous analogy, except that rape is not that big a deal really - barely worthy of a "tut-tut".

Now, as it happens, I believe that the age of consent should be lowered (not as low as 11, though) because I trust young teenagers to make their own decisions and, sometimes, to learn from the bad ones they made, just as young adults (and older adults) are able to do. But at the same time, I think that consent must involve an understanding and comprehension of that to which one consents: it must be informed consent. It must also be freely given - the term sex-positive feminists use often for this is "enthusiastic", although that has problems for some cases.

In the statutory rape case mentioned above, the judge is quoted as saying, "The girl had clearly been subjected to systematic sexual exploitation and you willingly used her for your own sexual gratification." He also said that, "Despite her age it is accepted that she was a willing participant."

Simply to be "willing" to me does not constitute "freely-given" consent: it is perfectly possible to be willing to go along with something (and even derive some pleasure from it) when one feels that there is pressure to do so, or that the option of not doing it has been made difficult or impossible. I haven't clicked through to read the reports (Mail and Sun - two papers I despise), much less read any details of the court proceedings, so I cannot comment with confidence on this, but for the judge to describe it as "systematic sexual exploitation" does not sound to me like a situation in which free or enthusiastic consent could exist. I also would tend to think that an adult having sex with a child almost automatically has a position of power and implicit coercion/exploitation even where that position is neither intended nor perceived by the adult, and that negates the possibility of free consent.

Furthermore, I would tend to question how well-informed an 11 year old would be about what sex involves physically and emotionally. To say that she was a "willing participant" says nothing about whether she understands that to which she is consenting, and that is the key question in understanding consent. Just as "Yes, I would like to come in for coffee" might be understood by one person as "Yes, I consent to have sex with you now" but understood by the other as "I would love to share a hot drink with you while we chat", then that would not constitute consent by the second person, so we have to ask whether the nature and implications of sex were really understood by the girl in the case. I think sex education needs to start sooner on these issues, because we live in a highly sexualised society and young people are under a certain amount of pressure to feel "grown up" about this, as with all other things. The forewarned is the forearmed, after all. But that is another debate. I do not trust current sex education to prepare a young person of that age for the realities of sex.

For the judge to believe that her willingness alone mitigates the severity of the crime (despite simultaneously recognising that the crime involved "systematic sexual exploitation") shows that on a societal and cultural level, sexual consent (and therefore, rape and sexual assault) is not understood but effectively minimised and marginalised.

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All three examples simply leave me exhausted: as Ms Willitts says, "the more I see stories such as these, the harder it is to keep fighting." There's only so much anger and disgust that I can feel all at once. These things are interconnected, and each begets more like it and like the others, unless enough people stand up and say, "This is wrong."

So, I'm saying it: Boris Johnson is wrong. The Leeds resident with his (I'm guessing male!) window sign is wrong. The judge and the men convicted of rape are wrong.