A quip I made last night on Twitter seems to have struck a chord, and I wanted to examine it beyond the 140-character limit. What I said was something along the lines of “If all alleged rapists got the kind of police attention Mr. Assange is getting, maybe 200 women a day wouldn’t get raped in the UK.”
Sex, politics, espionage, and the internet: it’s the perfect storm really, and I find it quite difficult to figure our where to even start untangling this one. But let me try.
I don’t know if Julian Assange raped anybody, or if the accusations are fabricated by some sort of CIA conspiracy, or if they were fabricated by a crazy woman out for revenge – these are all theories I’ve heard, and I simply do not know enough of the facts (or Swedish law!) to make a judgement on this. In fact I suspect that no-one – not even Assange and the women involved – know all the facts anymore. Between potential third-party interventions and all the media spin we’ve been getting, I can see it being difficult to keep this one straight. Not to mention that the technicalities of Swedish law involved are… interesting to say the least.
Next. Rape is a damn serious issue. And rape comes in all sorts of varieties. The traditional public perception of a rape victim is someone who was beaten black and blue as well as being raped. One of the things I’m reasonably sure of is that this is not the kind of rape we’re talking about in the Assange case. But rape is any form of sex without consent – whether the woman was drunk, or changed her mind halfway through, or was too scared to protest, or it happened in a relationship, or a whole number of other situations, having sex with someone without their consent is rape (though sometimes the law distinguishes different kinds of non-consensual sex, and what Assange is accused of under Swedish law is not quite sraight forward). To say it is incredibly traumatic for the victim doesn’t even begin to cover it. So no matter how much I agree with Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks work, no amount of good work he does entitles him to rape, and if indeed he did so I would like to see him face justice. Just as no amount of good (or otherwise) work Roman Polanski has done in his job as a film director entitles him to rape children, and I would still like justice to be done in that case too.
Here’s the catch though: if good work doesn’t atone for bad deeds, those same bad deeds do not negate the good work done. If I liked Polanski’s movies, I could still enjoy them while he spends the rest of his life in prison. Equally, even if it does some day turn out that Julian Assange raped a woman, I am still going to broadly agree with his political aims and what he is doing with WikiLeaks. Because let’s face it, even if the rape allegations aren’t a government conspiracy, any government Assange has pissed off recently is absolutely delighted that every time you google his name the word “rape” appears next to it. Humans aren’t terribly good at making subtle distinctions between the different things another person does – we like things to be neat and fit in nice labelled boxes. So the label “rapist” (no, nothing as subtle as “alleged rapist”) hangs over Assange’s head, and in a lot of people’s minds that is enough to cast doubt over everything else the man has ever done.
Finally, it seems obvious to me that the level of police attention the rape allegations against Julian Assange are getting across Europe is politically motivated. The last rape case that got anywhere near the amount of international police attention was the aforementioned Mr. Polanski, and he got off on a technicality. I would absolutely love our police to put this kind of effort into every rape allegation. Maybe our conviction rate would make it into the double digits then. Maybe a small fraction of the 200 women who get raped in the UK every single day would be spared the ordeal. Maybe it would finally send out the message that we as a society do not tolerate rape. The Assange case, on the other hand, has none of those effects and sends no such message. The only message I’m getting from it, loud and clear, is that if you piss off the state, no stone will be left unturned in the effort to make your life a living hell.