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With Kobe Bryant in the news and the recent thread about the question of rape and changing consent during intercouse going on, I read an article today in the London Times that seemed relevant to this topic:
(Note, this story is much longer then the second one. It is about the ordeal of a family when a 15 year old son was falsely accused of rape)
Another intersting article is from The Guardian, relating to a TV star who was accused of rape, was acquited of the charges, but nonetheless faced great damage to his life resulting from media publicity. As a result, some are calling for the names of rape victims to not be made public so that their names are not destroyed when their names and careers are not destroyed when rape charges are brought against them. I will attach it in a reply to this topic to prevent it being too long.
(Note, this story is much longer then the second one. It is about the ordeal of a family when a 15 year old son was falsely accused of rape)
They kissed. Months later she cried rape
By Jonathan Gornall
Sex charges against the TV presenter John Leslie have been dropped and he leaves court 'without a stain on his character'. But is that realistic? Our correspondent talks to the family of a 15-year-old boy falsely accused of rape, for whom the wounds of two months under suspicion may never heal
IT WASN’T EXACTLY a dawn raid, but the arrival of the police at 7.30am outside the imposing seven-bedroom semi in the prosperous Midlands market town couldn’t have had more impact if they had kicked down the front door.
Toby Simmons, 15, was asleep in his bedroom. Along with his brother Harry, 17, their mother Ann and her partner Paul, he had returned two days before from the family’s traditional Easter skiing trip in France. Within a week of getting home he faced his GCSEs, and had spent much of the trip revising, taking advantage of the location to practise for his French oral exam.
It was the second time that morning that the doorbell had rung. A few minutes before, Paul,the only member of the family up and about, had answered the door to the postman. This time, the first thing he registered was that a police car stood where the post van had been. On the doorstep were two officers.
“Paul took them into the drawing room,” said Ann, 46, “and came to tell me. He said they were looking for Toby.”
Her head reeling, she pulled on her dressing-gown and intercepted Toby on the landing and pulled him into the first-floor sitting room.
“All I could think was ‘What the hell has he done?’ I said, ‘Quick: you’ve got one minute. This is your opportunity to tell me so I can hear it from you, not them’.
“He just looked so surprised and scared, and said ‘Mum, I have no idea what they want’. He was telling the truth.”
Downstairs, the familiar, comforting drawing room, with its twin sofas facing across the fireplace, had suddenly become a cold, unwelcoming place, dominated by the presence of the uniformed officer. Mother and son sat on one sofa; the detective on the other. The PC stood.
Still recovering from her rude awakening, Ann listened dumbstruck as the detective spoke to Toby.
“He asked him his name, what school he went to, and had he had a girlfriend called Rachel . . . then he cautioned him. I said ‘Hang on a minute, can’t we talk about this informally?’ The detective looked at me and said no, because of the severity of the allegation.”
Then came the bombshell that detonated in the room with a physical force that was to shake the family to its foundations, cast a dark shadow over Toby’s impending GCSEs and have an untold impact on the rest of his life.
“I am arresting you for the alleged rape of . . .”
Ann stared at her son, who stared back.
“He looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. I muttered something about hearing his side of the story; the detective stopped him talking and said it wasn’t the time and place. They were going to take him into custody to interview him.” They let Toby go back upstairs to finish dressing. Ann, limping from a skiing injury, followed him upstairs and won a few precious minutes alone with her son in the bathroom. Downstairs, the detective told Paul that he was noting that they had spent five minutes alone. Shaking, Ann sat on the edge of the bath. Toby, afraid and completely white, faced the ultimate teenage torture of the most intimate conversation with his mother.
“He said, ‘Mum, I was with this girl in a crowd of people and we did touch each other with our hands, but . . .’” he paused and screwed up his eyes before blurting out the sort of mortifying sexual detail that no son should ever have to share with his mother “‘. . . but I couldn’t get it up’.
“He said she’d hoiked him into the bushes. They had been within earshot of the others, a few yards away. She was trying it on with Toby. At the time he was supposedly the boyfriend of another girl his age at the same school as his supposed victim. When they came out of the bushes the group walked on, mooching from place to place, and so the evening had gone on.”
The police marched Toby to their car, but wouldn’t let Ann ride with him. She jumped into her Range Rover and followed them for ten minutes, through what was by then the rush-hour traffic, along what had suddenly become the unfamiliar streets of her home town.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was a resolutely middle-class, middle-England family living happily in a beautiful, four-storey, seven-bedroom Victorian house in a leafy midlands town. Ann was a convent girl, now a part-time education consultant and governor of Toby’s school; her partner Paul, a Cambridge law graduate, was a senior civil servant; Bill, Toby’s father, a successful businessman.
Sitting, numb, in the car in which the family had driven home happily from France only days before, she rang Bill. He called a family friend and arranged for a lawyer to meet them all at the police station. Because Toby was a minor, Ann had to be present as they checked him in and sign for his few possessions. Then her son, officially a prisoner, was taken to a cell. The custody sergeant gave him a bowl of cereal and Ann had two hours to think, sitting in the car as she waited for the lawyer to arrive.
“It was horrendous. This was my child and I wanted it to be me, not him, in the cell. I believed him utterly because I knew that he had told me the truth in the bathroom; he had looked so bewildered. Of the two boys, Toby is the naughty one; he’s a character, an actor, but he has this sense of morality that always gets him into trouble at school. He always owns up. When they were little, if they were kicking each other in the car or something, Harry would always deny it but Toby would always admit it.”
Desperate to help their child, Ann and Toby’s father blundered unwittingly through the etiquette of a situation they had never begun to imagine they would face.
“When the lawyer arrived we said we were happy for her to be the ‘appropriate adult’ present, but apparently that’s not allowed. We only wanted Toby to say the truth and we thought he might be embarrassed with us there. But when the detective said ‘Well, if you aren’t prepared to do it we’ll get a social worker’, we were shocked. The lawyer and Toby had a talk and decided it should be his father. The detective’s manner throughout was short and cool; he didn’t say more than he had to and showed no empathy. He seemed to be trying to create the impression that Toby had done it.” When the interview ended, Toby was released on bail, to reappear at the station five weeks later. It was the beginning of a nightmare.
Back home, mother and son struggled to find words. “I wanted him to cry and I wanted to but didn’t for his sake. I said ‘It’s all right, darling’; I just wanted to take it away from him. He put his arms around me and his head on my shoulder and said ‘Why did she say that?’ He didn’t talk about the incident then, but did that afternoon, and on the Saturday and the Sunday.
“I felt so inadequate. I said ‘Toby, you are the same person’, but I knew this was going to hang over him. How was he going to knuckle down and do his revision? It could ruin his future.” Toby was due to sit the first of ten GCSEs on June 2 with the possibility that, if the Crown prosecutors decided to proceed against him, he could be in court by the end of May. His first exam was in science, his best subject. His mother says: “He wants to be a psychologist. He is interested in how people’s minds work. This was a case study he could have done without.”
As the days of waiting stretched into weeks, pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place. Harry, Toby’s brother, was furious, and told Ann: “It’s stupid and ridiculous. Everyone knows that girl, and who and what she is.”
On March 24, just over three weeks after the alleged Friday night rape, Toby had been attacked by three teenagers while cycling near the girl’s house. They had left him bleeding and in shock. At the time, all he had said was that it had been about a girl, but now he admitted that one of his attackers had been the girl’s brother.
Imagining that the police were interviewing all the youngsters who had been part of the group, and finding out the same things, Ann learnt that Toby’s accuser lived in social housing and had been suspended from school for being drunk and for shoplifting. According to Toby, she had told him it was all right for them to have sex as she wasn’t a virgin. She had not reported the alleged rape until after the attack on Toby.
Then, to Ann’s horror, the detective came round to the house on Saturday May 24, just three days before Toby was due back at the station, to get the addresses of his witnesses to the fateful evening. During the three weeks that Toby and his family had sweated, the police had done nothing.
“He said they were too busy, with a big fraud case and a serial rapist — they hadn’t had a chance. I grasped at straws; Toby wasn’t a priority. I thought the detective’s manner had changed, too; he was a lot more pleasant and kind of embarassed.”
But at the station on the following Tuesday, after the Bank Holiday weekend, the family’s agony was extended again. The detective told them that he needed to refer the case to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision. The CPS had been closed on the Monday, and so had had no time to consider the case. Now, if they decided to go ahead and prosecute that week, Toby would be in court just as his exams were beginning. In the end, the solicitor persuaded the police to agree to delay a CPS decision until after Toby’s exams.
“We were between a rock and a hard place. We were in shock again: the police weren’t prepared to dismiss the allegation, even though it was her word against his. Toby went quiet again. The weekend it first happened, on the Sunday up in his room he had said ‘Mum, this has ruined my life’. I said, no, it just feels like it. Now, inside, I was thinking I hope he isn’t right.” With the cloud hovering over him, Toby ploughed through his exams, unsure of how he had performed. They finished on June 17 and he braced himself for his next appearance at the police station, on June 25.
To everyone’s horror, the detective telephoned at 9am on the morning of the 25th to say the CPS hadn’t had time to look at the case; the sword would hang over Toby for another month and it now began to look as though his holiday at the beginning of August might be in doubt.
He had been due to report back to the police station last week, but just before the weekend Ann’s partner again found himself answering a knock on the front door. It was the detective again, clutching a letter for Toby. “There will be no further action taken against you in respect of this matter . . .” He apologised for the time it had taken. The family shed a few tears and hugs, but there were no celebrations.
That night Toby went into town for a leaving party for a friend. He had had a haircut and, his mother thought, looked suddenly grown-up.
“We had a big hug and I said ‘It’s all gone away’ and started to say that it didn’t matter to him; he said ‘Mum, I don’t need you to say this’.
“This has changed him. It has made him harder, made him grow up quickly. He is now very wary and aware that he must never put himself in a position where that sort of accusation can be made. In essence, it has made him untrusting, and that is very sad.
“He said to me ‘Mum, any girl could do this to you at any time, couldn’t they?’. And they could.”
All names been changed
Are men accused of rape entitled to anonymity unless convicted? E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
PRIME SUSPECT: HOW THE LAW TAKES ITS COURSE
UNLESS the allegation is historical or has been made by a known serial complainant, a man accused of rape is nearly always arrested and taken to a police station. There, he will be booked in by the custody officer and will probably spend some time in a cell before being interviewed. If the rape is alleged to have taken place recently, various forensic evidence will be sought. Intimate samples — pubic hair, saliva, DNA from a mouth scrape and/or a penile swab — can not be obtained by force, but an adverse inference will be taken from a refusal to consent.
Three options are then open to the police. Delayed-charge bail gives officers a chance to interview witnesses and take advice from the CPS. The accused is bailed to return to the station on a given day; the process can be repeated as often as necessary — there is no statutory time limit. Alternatively, he may be charged immediately. This means an inevitable appearance at a magistrates’ court, for which a date is given there and then. From the magistrates’ court the case will be transferred to Crown Court for a jury trial. The third option is for the accused to accept a summons, which can arrive through the post at any time with a date for a court appearance.
Normally, the accused has little choice in the matter. In Toby’s case, however, because of the impact of the uncertainty on his impending exams, the family’s views were taken into account. “He was from a good background,” says his solicitor. “It shouldn’t make a difference, but it does.
His family are people of high social standing in the community, he was polite and the alleged offence seemed out of character. Balanced with this was the character of the accuser, who did not appear to be a credible witness.”
FALSE WITNESS: WHY DO SOME WOMEN LIE ABOUT RAPE?
Jackie Craissati
Head of the Forensic Clinical Psychology Service, Oxleas NHS Trust
Within the small minority of sexual allegations that turn out to be false, there are three categories. The first is a personality issue. Some victims have disturbed backgrounds and a dramatic gesture such as alleging rape can be a way of coping. It is too simplistic to say they are attention-seeking. They are disturbed and distressed individuals, and crave the tremendous interest, support and sympathy they know the case will generate.
A second group is where a victim has been assaulted by someone else but cannot disclose the true perpetrator. This may include children assaulted by family members who, because they are fearful of and dependent on that person, make an accusation against a teacher or boy at school instead.
The third category is where you have a difficult break-up or an acrimonious parental situation that provokes an impulsive desire to express anger and get revenge on the alleged perpetrator. The high profile of a sexual assault case makes it a particularly poignant expression of rage. It’s a profoundly unsatisfactory course of action though, and the victim can end up being badly treated and publicly humiliated. The police must therefore make the victim feel they are supported if the allegation is genuine, but have sufficient detachment to be able to decide to drop charges if they are untrue.
By Jonathan Gornall
Sex charges against the TV presenter John Leslie have been dropped and he leaves court 'without a stain on his character'. But is that realistic? Our correspondent talks to the family of a 15-year-old boy falsely accused of rape, for whom the wounds of two months under suspicion may never heal
IT WASN’T EXACTLY a dawn raid, but the arrival of the police at 7.30am outside the imposing seven-bedroom semi in the prosperous Midlands market town couldn’t have had more impact if they had kicked down the front door.
Toby Simmons, 15, was asleep in his bedroom. Along with his brother Harry, 17, their mother Ann and her partner Paul, he had returned two days before from the family’s traditional Easter skiing trip in France. Within a week of getting home he faced his GCSEs, and had spent much of the trip revising, taking advantage of the location to practise for his French oral exam.
It was the second time that morning that the doorbell had rung. A few minutes before, Paul,the only member of the family up and about, had answered the door to the postman. This time, the first thing he registered was that a police car stood where the post van had been. On the doorstep were two officers.
“Paul took them into the drawing room,” said Ann, 46, “and came to tell me. He said they were looking for Toby.”
Her head reeling, she pulled on her dressing-gown and intercepted Toby on the landing and pulled him into the first-floor sitting room.
“All I could think was ‘What the hell has he done?’ I said, ‘Quick: you’ve got one minute. This is your opportunity to tell me so I can hear it from you, not them’.
“He just looked so surprised and scared, and said ‘Mum, I have no idea what they want’. He was telling the truth.”
Downstairs, the familiar, comforting drawing room, with its twin sofas facing across the fireplace, had suddenly become a cold, unwelcoming place, dominated by the presence of the uniformed officer. Mother and son sat on one sofa; the detective on the other. The PC stood.
Still recovering from her rude awakening, Ann listened dumbstruck as the detective spoke to Toby.
“He asked him his name, what school he went to, and had he had a girlfriend called Rachel . . . then he cautioned him. I said ‘Hang on a minute, can’t we talk about this informally?’ The detective looked at me and said no, because of the severity of the allegation.”
Then came the bombshell that detonated in the room with a physical force that was to shake the family to its foundations, cast a dark shadow over Toby’s impending GCSEs and have an untold impact on the rest of his life.
“I am arresting you for the alleged rape of . . .”
Ann stared at her son, who stared back.
“He looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. I muttered something about hearing his side of the story; the detective stopped him talking and said it wasn’t the time and place. They were going to take him into custody to interview him.” They let Toby go back upstairs to finish dressing. Ann, limping from a skiing injury, followed him upstairs and won a few precious minutes alone with her son in the bathroom. Downstairs, the detective told Paul that he was noting that they had spent five minutes alone. Shaking, Ann sat on the edge of the bath. Toby, afraid and completely white, faced the ultimate teenage torture of the most intimate conversation with his mother.
“He said, ‘Mum, I was with this girl in a crowd of people and we did touch each other with our hands, but . . .’” he paused and screwed up his eyes before blurting out the sort of mortifying sexual detail that no son should ever have to share with his mother “‘. . . but I couldn’t get it up’.
“He said she’d hoiked him into the bushes. They had been within earshot of the others, a few yards away. She was trying it on with Toby. At the time he was supposedly the boyfriend of another girl his age at the same school as his supposed victim. When they came out of the bushes the group walked on, mooching from place to place, and so the evening had gone on.”
The police marched Toby to their car, but wouldn’t let Ann ride with him. She jumped into her Range Rover and followed them for ten minutes, through what was by then the rush-hour traffic, along what had suddenly become the unfamiliar streets of her home town.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was a resolutely middle-class, middle-England family living happily in a beautiful, four-storey, seven-bedroom Victorian house in a leafy midlands town. Ann was a convent girl, now a part-time education consultant and governor of Toby’s school; her partner Paul, a Cambridge law graduate, was a senior civil servant; Bill, Toby’s father, a successful businessman.
Sitting, numb, in the car in which the family had driven home happily from France only days before, she rang Bill. He called a family friend and arranged for a lawyer to meet them all at the police station. Because Toby was a minor, Ann had to be present as they checked him in and sign for his few possessions. Then her son, officially a prisoner, was taken to a cell. The custody sergeant gave him a bowl of cereal and Ann had two hours to think, sitting in the car as she waited for the lawyer to arrive.
“It was horrendous. This was my child and I wanted it to be me, not him, in the cell. I believed him utterly because I knew that he had told me the truth in the bathroom; he had looked so bewildered. Of the two boys, Toby is the naughty one; he’s a character, an actor, but he has this sense of morality that always gets him into trouble at school. He always owns up. When they were little, if they were kicking each other in the car or something, Harry would always deny it but Toby would always admit it.”
Desperate to help their child, Ann and Toby’s father blundered unwittingly through the etiquette of a situation they had never begun to imagine they would face.
“When the lawyer arrived we said we were happy for her to be the ‘appropriate adult’ present, but apparently that’s not allowed. We only wanted Toby to say the truth and we thought he might be embarrassed with us there. But when the detective said ‘Well, if you aren’t prepared to do it we’ll get a social worker’, we were shocked. The lawyer and Toby had a talk and decided it should be his father. The detective’s manner throughout was short and cool; he didn’t say more than he had to and showed no empathy. He seemed to be trying to create the impression that Toby had done it.” When the interview ended, Toby was released on bail, to reappear at the station five weeks later. It was the beginning of a nightmare.
Back home, mother and son struggled to find words. “I wanted him to cry and I wanted to but didn’t for his sake. I said ‘It’s all right, darling’; I just wanted to take it away from him. He put his arms around me and his head on my shoulder and said ‘Why did she say that?’ He didn’t talk about the incident then, but did that afternoon, and on the Saturday and the Sunday.
“I felt so inadequate. I said ‘Toby, you are the same person’, but I knew this was going to hang over him. How was he going to knuckle down and do his revision? It could ruin his future.” Toby was due to sit the first of ten GCSEs on June 2 with the possibility that, if the Crown prosecutors decided to proceed against him, he could be in court by the end of May. His first exam was in science, his best subject. His mother says: “He wants to be a psychologist. He is interested in how people’s minds work. This was a case study he could have done without.”
As the days of waiting stretched into weeks, pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place. Harry, Toby’s brother, was furious, and told Ann: “It’s stupid and ridiculous. Everyone knows that girl, and who and what she is.”
On March 24, just over three weeks after the alleged Friday night rape, Toby had been attacked by three teenagers while cycling near the girl’s house. They had left him bleeding and in shock. At the time, all he had said was that it had been about a girl, but now he admitted that one of his attackers had been the girl’s brother.
Imagining that the police were interviewing all the youngsters who had been part of the group, and finding out the same things, Ann learnt that Toby’s accuser lived in social housing and had been suspended from school for being drunk and for shoplifting. According to Toby, she had told him it was all right for them to have sex as she wasn’t a virgin. She had not reported the alleged rape until after the attack on Toby.
Then, to Ann’s horror, the detective came round to the house on Saturday May 24, just three days before Toby was due back at the station, to get the addresses of his witnesses to the fateful evening. During the three weeks that Toby and his family had sweated, the police had done nothing.
“He said they were too busy, with a big fraud case and a serial rapist — they hadn’t had a chance. I grasped at straws; Toby wasn’t a priority. I thought the detective’s manner had changed, too; he was a lot more pleasant and kind of embarassed.”
But at the station on the following Tuesday, after the Bank Holiday weekend, the family’s agony was extended again. The detective told them that he needed to refer the case to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision. The CPS had been closed on the Monday, and so had had no time to consider the case. Now, if they decided to go ahead and prosecute that week, Toby would be in court just as his exams were beginning. In the end, the solicitor persuaded the police to agree to delay a CPS decision until after Toby’s exams.
“We were between a rock and a hard place. We were in shock again: the police weren’t prepared to dismiss the allegation, even though it was her word against his. Toby went quiet again. The weekend it first happened, on the Sunday up in his room he had said ‘Mum, this has ruined my life’. I said, no, it just feels like it. Now, inside, I was thinking I hope he isn’t right.” With the cloud hovering over him, Toby ploughed through his exams, unsure of how he had performed. They finished on June 17 and he braced himself for his next appearance at the police station, on June 25.
To everyone’s horror, the detective telephoned at 9am on the morning of the 25th to say the CPS hadn’t had time to look at the case; the sword would hang over Toby for another month and it now began to look as though his holiday at the beginning of August might be in doubt.
He had been due to report back to the police station last week, but just before the weekend Ann’s partner again found himself answering a knock on the front door. It was the detective again, clutching a letter for Toby. “There will be no further action taken against you in respect of this matter . . .” He apologised for the time it had taken. The family shed a few tears and hugs, but there were no celebrations.
That night Toby went into town for a leaving party for a friend. He had had a haircut and, his mother thought, looked suddenly grown-up.
“We had a big hug and I said ‘It’s all gone away’ and started to say that it didn’t matter to him; he said ‘Mum, I don’t need you to say this’.
“This has changed him. It has made him harder, made him grow up quickly. He is now very wary and aware that he must never put himself in a position where that sort of accusation can be made. In essence, it has made him untrusting, and that is very sad.
“He said to me ‘Mum, any girl could do this to you at any time, couldn’t they?’. And they could.”
All names been changed
Are men accused of rape entitled to anonymity unless convicted? E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
PRIME SUSPECT: HOW THE LAW TAKES ITS COURSE
UNLESS the allegation is historical or has been made by a known serial complainant, a man accused of rape is nearly always arrested and taken to a police station. There, he will be booked in by the custody officer and will probably spend some time in a cell before being interviewed. If the rape is alleged to have taken place recently, various forensic evidence will be sought. Intimate samples — pubic hair, saliva, DNA from a mouth scrape and/or a penile swab — can not be obtained by force, but an adverse inference will be taken from a refusal to consent.
Three options are then open to the police. Delayed-charge bail gives officers a chance to interview witnesses and take advice from the CPS. The accused is bailed to return to the station on a given day; the process can be repeated as often as necessary — there is no statutory time limit. Alternatively, he may be charged immediately. This means an inevitable appearance at a magistrates’ court, for which a date is given there and then. From the magistrates’ court the case will be transferred to Crown Court for a jury trial. The third option is for the accused to accept a summons, which can arrive through the post at any time with a date for a court appearance.
Normally, the accused has little choice in the matter. In Toby’s case, however, because of the impact of the uncertainty on his impending exams, the family’s views were taken into account. “He was from a good background,” says his solicitor. “It shouldn’t make a difference, but it does.
His family are people of high social standing in the community, he was polite and the alleged offence seemed out of character. Balanced with this was the character of the accuser, who did not appear to be a credible witness.”
FALSE WITNESS: WHY DO SOME WOMEN LIE ABOUT RAPE?
Jackie Craissati
Head of the Forensic Clinical Psychology Service, Oxleas NHS Trust
Within the small minority of sexual allegations that turn out to be false, there are three categories. The first is a personality issue. Some victims have disturbed backgrounds and a dramatic gesture such as alleging rape can be a way of coping. It is too simplistic to say they are attention-seeking. They are disturbed and distressed individuals, and crave the tremendous interest, support and sympathy they know the case will generate.
A second group is where a victim has been assaulted by someone else but cannot disclose the true perpetrator. This may include children assaulted by family members who, because they are fearful of and dependent on that person, make an accusation against a teacher or boy at school instead.
The third category is where you have a difficult break-up or an acrimonious parental situation that provokes an impulsive desire to express anger and get revenge on the alleged perpetrator. The high profile of a sexual assault case makes it a particularly poignant expression of rage. It’s a profoundly unsatisfactory course of action though, and the victim can end up being badly treated and publicly humiliated. The police must therefore make the victim feel they are supported if the allegation is genuine, but have sufficient detachment to be able to decide to drop charges if they are untrue.
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