One of the harrowing things about the recently published Rape Gang Report is how often young girls of twelve or thirteen, once discovered to be in abusive situations, are assumed by the police and other authorities to be in consensual relationships.
One’s immediate reaction is anger that clear statutory rape, below the age of consent, is being ignored for some specious pretence of willing participation. But it seems to me that the situation is muddier than that, because these agencies are, I suspect, applying the standard of “Gillick Competence” to the girls. It is the law that has destroyed their protection from exploitation.
British readers may remember how the unfortunate (perhaps vindictive?) attachment of Victoria Gillick’s name to the test for allowing children under the age of consent to receive contraception (and subsequently abortion, and subsequently “gender reassignment,”) without their parents’ knowledge or permission, came about in 1985.
The Catholic mother of ten children legally challenged DHSS guidance to professionals that under-aged girls could be prescribed contraception in secret. She had some first-hand knowledge, one supposes, of the psychology of teenage girls. She eventually lost the case, subject to a legal proviso about the mental competence of the teenagers to “know what they were doing.”
She subsequently lost a libel case against Brook Advisory Centres (whose “advice” was nearly always “Have an abortion,” as I found when our local health authority foisted their abortion services on us when the local gynaecologists bottled out). They had claimed her legal case had increased teenage pregnancy rates – whereas in fact, whilst a provisional ban on prescribing was in force during the case, pregnancies actually decreased. Go figure, as they say.
To name the permission that abolished her parental concerns after her, as “Gillick Competence,” seems in retrospect another part of her punishment for daring to impede the march of the sexual revolution of Reich and Marcuse.
Be that as it may, medical practitioners like me who opposed abortion, and therefore the sidelining of parental supervision, were acutely aware of the pressures being brought to bear on young girls to have sex, by every organ of liberal society. When the sex produced its natural biological result, the pressure to abort the baby was even greater, and the suppression of profound guilt, regret, grief and a whole raft of complex psychology, through after-the-event “you did the right thing” platitudes, was clear to me, at least, if not to those regarding abortion as a minor day-case procedure. And as a “right to reproductive health.”
The visibility of things like the Trans debate have, perhaps, slightly obscured the downstream results of Gillick Competence. They include well over 1/4 million abortions annually, with the last available figures, 2023, showing an 11% rise over the previous year. They include ongoing high rates of STD in 15-24 year olds. They include strange patterns of non-engagement with the opposite sex as reflected in the rapid decrease in marriage and collapsing birth rates (except amongst Muslims), in the emergence of a class called “incels,” and in the widespread substitution of pornography amongst the young for normal relationships with each other. Oh, I forgot to add the burgeoning of same-sex relationships, and sterility due to “transitioning.” It has also made policing Pakistani gang rape much harder.
Interestingly, one of the victims of the rape gangs transitioned female to male mainly to avoid the coercive attention of males, and I suspect that this may happen in less traumatic cases, too. A few instances of sexting at school, a few boyfriends trained by perverted pornography, and constant pressures on how to look and act, and becoming a celibate male might appear better than a lifetime looking for stable family life.
That “consent” is, in sexual matters, not merely a question of mental competence, should be obvious, especially if we know from experience the poor quality of many of our own decisions before true adulthood. For example, victims of family sexual abuse routinely come to confuse “love” with “submission to rape,” and a high proportion of witnesses in the Lowe Report reflect such a background.
It was common knowledge, even before the “Me Too” campaign weaponised it for feminism, that male authority figures often use power to manipulate juniors, but also that immature girls can feel affirmed by sexual advances from them… the casting couch may get you into Hollywood, but even the favour of the dishy young teacher can win you peer status at a time when adolescent self-doubt prevails.
Rape gangs target obviously vulnerable girls through similar flattery, presents, treatment as adults, free drugs and alcohol, etc. So their first aim is to win limited consent, and rack up the controlling coercion later. Therefore your, perhaps, well-intentioned police officer, presented with a simple “Gillick Competence” test to cut through the behavioural complexities, the paperwork, and of course the ever-present threat of being deemed a racist, has every incentive to tick the “consensual” box.
What should cut through the crap, of course, is the fact that in this country there is a legal age of consent, below which sexual activity is illegal. If the other party is above the age of consent, then regardless of the child’s competence or wishes, it is rape. Unlike the protean “racism,” rape is a clearcut, readily understood, offence which the certainty of punishment will discourage.
But I guess that, before such a response is ever likely to happen in our green and pleasant land, our strange society needs to grow out of the idea that “sexual health” means gynaecological injury, psychological torture, dangerous sexual aberrations, and childlessness or single parenthood. I doubt there are many votes in that.
