‘Getting drunk does make you vulnerable’

It seems that wine is fast overtaking tea as women's relaxant of choice.

It seems that wine is fast overtaking tea as women's relaxant of choice.

Published Apr 25, 2015

Share

London – Here we are, back on the bar stool, having yet another drunk women debate in the last chance saloon. The issue that, like a bad hangover, just won’t go away.

This week, district judge Nigel Cadbury is in trouble for suggesting that women who drink too much on nights out put themselves at risk.

His remarks came at Worcester Magistrates’ Court as he sentenced a 21-year-old woman for punching a girl outside a nightclub. Something she has no recollection of doing because she was drunk at the time.

Airing his understandable concerns about the effect excess alcohol can have on personal safety, the judge mentioned the ‘horrible situation’ in Glasgow, and added that he worried about ‘young girls who put themselves in such very, very vulnerable positions’.

He was referring to Karen Buckley, whose remains were found dumped in a field following a night out with girlfriends in Glasgow. For these remarks, Judge Cadbury was accused of being insensitive.

Insensitive? A British court of law is not a therapy session and a judge is not some kindly hippy who dispenses green tea, biscuits and sympathy. Sometimes harsh truths and cold reality have to be faced, whether we like it or not.

In Buckley’s case, her friends say she did not have that much to drink. All we know is that she went to the loo at around 1am at the nightclub and did not re-join her group, not even to collect her coat.

No one knows if alcohol was a factor in her disappearance but I want to make this clear: whatever happened to Karen Buckley, it was not her fault. She was an innocent victim who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Karen was last seen on CCTV cameras walking down a Glasgow street with a man she had met outside the club. After that, this lovely young girl who trained as a nurse slips from public view for ever. It is heartbreaking. All Karen wanted of the world was to do good in it.

Yet we cannot shy away from the fact that alcohol has a part to play in the safety of young women. To keep denying this, and to accuse those who point out the dangers of being insensitive, only puts more girls in harm’s way.

Judge Cadbury was only echoing what other judges have said, including female judge Mary Jane Mowat, who said last year that rape conviction rates would not improve unless women stopped drinking so heavily. The fact that they were unable to remember their attack led to a lack of corroborative evidence.

Last month, Sussex Police were also criticised for an eminently sensible poster campaign which urged girls to stick together on nights out. Campaigners said that the police should be targeting potential rapists instead of bothering potential victims.

Yet women have to take responsibility for themselves. Getting so inebriated that you are incapable of making sensible decisions does make you more vulnerable.

We’ve all been idiotic. I shudder to think how foolish I have been in the dim and distant past. That is why I can’t agree with those who claim that whatever the circumstances of sexual violence, the state of intoxication of the victim is irrelevant.

It is anything but. How can drunkenness be immaterial if it is a factor in the victim being targeted or attacked?

Can’t we at least agree that getting very drunk on a night out makes a woman - or a man - more vulnerable to sexual assault and to becoming a victim of personal crime? This does not detract from the culpability of the criminal or rapist. Or make a drunken rape victim somehow less worthy of sympathy and justice.

I believe in the innocence of footballer Ched Evans’s rape victim, but I equally believe that if she had not been so drunk, she might have made a smarter decision about the danger around her. And I want young women to understand that - not to be cocooned in a shrieking ball of feminist outrage that proclaims that everything is the man’s fault.

To agree that being drunk just might make a woman more vulnerable to rape is not the same thing as suggesting she is responsible for the rape. If we are to celebrate the hard-won freedoms of liberation, then we must accept responsibility for ourselves, too. And also accept that even though what they say might be blunt, the judiciary and the police only have our best interests at heart.

So let’s be careful out there.

Daily Mail

Related Topics: