In a development that has sent shivers down the spines of every British politician who has ever had to pronounce ‘consent’ while winking, French rape victims are demanding an end to the statute of limitations on their heinous crimes. The chants are rising from Paris to Marseille, a cacophony of righteous fury that threatens to drown out the clinking of champagne flutes in the corridors of power. Meanwhile, across the Channel, British legal reforms are being subjected to the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for a politician's expenses claims after a particularly generous weekend in the Cotswolds.
Let us first examine the French situation, because nothing says ‘sacred republic’ quite like a deadline on justice. The statute of limitations for rape in France is currently 20 years from the victim’s 18th birthday. That’s right: if you are assaulted at 14, you have until you are 38 to report it. After that, the state shrugs its Gallic shoulders and mumbles something about ‘prescription.’ But now, the victims are saying, ‘Non, merci.’ They want the clock stopped, the law amended, and the bastards brought to book no matter how many years have passed. One can almost hear the sound of aristocratic family trees quivering in their ancestral chateaus.
But what of Blighty? Ah, dear reader, our own little island of justice has its own peculiar brand of absurdity. The UK has no statute of limitations for rape, yet the process remains a labyrinth of bureaucratic nonsense and victim-blaming. The current spotlight on legal reforms is less about justice and more about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the iceberg of public trust looms ever closer. The government’s response, predictably, has been to set up a commission, because nothing solves a crisis of faith in the legal system like a committee meeting with biscuits and a flip chart.
Witness the latest proposal: a ‘victim’s code’ that promises to treat victims with dignity and respect. One might laugh if the subject were not so tragic. This code, which will be enforced by a ‘victim’s commissioner,’ is the legal equivalent of putting a plaster on a bullet wound. The problem is not the absence of a code; the problem is a system that treats victims as unreliable witnesses, that allows barristers to rake them over the coals in cross-examination, and that has a conviction rate for rape that hovers around the same level as a Conservative party promise to cut taxes.
And let us not forget the role of the media, that sanctimonious chorus of moral outrage that cycles through ‘victim-blaming’ and ‘believe survivors’ with the frequency of a weather forecast. Today, it is all about the French protests; tomorrow, it will be about something else, like a celebrity’s haircut or a duck that got stuck in a drain. The tragedy of rape is that it is so horribly common that it becomes background noise, a static hum that we learn to ignore.
So, what is to be done? The French victims are right: time is a construct, and justice should not have an expiry date. But perhaps we need to go further. Perhaps we need to abolish not just the statute of limitations, but the entire legal apparatus that treats sexual violence as a crime requiring a higher burden of proof than murder. Or maybe we should just legalise gin at breakfast and let the world burn. At this point, both seem equally plausible.
In the meantime, I will be in my bunker, composing a strongly worded letter to my MP about the quality of the local gin supply. Justice may be blind, but it should at least be well-lubricated.
