From The Times
November 24, 2005

Binge-drink women may lose right to claim rape

By Frances Gibb, Legal Editor, Simon de Bruxelles and Sam Coates
(Have you been affected by the new pub opening laws? E-mail us and tell us how.)

WOMEN who are raped while drunk face losing the chance to bring their attackers to justice after a legal ruling on the eve of new licensing laws.

A High Court judge yesterday threw out the case of a student who claimed that she was raped while drunk and unconscious on the basis that “drunken consent is still consent”.

The judgment came hours before the sweeping relaxation of Britain licensing laws which introduces 24-hour drinking in pubs for the first time.

The change prompted police and doctors to warn that Britain was facing an explosion of binge drinking.

The prosecution in the rape case had said it could not go on after the woman admitted that she could not remember whether she gave consent or not or whether sex had taken place. The jury at Swansea Crown Court was told: “Drunken consent is still consent.”

The judge agreed, instructing the jury to return a verdict of not guilty “even if you don’t agree”.

The drama student was allegedly raped by another student, who was working as a security guard, while she claimed she was unconscious through drink in a corridor outside her flat in a university’s hall of residence.

She told the jury that she had no recollection of events but insisted that she would not have agreed to sex with the man.

“If I had wanted to sleep with him I would have taken the few steps to my bedroom,” she said.

Last night Jennifer Temkin, Professor of Law at Sussex University and an expert on sexual offences, said that the decision was on the face of it “extremely perturbing”.

She said: “At common law it has been recognised for over a century that there is no consent where a woman is unconscious through drink.”

Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a person consented if he or she agreed by choice and had the freedom and capacity to make that choice, she added.

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