If a drunken woman and a drunken man have sex, our legal system treats the man as a rapist. That’s wrong — and patronising
Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve had a few sherries. Perhaps, even, more than a few; perhaps you have enjoyed that most pernicious of doses: the one that leaves you on the right side of consciousness but the wrong side of common sense. In which demonically stupid state, you do things that you would never do when sober: you prang a car, smash a window, break a nose, bare a backside, betray a confidence, dish an insult or, more generally, just bore for England. Whatever your behaviour, the sorry morning after will be made worse by the one thing of which you can still be sure: the fact that you were steaming drunk at the time will not constitute a defence.
From the codes of polite company to the less polite reaches of the law, we are all agreed: no deed shall ever be exonerated by the involvement of alcohol — in fact, opprobrium will usually be doubly heaped, once for the misdemeanour and again for the incontinent imbibing that preceded it.
There is now, however, an increasingly accepted exception. If inebriation has inspired a woman to choose a seedy indiscretion with a pesky bore, then her 38 sherries become, strangely and uniquely, the perfect defence. She was wronged, not wrong. Slate (hers, anyway) wiped clean.
Which is why, last week, our Crown Prosecution Service once again dragged a man into court on a charge of rape. This time it was Byron Davies, the 52-year-old chief executive of the borough council in Conwy, North Wales, accused by a younger married woman who had freely agreed to dally with him but who subsequently decided it must have been the drink talking, not her.
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