Nick Cohen has an excellent piece at The Spectator Coffee House, on the inability of political parties – and I’d add, pretty much any other institution – to investigate sexual abuse cases. He concludes:
In these paranoid circumstances, you can no more guarantee that the Liberal Democrats will put the interests of justice before the interests of the party than you can expect the Socialist Workers Party to provide an alternative to a court of law. Conspiracy theory, manifesting itself as a paranoid fear of a “bourgeois state” or “Tory press”, prevents an honest evaluation of the facts.
But there’s also this account of another as yet unreported rape in the Socialist Workers Party:
I wanted to tell you that I was in the SWP a few years ago, and was physically and sexually abused. Following the rape, I left the party, but was encouraged to take the complaint to the disputes committee to make sure he didn’t do it to other women in the party. The disputes committee meeting lasted 5 hours. I was asked if I had been drinking. They said that if {the alleged assailant} and I had recently broken up my case would be invalid. They constantly asked me if I was still attracted to him, and referred to instances of him hitting me as ‘shaking’. They also constantly asked if I was sure I had not consented to sex.
The disputes committee also told me that if I talked to the media or anyone else that I was in trouble. {The man} was allowed to bring two character witnesses who claimed I was a convincing slut, and he had my statement for a month before the meeting, but I had no idea what he would say in his statement.”
Well, now it has been reported.
And there is more to come:
“My colleagues are working on more stories of rape on the far left.”
This will be huge.
