Spiked: Let’s shine a light on these shady family courts
...Munby is right. The powers of the family courts are truly draconian. The court has a broad range of powers to break up allegedly ‘troubled’ families, often under Kafkaesque conditions. Applications can be made without families being present, judgements can be passed in secret, and injunctions placed on reporting some or all of the court’s proceedings. Munby’s remarks follow a series of judgments this year in which less senior judges in the family courts have been similarly scathing of the veil of secrecy under which they are able to function. ...

...Sadly, the Lib-Con coalition government has chosen a different focus in its reforms of the family courts: speeding up the proceedings for taking children into care. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice declared its intention to shorten the average time taken for care cases to be concluded from 56 weeks to 26 weeks. This echoed calls from the children’s charity Barnardo’s, which in 2010 criticised delays in having children taken into care and called for a limit of 30 weeks for the length of proceedings. Rather than seriously rewriting the statute book to create a more open family-court system, the government seems more interested in making it easier to chuck allegedly ‘damaged’ kids into care....

Gender abortions: Cameron voices concerns about failure to prosecute doctors
The Prime Minister said he "shared the concern" of an MP who warned that the failure to prosecute meant that Britain's abortion laws are at risk of becoming "obsolete". He said it was "absolutely right" that the doctors could still be subject to disciplinary action.

The two doctors were exposed after The Daily Telegraph mounted an investigation and published its results in February last year.

Acting on specific information, undercover reporters accompanied pregnant women to nine clinics in different parts of the country.

In two cases doctors were filmed offering to arrange terminations after being told the mother-to-be did not want to go ahead with the pregnancy because of the sex of the unborn child.

Mr Cameron praised The Daily Telegraph for highlighting "this important case" and said it was "absolutely right" that the doctors could face "professional" consequences. ...

..."And do you agree with me, prime minister, that this is very uncomfortable, the fact the 57 Act is now almost obsolete and puts our abortion policy on a par with India and China and a female foetus in the womb today is more vulnerable than she was last week?" ...

You can’t be pro-choice only when you like the choice
Imagine this: a newspaper, with an editorial policy opposing abortion, sends a pregnant woman to see a number of doctors intending to expose that doctors break the abortion law. A reporter sets up video footage of a woman saying she wants an abortion on the grounds she has been raped. The doctor agrees. Our paper, The Yellagraph, triumphantly publishes the footage as evidence that ‘the law has been broken’ because rape is not a legal ground for abortion.

Can you imagine the secretary of state for health ordering inspections of every single abortion clinic in England to investigate whether doctors are approving abortion for rape? Can you imagine it taking the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) more than 18 months to decide whether or not to prosecute the doctor who agreed to the abortion? Can you imagine the shadow attorney general, a Labour MP with a pro-choice reputation, harrying the CPS to prosecute rape-abortion doctors?

No; it would seem crazy. And yet a doctor agreeing to an abortion ‘on grounds of rape’ would be breaking the law no more and no less than a doctor who agrees an abortion on grounds of sex selection....

...That’s why the Daily Telegraph entrapment of sex-selection abortions has been almost universally praised, even by the prime minister, David Cameron, while our imagined Daily Yellagraph entrapment of doctors for rape abortions would seem ludicrous....

Researching the "Rape Culture" of America
...He noticed, for example, that Koss and her colleagues counted as victims of rape any respondent who answered "yes" to the question "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" That opened the door wide to regarding as a rape victim anyone who regretted her liaison of the previous night. If your date mixes a pitcher of margaritas and encourages you to drink with him and you accept a drink, have you been "administered" an intoxicant, and has your judgment been impaired? Certainly, if you pass out and are molested, one would call it rape. But if you drink and, while intoxicated, engage in sex that you later come to regret, have you been raped? Koss does not address these questions specifically, she merely counts your date as a rapist and you as a rape statistic if you drank with your date and regret having had sex with him. As Gilbert points out, the question, as Koss posed it, is far too ambiguous...

...Koss also found that 42 percent of those she counted as rape victims went on to have sex with their attackers on a later occasion. For victims of attempted rape, the figure for subsequent sex with reported assailants was 35 percent. Koss is quick to point out that "it is not known if [the subsequent sex] was forced or voluntary" and that most of the relationships "did eventually break up subsequent to the victimization."[24] But of course, most college relationships break up eventually for one reason or another. Yet, instead of taking these young women at their word, Koss casts about for explanations of why so many "raped" women would return to their assailants, implying that they may have been coerced. She ends by treating her subjects' rejection of her findings as evidence that they were confused and sexually naive. There is a more respectful explanation. Since most of those Koss counts as rape victims did not regard themselves as having been raped, why not take this fact and the fact that so many went back to their partners as reasonable indications that they had not been raped to begin with?...

...There is, however, one flaw that affects the significance of Kilpatrick's findings. An affirmative answer to any one of the first three questions does reasonably put one in the category of rape victim. The fourth is problematic, for it includes cases in which a boy penetrated a girl with his finger, against her will, in a heavy petting situation. Certainly the boy behaved badly. But is he a rapist? Probably neither he nor his date would say so. Yet, the survey classifies him as a rapist and her as a rape victim.

I called Dr. Kilpatrick and asked him about the fourth question. "Well," he said, "if a woman is forcibly penetrated by an object such as a broomstick, we would call that rape."

"So would I," I said. "But isn't there a big difference between being violated by a broomstick and being violated by a finger?" Dr. Kilpatrick acknowledged this: "We should have split out fingers versus objects," he said. Still, he assured me that the question did not significantly affect the outcome. But I wondered. The study had found an epidemic of rape among teenagers-just the age group most likely to get into situations like the one I have described....