We Can't Consent To This is a response to the increasingly frequent reports of women killed and injured in claimed “sex, gone wrong”.
I set up the campaign last December, when the partner of a young woman called Natalie Connolly received a short sentence for manslaughter. She died with terrible injuries; he claimed from rough sex. There was outcry over the CPS decision not to pursue a murder charge against him - and I knew that he was far from the first to say his partner had died in consensual sexual violence.
Headlines referred to her as the ‘Kinky Sex Mum’ and her husband was given four years for culpable homicide, the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter.
Before this there had been a number of recent reports of women killed where the accused men claimed they’d consented to the violence as part of sex. I first heard of the sex game gone wrong defence as a student, when a local woman was killed by her husband. Headlines referred to her as the ‘Kinky Sex Mum’, and her husband was given four years for culpable homicide, the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter.
To understand the extent of these defences, we've searched archives and in the UK have found over 60 killed by others in claimed consensual violence. Most are women, the others gay men, and all those accused in these deaths are male. Yet more have been assaulted, almost all are women, and all accused in these cases are male. Strikingly, in the vast majority of assault cases, women say they did not consent to the sexual violence. Despite this, and the R v Brown case law that more than "transient or trifling" injury cannot be consented to, much evidence of the women's alleged sex lives is submitted in court (and reported in the press), and this defence can be successful. In "rough sex" defences to a death, the defence works around 40% of the time, with men receiving a manslaughter conviction, a lighter sentence, or the death not being treated as a crime at all. And we see a tenfold increase in these consent defences over the last 20 years.
Around 60% of the women killed in alleged "rough sex" have been strangled, three times as many as the average in Femicide Census data on killings of all UK women.
Alongside this: it's now commonplace to be assaulted - violently assaulted - on dates. We've heard from many women who report this, and some say they're even shamed for not consenting to the violence. Few have gone to the police. We're particularly concerned that choking during sex may become normalised. Around 60% of the women killed in alleged "rough sex" have been strangled, three times as many as the average in Femicide Census data on killings of all UK women.
We continue to collect data to support changes to law and practice to make sure women receive an appropriate response from the criminal justice system. In particular we want to challenge the acceptance that women commonly consent to violence that kills or terribly injures them. We fully support MPs Harriet Harman and Mark Garnier's work to add to the Domestic Abuse Bill to reduce the likelihood of these defences being used to avoid serious charges in England and Wales.
It's worth returning to the woman killed by her husband when I was a student. He hid her body and told her family she'd walked out after an argument. In the lead up to her death she'd talked of leaving him - her family reported he'd been verbally abusive and had frittered away her money to control her. She'd died of strangulation and awful, fatal internal injuries. His defence QC called her killing "a private matter". Her name was Mandy Barclay, and she is not alone; there are stories like hers across the world, and we'll campaign until the "rough sex" defence can no longer be used to blame women for their own assault or death.
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Fiona Mackenzie is the founder of the We Can't Consent To This campaign and a nominee of the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize, taking place on 8th November.