Scenario:
Girl hops in bed with a guy in a horny fit and regrets it later, or finds out he is married, or he rejects her afterwards. Knowing that drunkedness is a surefire way to nail the guy she runs home and downs 8 shots of tequila, waits till she’s close to stumbling drunk, calls the cops and calls rape because “he took advantage of me when I couldn’t control my self or give consent”.
How does this man prove that she gave consent? How does he prove she wasn’t drunk when he nailed her?
A womans decisions when she is drunk are still her own decisions. It’s no different than someone who rams a tree when they are drunk driving. They are still fully responsible for deciding to get in that car. I believe the same thing applies here.
You shouldn’t get totally blitzed with people you don’t know or trust. It’s a decision you need to make BEFORE you start drinking.
Before you jump in here and blast me, yes, I think a drunk woman can be raped, but I think consent when you are drunk is still consent. For better or worse.
Yes, an English judge can direct a jury to acquit. I say “English” deliberately because Scotland, though part of the UK, retains its own legal system; a Scottish judge very likely does have the same power, but I don’t hear enough about Scottish court cases to comment.
Bad case, right outcome, not, however, a good precendent.
I am entitled to feel that security guards escorting extrememly drunk female students back to their homes and who then have sex with them should be fired from their jobs, even if they are aquitted of rape.
Cool. 
He did nothing a court could convict him of, but he should be severely punished anyway. That seems fair.
Of course, getting fired is private contractual obligations, not criminal law.
I must say that in this case, I must agree with her. If it is part of his job to safely bring people back home, he commited a serious ethical breach, failed at his obligations and ought to be fired. Being a criminal or not and being fit for your job or not aren’t the same issues at all.
Are you allowed to have sex on the job where you work?
If a person is brought into our emergency department due to an illness while drinking, does that mean we can have sex with him/her during the course of treatment if we can get them to say it’s okay? And even if it doesn’t make it rape I can still keep my job after having sex at work? That’ll make a 12 hour shift go faster, I’ll say that.
Having said that, I agree that in this case it would seem conviction would be nearly impossible. I’m just responding to the idea that it’s okay to have sex with people while you’re working at a job to protect them.
Agreed if he was escorting her back home as part of his job, if he’d gone off duty and then later on that evening had simply offered to walk her home then perhaps not.
I used to work as a team leader for nightclub security when I was at university and I did help people get back to their halls of residense (normally only during freshers week…the poor things). It wasn’t something that was part of the job but it was something some of us did to help out when we had a particularly blitzed student who could barely remember what hall they lived in and had no real idea how to get there (if they were at all together at least they remembered which university they were at!).
What we would do is get the office to call a taxi, get the student into the hall of residense and then call the on-duty warden who could find some of their friends to help them to their room. Normally I would then go with the other students to make sure the person got to their room okay and to make sure they were level headed enough to watch over the intoxicated student for a while (you don’t want to hand over the intoxicated student to a bunch that’s been drinking all night and feels the answer to the problem is that they just need a few more drinks!). I would not enter the other students room though, that would just be putting yourself in a position where any sort of accusation could fly.
I must say that if one of my team had done this whilst offering to help another student out I think our managers would have removed them from the job pretty sharpish. Even in the situation where there was no actual rape, I still think it is a breach of trust in the security team.
grey_ideas
A police officer or paramedic who was charged with escorting a drunk person home and had sex with them would be fired for breach of a duty of care.
A doctor who has consensual sex with a sober patient would be struck off.
A university teacher who escorted a drunk student home and had sex with them would be fired.
I don’t see why a security guard should be different.
It was his job to get her safely from A to B, not to have sex with her in the corridor outside her flat. He was sober, he was at work, whether there was rape or not is immaterial, he doesn’t deserve to have that job if having sex with a woman is more important than doing his job.
Hmm. The Times article doesn’t make it clear whether he was working at the time, and I can’t remember what the paper said when I read it yesterday. If he wasn’t, that kinda weakens the case for harassing him out of his job as an unconvicted sex offender.
My job never requires me to go to someone else’s home. Yours conceivably might. Would it make a difference if you had sex with someone at their own home, rather in the workplace?
I might be missing something but the article doesn’t state whether he was escorting her home as a part of his job or whether he’d gone off duty earlier and wasn’t working any more.
Although as I stated in my earlier post, regardless of whether escorting the student home was part of the job or not, I still think that since he had been working that night it was a breach of trust in the security team.
grey_ideas
Sorry, it was in the article I read in the newspaper yesterday. It’s not a great paper, but there you go.
This is a direct quote from the article by John Higginson in yesterday’s Dublin Metro paper.
“A female member of staff got Mr Dougal, a student working as a guard that night, to walk her [the plaintiff in the case] back to her flat”.
Seems clear enough, he was acting in his role as a security guard and didn’t do his job properly.
Is walking home blind-drunk students part of a security guard’s job?
Bad situation, correct result. The moral of the story is don’t drink yourself into oblivion while in public. You don’t know what you might, or might not, do. And if you can’t remember what you’ve done, what right have you to place someone in prison because of what you think happened?
Actually, the moral of the story is behave like a gentleman, do your job properly, and a woman won’t think you’ve raped her.
It might not be illegal, but using someone else’s drunken, drugged state to your advantage isn’t a nice thing to do.
Whether it’s persuading them to give you money, sex or a job promotion at the office party, taking advantage of someone else’s incapacitation isn’t acceptable by any moral yardstick.
I’ll buy that, but will you sign up to the other half of it: Don’t get so blind falling-down drunk that it’s perfectly possible you’ll shag someone on five minutes’ acquaintance, and then not know half an hour later whether you did it at all, let alone whose idea it was?
Totally, which is why I don’t.
The time that a bouncer spiked my drink and sexually assaulted me you get for free.
Cool. That’s kinduvanother ball-game though, isn’t it? Or did you toss that in so I’d be ashamed of myself for arguing with you? :dubious:
A slight correction for truth’s sake. The judge was Welsh.
Nah, I like you, Mal, you’re cool.
My point was that bad stuff will still happen because people are still assholes.
Threw it in there because I don’t like posting in these threads without saying at some point that I’m not totally unbiased. From experience I’ve found it’s better to just come out and say it myself, rather than have someone else back me into a corner where I’m forced to.
There’s no point telling our daughters not to drink because men will take advantage if we don’t tell our sons to be decent human beings because women will still drink too much.