More on the rape story and consent, both Devil's Kitchen and Talk Politics have excellent articles on the subject. But where do they find the time to write at such length? There's also been much comment on the Julie Bindel article in The Guardian. As I've said on other blogs, it should come as no surprise that a writer who has spent her life working within the Domestic Violence Research Industry should write such a piece, and play fast and loose with statistics. As with so many other areas of research, lazy journalists pick up statistics and use them without much checking, then THAT use is picked up by someone else and you end up with statistics being used in ways which the original researchers would never recognise. Before starting to write for The Guardian, Bindel was at Leeds Met University working on prostitution, amongst other issues. She proposed totally criminalising the men involved with a fairly robust campaign (IIRC if you were spotted kerb-crawling, you were summoned to a 're-education' day run by Ms Bindel and colleagues). Unfortunately, no-one had checked with the good ladies of Spencer Place to see what they thought of the scheme and I believe it was dropped after many of the local working girls protested about potential loss of trade (nothing had been put in place to replace their lost income). Since when she's made a career writing articles for The Guardian and continuing to plow the furrow of men's evil towards women. It should be no surprise that being thoroughly ideologically connected to the belief that men abuse women and that we live in a rapists society, everything becomes grist to this mil. Just as it is no surprise that an academic at the Women Abuse Studies Unit is suggesting the rape rate is soaring. These researchers are paid to discover abuse of women. Funnily enough, that's exactly what they then do (not to suggest it doesn't happen, but to suggest that it becomes a prism psychologically and economically through which the world is viewed). And if funding requires building up the alleged levels of abuse, manipulating the statistics, well, it's what happens in every other sphere, why not in this one? And men, of course, so ashamed of what we've done, don't challenge it. And if the price is a generation of women scared of their own shadows because of the supposed levels of abuse, that's a price worth paying.