Express & Star comment: Law must change to protect victims
The concept of somebody being a willing victim seems a contradiction in terms, but the shocking case of Natalie Connolly showed that it seems to have some standing in law.
Subjected to violence, she was left to die in a pool of blood at the home she shared with her partner in Kinver.
He was a multi-millionaire businessman and was not guilty of her murder because she had asked for it. That was not, of course, how it was put in court, but the defence argument was that she took part willingly in extreme masochistic sex games.
With the charge of murdering Natalie reduced to one of manslaughter, the defendant was jailed for 44 months.
Now the veteran Labour MP Harriet Harman, a solicitor and women’s rights campaigner, is leading an effort to get the law changed to stop alleged killers and abusers using what has been dubbed the “Fifty Shades defence,” in which deaths or injury are blamed on “sex games gone wrong.”
The practice of placing the blame on female victims has to stop, she says, adding: “Men are now getting away with murder, literally, by claiming that though they admit they caused the injuries which led to her death, it was not his fault as it was part of a sex game gone wrong.”
She wants to see the law changed so that a man is guilty of murder irrespective of whether the woman consented to the acts which led to her death.
There will be many people who followed the case who will agree that the outcome of the trial gave Natalie and her family less than justice.
Nevertheless this unusual and tragic case posed some very difficult questions, about the extent to which consent, real or alleged, can be advanced as a mitigating “excuse,” and indeed whether it is reasonable in any event to argue that somebody can consent to something that can do them serious harm or worse.
Legal brains will be wary about changing the law based on one terrible case. But there again, a law which does not protect people is a law which is not working.
