It's time we stopped treating all men as sex pests

Mark Pearson seen on CCTV footage recorded at Waterloo Underground Station  

• Martin Daubney

9 February 2016 • 11:51am

 

“The law is a ass – a idiot,” declared Mr Bumble in Charles Dicken's classic novel Oliver Twist, which was released 178 years ago to the month.
Bumble would have no doubt have added some choice expletives to his observation if he’d been in Blackfriars Crown Court in London last week, to witness the unjust case brought against Mark Pearson.

Mark Pearson said he had endured a year-long "Kafkaesque nightmare" as a result of the complaint Credit: ITV / This Morning

Pearson, a 51-year-old artist, was tried for a sex crime simply because he brushed past a female film star during rush hour at Waterloo Tube station without even breaking his stride.
His accuser (who shall remain anonymous for life) claimed Pearson penetrated her with three fingers for “two or three seconds”.
CCTV of the footage irrefutably backs Pearson’s account; it took a jury of nine women and three men just 90 minutes to unanimously reject the accuser’s version of events and find Pearson innocent.

Mr Pearson seen with his right hand on his bag strap on CCTV footage recorded at Waterloo Underground Station at 18:40:24 

Mr Pearson seen passing the woman on CCTV footage recorded at Waterloo Underground Station at 18:40:25 

Mr Pearson seen on CCTV footage recorded at Waterloo Underground Station at 18:40:26 

After the case, Mr Pearson, who still suffers anxiety attacks, said, “This could have happened to anyone. For me, half a second turned into a year of hell. I feel I have undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state. Why couldn’t the CPS have used common sense?”
Which begs the bigger question: why, despite having seen the CCTV evidence (there were also no witnesses nor forensic evidence), did the Crown Prosecution Service still see fit to push for prosecution?

We see the poisonous mindset that male sex pests are everywhere in the NUS’s misplaced war on “lad culture”

Martin Daubney

Pearson’s acquittal topped off a bad week for the CPS – and a terrible one for men – following a damning report in which HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate concluded that “poor” decision-making in London rape cases was leading to innocent suspects being wrongly charged in an attempt to raise the number of convictions.
So why is what’s been described as a CPS “witch hunt” against men happening?
Increasingly, there is a sense that the courts are becoming the judicial hammer for the anvil of the CPS’s Violence Against Women And Girls strategy. It's also hard to avoid the argument that innocent men like Mark Pearson are seeing their day in court because the most prolific and evil sex offender of them all – Jimmy Savile – escaped his.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the highest courts in the land merely reflect an endemic mindset that tells us all men are potential sex offenders.
While only the battiest radical feminist still opines “all men are rapists,” there's a strong social presumption – fuelled in part by the vocal campaigning of groups such as the Everyday Sexism Project – that men are desperate to grope women on the tube. Jeremy Corbyn echoed that nonsense with his absurd and misandric proposal for women-only Tube carriages – an idea that was thankfully derailed by common sense.

Commuters give their views on women-only carriages Play! 02:12

We also see the poisonous mindset that male sex pests are everywhere in the NUS’s misplaced war on “lad culture” and exclusion of “cisgendered men” from “safe spaces”.
We see it in YouTube videos where sexual harassment of women by men incites reaction but violence against men is ignored.

The demonization of men is now an entire industry where lucrative academic, journalistic, charity and even governmental careers are forged. And top of the tree is the CPS’s Director Of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who has long been accused of a systematic “witch hunt” against men.
Saunders has been under fire over a series of high-profile Operation Yewtree failures to convict ageing TV stars Bill Roache, Jimmy Tarbuck and Freddie Starr and DJs Paul Gambaccini and Dr Fox.
Perhaps sensing that celebrity scalps were drying up, last January Saunders turned her campaign against male sex offenders to the general public. She introduced tough new affirmative consent rules designed to protect drunken women – and increase convictions against men. This culminated in the farcical, false rape case brought against history student Louis Richardson, 21, which was thrown out of Durham Crown Court after just three hours of deliberation last month.

Louis Richardson of the Durham University debating society Credit: Facebook

By jurisdiction, the post of DPP is meant to be independent and impartial. There is a feeling – exacerbated by Mr Pearson’s case – that the CPS is no longer making proper, informed decisions. In short, doing its job.
Are the CPS terrified of not prosecuting even the feeblest of cases for appearing to be siding “against” women accusers? Are they so headlight-frozen with cowardice they are deferring to juries the work they should be doing at the outset? Or are they after high-profile PR, where men like Pearson and Richardson are the poster boys of shame?
At ground level, men are being made to feel increasingly hated by a society and legal system that seems to say “all men are capable of evil – if only you look hard enough”.
In my work as an educator on internet pornography safety, I see confusion and often genuine terror in teenage boys’ (and girls’) eyes when I tell them about Saunders’ guidelines on affirmative consent. Who can blame an increasing number of Men Going Their Own Way – the MGTOWs – who feel sex is so risky they are giving up on sex and dating altogether?

Blackfriars Crown Court in central London Credit: Alamy

Like crazed parking wardens in pursuit of bonuses, the CPS currently seems intent of destroying innocent men’s reputations in the pursuit of conviction quotas.
Most shamefully of all, in today’s Britain we have a legal system that piles a wrecking ball through that unsurrenderable, central pillar of justice: that a man is always innocent until proven guilty.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/its-time-we-stopped-treating-all-men-as-sex-pests/

“Half a second turned into a year of hell.” How a man who brushed past an actress was accused of sexual assault.

Shauna Anderson

 

 

A commuter has told of how a simple trip through a busy train station changed his life after he was accused and sent to court for a “sex crime” that never took place.
Mark Pearson, a 51-year-old artist and picture framer, was accused of sexually assaulting a well-known actress at London’s Waterloo station while he was on his way home from work.
It was a commute he took every day, a routine, almost mundane part of his life, but what he didn’t know as he briskly walked through Waterloo Station on his way home was that this day was to change his life.
In the year since the encounter Mark Pearson has been labelled a sex criminal, he has been maligned and his reputation almost ruined. He now suffers anxiety and sees a therapist.
All because of a chance happening with a complete stranger.

Mark Pearson was accused of sexually assaulting a well-known actress at London’s Waterloo station. ( Image via IStock.)

The encounter took place in December 2014. The woman, who was headed to a rehearsal, had just been to a yoga class and was rushing through the busy station. She claimed that Pearson penetrated her with three fingers for “two or three seconds” followed by a violent blow to her left shoulder.
Their subsequent encounter drew Pearson into what he calls a year-long ‘Kafkaesque nightmare’ from which he has only just escaped.

CCTV of the encounter was released by the court. Via BBC News.

The actress reported the assault to police who tracked down Pearson through his travel card and arrested him. Four months later he was told he was being prosecuted and would go to trial.
‘It is horrible and frightening to contemplate going to prison for a crime you haven’t committed. Particularly a sex crime. We have all heard about how sex offenders are treated in prison” he told The Mail on Sunday.
While CCTV did not conclusively prove there was any form of physical contact between the two strangers it still led to the arrest.

CCTV of the encounter was released by the court. Via BBC News.

The actress told police that Pearson “clocked her” and then gestured with his newspaper for her to pass by.
“The next thing I know, his hand is up me…. and then I felt this enormous blow on my left shoulder” she said in her statement.
Her evidence claimed “I staggered and yelled… and people just stopped all around me, and I was looking back after him.’ Then she said he ‘shot off… legging it towards the ticket barriers.”

CCTV of the encounter was released by the court. Via BBC News.

After a lengthy investigation the woman finally had her day in court. This week after a three day trial a jury of men and women at Blackfriars Crown Court took 90 minutes to clear Pearson of the charge of “sexual assault by penetration”.

CCTV of the encounter was released by the court. Via BBC News.

The court was shown the CCTV with Pearson at Waterloo Tube station that was used to prosecute him. In it he rushes through, in his left hand-  the one which he is supposed to have used to assault the actress -Pearson carried a newspaper and in the right he holds his bag.
Without even breaking his stride he brushes past the woman.  His pace does not change, he does not “shoot off”. In fact his contact with the woman is less than half a second.
Pearson’s lawyer, Mark Bagshaw told the court that the allegation was not true given the half-second time frame.


Mr Pearson told the court “I would have had to crouch down, put my hand up the woman’s skirt… penetrate her, take my hand out again… all while holding the newspaper and walking along the concourse… It’s preposterous… It is against everything I believe in as a human being. I did nothing.”
In the three-day trial there were no witnesses, no forensic evidence and the actress failed to pick out Mark Pearson in an identity parade of video images after the alleged assault.
The jury heard that the woman, who can never be named, was wearing a coat and jacket and a thin dress over “training pants” following a yoga class,
Mr Pearson told the Mail on Sunday “One of the many frightening aspects is that this could have happened to anyone.”
“For me, half a second turned into a year of hell. I feel I have undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state.
“It is just bizarre.”
He questioned why the charges were brought forth in the first place when the CCTV clearly shows him holding a newspaper and only brushing past the actress for half a second.
“Why couldn’t the CPS have used common sense?”
The case has sparked much debate in the UK with one journalist, Martin Daubney the former editor of men’s magazine Loaded calling for an end to “ treating all men as sex pests”.
He said Mr Pearson’s case highlights a “misplaced war” on men.
“At ground level, men are being made to feel increasingly hated by a society and legal system that seems to say “all men are capable of evil – if only you look hard enough”.

 http://www.mamamia.com.au/mark-pearson-assault-allegations/

How a ‘half-a-second’ sex assault charge ruined this man’s life

MARK Pearson was walking through the busiest train station in the UK during peak hour when his life changed forever.

In his left hand he was carrying a newspaper. His right hand was holding the strap on his backpack. As he brushed past a woman walking in the opposite direction, their shoulders colliding briefly, the 51-year-old thought nothing more of it.
The woman, an actress on her way to a rehearsal, later told police Mr Peason sexually assaulted her. She offered details of how he “penetrated her” on the concourse of Waterloo Station despite the fact she was wearing “training pants” under a dress and despite footage showing he never broke stride.
Mr Pearson said the case against him was “preposterous”, but still his name was dragged through the mud. For a year he defended himself in court and out of court. When he explained to people that it never happened like his accused said it did, he knew people were thinking: “Of course you would say that”.
A jury spent just 90 minutes deliberating before finding Mr Pearson not guilty last week. It came as a relief to the married picture-framer but the damage had already been done.
“Anybody who has seen the CCTV images knows that I couldn’t possibly have done it,” Mr Pearson said.
“It is against everything I believe in as a human being. I did nothing. I would have had to crouch down, put my hand up the woman’s skirt ... penetrate her, take my hand out again ... all while holding the newspaper and walking along the concourse.”
He says he now suffers from anxiety.
“For me, half a second turned into a year of hell. I feel I have undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state.”

CCTV footage shows Mark Pearson never took his hands off his bag or his newspaper. Picture: BBCSource:Supplied

Prosecutors unsuccessfully argued Mark Pearson sexually assaulted an unnamed actress at Waterloo Station a year ago. Picture: BBCSource:Supplied

The case was pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service despite no witnesses and no forensic evidence supporting the woman’s claims.
Martin Daubney, the former editor of men’s magazine Loaded, penned a passionate plea for common sense headlined: ‘Stop treating all men as sex pests’. In it, he said Mr Pearson’s case highlights a “misplaced war” on men.
“At ground level, men are being made to feel increasingly hated by a society and legal system that seems to say ‘all men are capable of evil — if only you look hard enough’.”
Mr Pearson’s wife Carol said she knew all along that her husband was innocent, incapable of doing what he was accused of doing. On social media, users demanded the name of Mr Pearson’s accuser be made as public as his.

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/how-a-halfasecond-sex-assault-charge-ruined-this-mans-life/news-story/9252ea521fd7c7a572c8d7e518f4d852

Man falsely accused of sexually assaulting actress feels like he has undergone 'mental torture sanctioned by the state'

• Caroline Mortimer
• @cjmortimer
• Thursday 11 February 2016

A commuter wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a "well-known" actress after brushing past her at a train station has spoken of how “half a second turned into a year of hell”.
Mark Pearson said he felt like he had “undergone a form of mental torture sanctioned by the state” after he was charged over the alleged incident at Waterloo station in December 2014.
CCTV footage showed the 51-year-old walking through the station holding a newspaper in his left hand and with his right hand on his bag strap when he brushes past the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons.
The alleged victim later told police he had “penetrated” her and hit her on the shoulder - although footage showing he had never broken his stride.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) were found to have deliberately slowed down the footage, which made it appear Mr Pearson had more time to assault the alleged victim.
Mr Pearson’s defence barrister Mark Bagshaw explained the footage had been slowed down from one frame per second to one frame per two seconds.
There were no witnesses or forensic evidence.
A jury took just 90 minutes for jurors to clear Mr Pearson of any wrongdoing at his trial at Blackfriars Crown Court.
Speaking BBC Radio Five Live, the married picture-framer called the charges “preposterous” and said “anyone who has seen the CCTV images knows that I couldn’t possibly have done it”.
He said in court: “It is against everything I believe in as a human being. I did nothing. I would have had to crouch down, put my hand up the woman’s skirt ... penetrate her, take my hand out again ... all while holding the newspaper and walking along the concourse.”

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/man-falsely-accused-of-sexually-assaulting-actress-feels-like-he-has-undergone-mental-torture-a6867366.html

Rape accusations are all lies until proven otherwise

So help me Yahweh, the next time I hear some feminist dimwit like Zerlina Maxwell crowing about how we “must believe the victim,” I am going to hack off one of my toes just to get my mind off the pain in my head from having to listen to this bullshit.
First of all, unless something has been proven in a court of law, the word “victim” should remain forever in scare quotes. You know why? Because we have something, however dwindling, called a criminal justice system. That carries with it certain principles, like the presumption of innocence.
Let me explain a little about what that means. I will try to break it down real simple-like, so that even rape journalists like Maxwell can comprehend it—when she isn’t glassy-eyed with zealous misandry.
Presumed innocence means those exact words. Literally. It means that if you are sitting on a jury, or just sitting at your laptop or TV, you must assume that whoever is getting the finger pointed at them at the moment didn’t do a damn thing. You must assume that they were just living their life, minding their own business, but for some reason that you know absolutely nothing about, they were scooped up by police and charged with a crime for which the prosecutor believed there was enough provable evidence to convict them beyond a reasonable doubt.
Until that conviction comes, they are legally and morally innocent.
Consequently, for the sake of justice, you must assume that the prosecutor is full of crap and is prosecuting someone for no apparent reason until he or she can provide you evidence so compelling and convincing that there is no reasonable doubt in your mind that the accused is actually guilty.
You must assume that whoever accusing them is doing so falsely, until you are convinced by the same solid, completely credible evidence that they are not lying. Until then, you must assume their accusation means nothing. That is what presumed innocent until proven guilty means. It means that you don’t have a single iota of belief in the so-called “victim’s” story until evidence forces you to believe otherwise.
That includes rape.
To be even clearer, there are no rape victims until it has been proven in a court of law. There are only “victims.”
Even then, it can be quite questionable. Rape shield laws, rules on allowing convictions without forensic evidence, corrupt cops, corrupt prosecutors, and the built-in bias of jurors to protect alleged (female) “victims” already cast a shadow on the criminal justice system wide enough to cover a small country.
But that is just digressing for the moment because the court of public opinion is the topic at hand. We are now deluged with scores of two-bit rape journalism and ideological witch hunts in our university system. We have abandoned any sense of due process in the cultural narrative and yielded like zombies to insultingly stupid public outcries to believe anyone with a hangover and a fuzzy rape story, even if that story changes every five minutes.
Believe the “victim”? My ass. I don’t believe in anything I have to put in scare quotes. And that is the way it is supposed to be in a society guided by laws and legal canons that are supposedly inviolable.
Instead of that society, we now believe “victims” until it is proven that they lied (and they lie for an encyclopedia full of reasons). Even then we hear feminists uttering nonsense like “even if they lied they were a hero for starting the conversation.”
I actually saw that on Twitter recently regarding Rolling Stone’s decline into the rape journalism cesspool. Fortunately, I don’t remember the silly twit who tweeted it, but I am betting that a screenshot of it turns up in the comments to this article.
It is time we faced up to some facts, and I am growing ever more grateful that AVfM remains here as a place where things like facts can still be discussed.
Fact: Our culture has gone rape-crazy. Not with rapes but with the insistence that the crime happens about 500 times more than it actually does. Per rape academicians like Mary Koss, we are identifying rape “victims” even when they were reporting on surveys that they were not raped, even when they continued dating their “rapists” after the “rape.” And we are publicly crushing the reputations of anyone who has the audacity to insist on that pesky thing we call proof before picking up a torch and pitchfork with everyone else.
We have a world full of Horace Gilmers while a smattering of Atticus Finches are reduced to writing blog posts that scores of people hold their nose while reading. It’s as though their fake nobility raises them above the principles of law and common sense—because vagina.
Let me put it this way. I have an abundance of sympathy for rape victims, of either sex. Rape “victims”? Meh. Truth be told, I am pretty much sick and tired of hearing about them. And I am sick and tired of hearing them be called “survivors.”
You have to be a victim to be a survivor. If you are a “victim,” you are just someone with an unproven story, pointing a finger at someone who has not been proven to have done anything wrong.
Sorry, but that is the only way a system of justice can work unless you count gangs wearing sheets and carrying lots of rope as “justice.”
Oh, and if you were “raped” but you reported it to your college administration and not to the police, then as far as I am concerned, you are doing a shit-poor job of even being a “victim.” Your story could and should be used as fertilizer.
Reporting any violent crime, from muggings to assaults of varying degrees, can be an emotionally stressful, often embarrassing experience. It does not have to be a rape to be a hard process. I know that from personal experience. That is life for any real crime victim. Deal with it and start taking your life back. Sucking sustenance off the reflexive, gushing sympathies of others is a scam—no more, no less.
Having just enough courage to tell your college administration that you were raped, when you know that they will not give the accused a chance to even question you about your allegations, but too little courage to tell the police is a chicken-shit move that helps cast doubt on all alleged victims of this crime.
Give real victims a break. Tell the cops or shut the hell up.
If you won’t even tell the police, don’t expect people to pay for your “survivor” T-shirt or to give a rat’s ass about why you are wearing it.
But hold out your tin can anyway. P.T. Barnum assures us that someone is born every minute who will toss in a dime.

 http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/rape-accusations-are-all-lies-until-proven-otherwise/

Just because you regret your life choices doesn't mean it's rape

Just because you regret your life choices doesn't mean it's rape

Feminist Myths: Rape Culture

I’m sure we’ve all heard about rape culture from Feminists before. It’s a term that originally referred to the frequency and trivialization of rape within the prison system. But Feminists have turned it into their own personal tool. They believe that we, in Western society, live in a culture which normalizes, encourages, and trivializes the rape of women. The hard truth is that we simply don’t.
Many Feminists like to quote the false statistic of “1 in 4 women are raped” (or 1 in 5, 1 in 3, 1 in 6, it seems to change quite often). The facts about this “statistic” are that, on top of being wildly over inflated, it comes from a study conducted by a Feminist by the name of Mary Koss, and was first published in a tabloid magazine by the name of “Ms. Magazine”.
Mary Koss herself has previously admitted that 73% of the women she classified as rape victims, did not believe they had been raped. 43% of the women she classified as victims had even gone on to date their “attackers”. Stockholm Syndrome can’t account for percentages that high. If you take the women who don’t believe they were raped out of the equation, the statistic comes down to about 1 in 16 women, or about 6.25%. This is relatively close to the rate of prison rape, which is 1 in 20 or 5%.
It would seem that it is not society that is trivializing rape, but rather that it is Feminists themselves. When you constantly use a statistic which purposefully over-represents the number of rape victims, you are broadening the definition of rape to include things that are not, in fact, rape.
There’s also the ever infamous “Don’t be that guy” poster campaign. There are 2 problems with this campaign and its message. One, is that it completely ignores that women commit rape as well (something I’ll address in a later post). The second, is that it employs the “teach men not to rape” tactic, which implies that the natural state of a man, is that of a rapist. Not only is this a completely insulting message, it is also horribly wrong. Men don’t need to be told rape is wrong. We know that. We don’t go around our whole lives thinking “Rape is so great!” until somebody tells us otherwise. Please, just stop spreading this message. Not only is it completely ridiculous, it is also very very hateful.
Now onto the concept of “victim blaming”. I’d like to point out the difference between “victim blaming” and “preventative measures”.
Victim Blaming: “She was dressed like a slut, she deserved to get raped!”
Preventative Measures: “You should put on a jacket and hide a weapon inside it before you go out, just in case somebody tries to attack you.”
It is not victim blaming to recommend you learn the proper way to defend yourself against criminals. We do this for literally EVERY other crime. You can’t “teach rapists not to rape”, because rapists do not care about feelings, and they don’t care about right and wrong.
We live in a society which tries to help women protect themselves against rape. We live in a society where 4 women can falsely accuse a taxi driver of rape over a $13 cab fare, and NOT get in trouble for it. I feel like Feminists want society to simply take the word of the victim. The problem with this, is that it would mean completely abandoning the premise of “Innocent until proven guilty” that is supposed to be the backbone of our legal system. You cannot simply convict one person on the word of another. If you could, it’d be like the Salem Witch Trials all over again.
If you want an example of a rape culture, please, look to the Middle East where women are literally being executed because they were raped. That is rape culture, and that is not our society.

 http://dontneedfeminism.com/post/59636618403/feminist-myths-rape-culture