8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

[Borracho]

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/12/gayle-newland-sentenced-eight-years-prison-duping-friend-having-sex

It's undoubtedly a horrible thing to do, but eight years? Most people convicted of manslaughter don't get as long as that.

The victim sounds either deranged or incredibly dense. Keeping the blindfold on while sunbathing and watching TV . . .

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Is it so hard for a gay woman to get sex?

[Toby Gymshorts]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

I've been pretending to be a man during sex for twenty-odd years.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

It's a very sad story all round.

[dalliance]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

It's a story that makes me feel really old as I just can't get my head around it at all.

Who would keep a blindfold on around a stranger they had never seen in the flesh for 100 hours, whether sunbathing, watching (or, umm listening to) television) or especially during sex?

And how could you not tell the person on top of you during sex is female? I'm not really sure why wearing a hat and a swimsuit would throw many people off the scent, but how can a woman disguise the feel of a soft body?

And yes, the sentence seems bizarrely draconian.

[WOM]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Well, probably because she was charged with sexual assault when really what she committed was fraud.

[Jah Womble]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Well, I'd hazard that this constitutes a little more than just 'fraud' - but I think eight years is extreme, I must say.

I don't know, but I suspect the tipping point of the complainant's disbelief might've been being made to wear a blindfold 'while they watched television'.

[Incandenza]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

WOM wrote: Well, probably because she was charged with sexual assault when really what she committed was fraud.

Whoa there.

[WOM]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Well...it seems that the sex was consensual. It just wasn't with whom the woman believed it to be. It wasn't a sexual assault, per se, but a misrepresentation of person. It was fraudulent sex.

[WOM]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Incandenza wrote:

Well, probably because she was charged with sexual assault when really what she committed was fraud.

Whoa there.

See above.

[ursus arctos]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

WOM, you might want to look at how you are defining consent there.

[Jah Womble]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

WOM wrote: Well...it seems that the sex was consensual. It just wasn't with whom the woman believed it to be.

Then it can't be deemed as consensual. (As ua suggests.)

[Borracho]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

This whole case reminds me of a story from a year or two back. A policeman went undercover with some sort of anarchist movement somewhere in Britain. One of the anarchists took a shine to him and they began sleeping with each other.

Then he was taken off the case by his superiors and disappeared from the scene. A while later the woman discovered through the media that he was an undercover policeman. I can't recall the specifics but I'm fairly sure she called for him to be charged with either rape or sexual assault.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Sat on a jury for a trial of a sexual abuser of (more than one) children who received a shorter sentence than that.

[treibeis]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Green Calx wrote: This whole case reminds me of a story from a year or two back. A policeman went undercover with some sort of anarchist movement somewhere in Britain. One of the anarchists took a shine to him and they began sleeping with each other.

Then he was taken off the case by his superiors and disappeared from the scene. A while later the woman discovered through the media that he was an undercover policeman. I can't recall the specifics but I'm fairly sure she called for him to be charged with either rape or sexual assault.

There's was a very similar case here not long ago (it was an undercover policewoman rather than policeman, but still).

When the story broke, all sorts of things were being called into question, but the legality of the sex wasn't one of them.

[Crusoe]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Jah Womble wrote:

Well...it seems that the sex was consensual. It just wasn't with whom the woman believed it to be.

Then it can't be deemed as consensual. (As ua suggests.)

Yes, this, absolutely.

[Lucia Lanigan]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Jah Womble wrote:

Well...it seems that the sex was consensual. It just wasn't with whom the woman believed it to be.

Then it can't be deemed as consensual. (As ua suggests.)

Yes, I think there've been cases where a man's had sex with a woman who thought he was her partner (in the dark, like) which were pretty clear-cut rape. This isn't so different in principle.

Can't help but wonder if the judge's personal ideas about sexual behaviour and its psychological impacts dictated that sentence though.

[WOM]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Green Calx wrote: This whole case reminds me of a story from a year or two back. A policeman went undercover with some sort of anarchist movement somewhere in Britain. One of the anarchists took a shine to him and they began sleeping with each other.

Then he was taken off the case by his superiors and disappeared from the scene. A while later the woman discovered through the media that he was an undercover policeman. I can't recall the specifics but I'm fairly sure she called for him to be charged with either rape or sexual assault.

That's probably closer to my thinking. I see a lot of room between 'misrepresentation of person' culminating in sex and 'sexual assault'. But of course, I'm not a lawyer.

[Janik]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Green Calx wrote: This whole case reminds me of a story from a year or two back. A policeman went undercover with some sort of anarchist movement somewhere in Britain. One of the anarchists took a shine to him and they began sleeping with each other.

Then he was taken off the case by his superiors and disappeared from the scene. A while later the woman discovered through the media that he was an undercover policeman. I can't recall the specifics but I'm fairly sure she called for him to be charged with either rape or sexual assault.

More than one case of this, and it went as far as a 'marriage'. And if mispresenting who you are is grounds for a sexual assault, which is the precedent this case seems to suggest, then the victims wish to see the policeman involved prosecuted for rape seems reasonable.

[ursus arctos]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Calx, are you thinking of the "Bob Robinson" case?

"I thought I had found my Mr Right. He was very charming and I thought I could take him to meet my parents," she says.

They had an 18-month relationship and one of his characteristics struck her in particular: "I thought he had a high moral code."

But now she feels very different about him. It turns out that there was a lot more to Bob Robinson than his impassioned campaigning and shoulder-length hair, which gave every impression of a rebel with many causes.

He was, in fact, the opposite. Bob Lambert today admits he was an undercover police officer who had created the fictional persona of Bob Robinson to spy on political activists.

Or those of his colleagues that engaged in similar activity?

Lambert was not the first SDS officer to father a child in the field. At least one other child had already been born to a member of the squad in the early 1980s. Rather than receive any reprimand, that SDS officer was later promoted to a senior post in the squad. But, on the whole, fathering children was not what police spies were supposed to do. It made life complicated.

[Toby Gymshorts]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

Vicarious Thrillseeker wrote: It's a very sad story all round.

Well, yeah. I should probably have mentioned that before the lame gag.

Genuine question - has there been a precedent for this behaviour (for want of a better word)?

[Borracho]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

I think that in the case I read about, the policeman was called Mark something.

I knew a chap years ago who was a serious smooth talker when it came to women. On one occasion, we were in a nightclub after work and, at the end of the evening, I saw him go home with an American girl whom he had successfully convinced that he was a member of U2's road crew.

I saw him again a few weeks later and he told me that he used that one any time he was out and about in Temple Bar, which of course is full of foreign tourists.

[Crusoe]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

The more I think on this, the more troubled I am by trying to work out where the dividing line is between sexual assault and this idea of misrepresenation. To me the case in the OP is sexual assault, but I'm less sure with the cases involving the undercover police officers (it's definitely wrong but I can't name the crime). If someone pretends to be a charming, decent human being, enters a sexual relationship, then turns out to be a loutish, bigoted (but not actually coercive) fuckwit, where does that sit on this spectrum?

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

There's surely two aspects here - the non-problematic aspect that is it's surely sexual assault to do sex things to people that they haven't consented to (which surely happened in this case), and mislead them into doing that.

And the second thing is the identity one which is surely far more problematic - particularly taking into account someone might have a fluid gender identity. Obviously the cop case is a precedent there.

[ursus arctos]

8 years for pretending to be a man during sex

A precedent from California.

A California appellate court on Wednesday offered an answer, reversing the rape conviction of a man who had sex with a woman by allegedly duping her into thinking she was in bed with her boyfriend.

The details of that case (including the fact that the outcome would have differed if the victim was married and the defendant was impersonating her spouse) illustrate how fraught this area can be.