All this talk of rape

I am trying to decide how I feel about all this talk of rape at the moment. There is Justice Minister, Kenneth Clarke's unfortunate wording and Head of IMF, Strauss-Kahn's quite shocking incident in a hotel in New York. Then there is WikiLeaks Julian Assange's casual treatment of women supporters, who he seems to treat as sexual teddy bears, available for his personal pleasure when he stops over for a night.

I also can't help thinking that TV series coming out of Hollywood are somehow related, with really quite graphic scenes of sex and violence e.g. Spartacus, Game of Thrones. Spartacus disturbingly wraps sex and violence together by interspersing battle scenes where people slice each other with swords, with sex scenes where slaves have not quite consensual sex with their masters. Are these shows depicting metaphorical rape?

Then there is this whole wave of films coming out where murders are not just a gunshot, like back in the days when Hitchcock explored violent acts with a camera shot of a knife and then a dead person.. His most graphic scene that I ever saw was the struggle in North by North West where the intention of the scene is to show just how hard it is to kill a man. Last week I watched London Boulevard thinking it was a romcom and ended up watching murder after murder with hammers, knives, all sorts. What to do when you like a good yarn but all the good stories out there seem to be full of violence?

At the same time however, I have long had the view that if people live out their violent urges on screen, perhaps they don't live them out in real life. Is one of the reasons why we don't have as much violence in our streets because we see the goriness of it on screen? Could it be that the current extreme vocalisation of rape is a good thing? That it is a necessary outing of the issues that raises sufficient awareness of it for women to feel ok about reporting it and the number of prosecutions go up.

Perhaps Slutwalk and the Clarke and Strauss-Kahn situations are all part of the same progression forward, bringing the issues of rape right out into the open, onto the front pages, to be discussed and thought about. After all, the biggest surprise for me with the Strauss-Kahn attack was that people believed the maid quickly enough that Strauss-Kahn could be stopped and arrested shortly afterwards, as he fled to the airport. Now he has lost his job, before he has even been convicted. That's a pretty clear message.

When a juror is contemplating a rape case in the context of what has happened over the past few weeks. When they are asked to consider a woman's outfit as part of the defense - will they now have the courage to say, who cares what she was wearing, who cares what time of day it was, who cares that she had sex with him the previous week. If the answer is no, it is no. End of.