There has been a lot of domestic abuse in the news over the last few days, not that the subject is ever absent for long. I’ve interviewed many women in the last two decades who have been victims of horrific domestic violence. It is obvious to me, but it might not be too all, that in an abusive relationship rape is always involved.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed a brave survivor who had helped put her pathetic and scrawny abuser, Stefan Scott, away. Katie Mackinnon waived her right to anonymity and her interview with me appeared in the Record.
She told me, having already told the High Court, that when Scott raped her, he was often choking her at the same time, and that on two occasions she passed out and thought she was going to die. Every sexual act in a relationship like that is rape or assault. In an abusive relationship the idea of consent is nonsense.
A woman who lives with a man who is beating her every day does not go to bed at night wanting to have sex with him. If she doesn’t fight and kick and scream, it’s because she needs to survive.
Scott was convicted of beating six women he lived with, but of raping only three. He claimed they all consented to sex. The courts allow that nonsense and juries often accept it.
Gil Paterson MSP has recently championed a new bill to impose a time limit on defence lawyers seeking a second post-mortem on the bodies of murder victims because it distresses families and delays funerals. He has worked alongside constituent Pamela Munro, mother of murdered Paige Doherty, for three years and it is not yet law, so new laws take time and effort.
This issue, which doubtless affects thousands of women in Scotland each day, needs a champion at Holyrood. It might be something that has to be arrived at in stages, but the outcome needs to be that in a domestic situation where abuse is the norm and brutal physical violence is a daily occurrence, charges of rape must be part of the package.
Some of the men accused admit the beatings because often there are witnesses to those, and medical evidence backs them up, but the sexual abuse happens in private and abusers always claim sex was consensual. When it works, they get two or three years, not seven or eight.
We need to make sure that when women who have been abused get justice, they get it in full, and we need to make brutal cowards pay in full.

Below, the unedited version of an article I had in the scottish edition of The Sunday Express on 17/2/13.

Would parents send their children to a school that continued to celebrate a past association with Jimmy Savile or Cyril Smith? So what’s the difference here? AC-T apparently considered sodomy ‘messy and futile’, so his abusive behaviour could have been much worse. But there’s no doubt in the minds of his victims that after leathering their bare backsides, often in his private quarters, and even on the marital bed, as well as in his locked office, he was masturbating as he admired his handywork _ while the boys were told to stay still and not turn around. Just the sort of man you want to lionise in a school chapel.

 

By Marcello Mega

 

ONE of the UK’s most famous independent schools has refused to remove a plaque in its chapel that pays tribute to a former headmaster, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, a sexual deviant renowned for beating the bare buttocks of young boys in his charge.

 

While plaques and other memorials to Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith have been removed in recent months amid the sex abuse scandals that have destroyed their reputations, Tony Blair’s old school, Fettes College in Edinburgh, has refused to follow suit.

 

Chenevix-Trench had been head of Eton from 1964 but was sacked in 1970 because of his increasingly sadistic treatment of boys, including the sons of titled and powerful parents who complained about his excesses.

 

The reason for his removal was never made public, and a year later he was appointed head of Fettes. His enthusiasm for beatings and excessive alcohol intake meant he was in the process of being removed by way of early retirement in 1979 when he died, aged 60.

 

A plaque on the wall of the school’s chapel reads: ‘His door was always open, for he loved his fellow man.’

 

In a letter sent to Lord Tyre, chair of the board of governors at Fettes, David Blackie, 66, an educationalist, talks of the ‘grotesque irony of the legend’, adding: ‘When engaged in his particular deviant form of love for his fellow man he in fact took great care to ensure that the door was locked.’

 

Mr Blackie, who first wrote to Fettes in 1994 to request the plaque be removed, endured many episodes of Chenevix-Trench’s brutal sadism when he had him as housemaster at Bradfield, in Berkshire, including beatings administered in the head’s private quarters, and even on his marital bed.

 

He tells Lord Tyre that recent revelations of child abuse have prompted him to appeal to Fettes again. He adds: ‘Anthony Chenevix-Trench was not a disciplinarian. He was over-familiar and tactile. He was late for meetings, late for lessons, late for chapel, dressed untidily and always smelled of alcohol.’

 

Mr Blackie concludes his letter: ‘I am writing to suggest you remove that plaque from your chapel. I personally don’t mind what you do with the chapel, but I think it does you no credit that it sits there with its absurd message, when really Trench should be held up in much the same way as James Savile, as one who abused his position over many years and got away with it.

 

‘I am asking the trustees of Fettes to be courageous enough to put the interests of children past, present and future first, and to distance the college from its links with this odious little man, and from any tacit acceptance of his perverse proclivities.’

 

Chenevix-Trench’s bizarre and unacceptable behaviour at Shrewsbury, where he was a housemaster, then at Bradfield and Eton, meant that word did circulate in privileged circles of his undesirable proclivities. There were many raised eyebrows when he re-emerged at Fettes, often referred to as the Eton of the North.

 

The late and well respected journalist, Paul Foot, who was taught and beaten by Chenevix-Trench at Shrewsbury, first wrote about his former master’s brutality in 1969, before his arrival at Fettes.

 

But the full extent of the deviant nature of his beatings only became widely known in the mid 1990s, with Foot, Blackie and other victims provoked into print by tributes paid to Chenevix-Trench, especially in a hagiography penned by Mark Peel, then a teacher at Fettes.

 

In a remarkably candid essay for the London Review of Books, published in September 1996, Foot wrote: ‘In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals’.

 

‘Another interest, not mentioned by Sir William, lay in drawing down the underpants of boys – as individuals – before ordering them to lie on his sofa while he spanked their bare buttocks.

 

‘In his Introduction, the author Mark Peel pays tribute to Trench’s ‘common touch’ without referring to his most common touch of all: the sensuous fingering of his pupils’ buttocks before and during the interminable beatings.’

 

The article provoked a flood of tales from fellow victims, but also a steady stream of those who had known Chenevix-Trench and who wished to defend him.

 

In dismissing Mr Blackie’s request to remove the plaque in 1994, Fettes cited respect for those who had known and admired its former head.

 

On this occasion, Lord Tyre took some weeks to reply to Mr Blackie, telling him simply that his comments were noted, as they had been in 1994.

 

A spokeswoman for the school said: ‘A letter was addressed to the Fettes College Governors and arrived at the end of November regarding this matter and a reply was sent back to the author of that letter in due course. No further comment will be made.’

 

Last night, Vanessa Goldie-Scot, daughter of Fettes’ former deputy head, Thomas Goldie-Scot, condemned the school for its arrogance.

 

Ms Goldie-Scot, 61, now living in Australia, could not attend the school with her brothers as it was no co-ed during her childhood, but she grew up there.

 

She said: ‘I went to the chapel regularly as a child, I was married there, and my children went there. The chapel is a special, sacred place.

 

‘My dear father went there every day, sometimes twice a day, for more than 40 years.

 

‘He would be turning in his grave. How the head and the board of governors cannot see that it is an insult to the children abused by Chenevix-Trench to honour him in that special place is beyond me.

 

‘He has long since been exposed as a sadistic sexual deviant. To continue to attempt to cover him in the cloak of respectability is foolish and futile.’

 

Fettes College opened in 1870 following a vast bequest by the former Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir William Fettes, for the education of poor children and orphans.

 

Last month, the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator announced that Fettes was one of only three independent schools in Scotland to have failed to meet the level of public benefit required to retain its charitable status.

 

With fees ranging from £12,555 to £27,150, the school has been ordered to take steps to widen access to the benefits it provides.

ENDS

 

 

The Edinburgh Evening News on Saturday splashed the story of Chen Wright, the Jamaican rapist who should have been deported after serving a pitifully inadequate time for his first rape, or at least the first he was caught for.

The Mail on Sunday followed suit the next day, but with the highly appropriate heading: A Pitiful Day for Justice. The trouble is, almost every day is a pitiful day for justice in Scotland, at least for the victims of serious crime, their families, and the police officers who, in the main, bust a gut to get the right person in the dock.

To recap, the point of the new stories about Wright were that three appeal judges effectively enabled him to rape and sexually assault three other women rather than support moves to deport him, saying it was ‘irrational’ to conclude that he posed a high risk of re-offending. A jury also found Chen not proven on a fourth rape charge, another charge of indecent assault and two charges of assaulting children, but I’d bet my life he was guilty of the lot.

Wright was jailed for a pitiful four years in 1997 for raping a 19-year-old after trapping her in his home in Livingston in 1995 and refusing to let her go. Imagine the terror that young woman must have endured, wondering if he would kill her after she’d been raped, wondering how badly he’d hurt her, wondering about the possibility of pregnancy, STDs, HIV. We can’t know how she felt unless we’ve endured something similar, but we can imagine terror, pain, unbearable distress, and I know from interviewing many rape victims in recent years that those feelings don’t stop when the rape ends.

Wright was freed in 2000, convicted in 2002 of failing to notify police of a move to Edinburgh and then jailed again for drugs offences in 2003, with a wise sheriff recommending his deportation and the Home Office supporting the decision. But Wright had children in Scotland and argued he would lose touch with them. Aside from the fact that no child can benefit from having a monster as a father and that they would have been better served not to have him nearby, no consideration was given to the fact that the situation was entirely of his own making. Don’t rape women and don’t commit further crimes and you don’t have a problem.

By 2007, he took his case to the Court of Appeal and three judges, Lords Johnston, Eassie and Wheatley, decided that as he had committed ‘only one’ rape and had only one drug conviction, claims of a high risk of re-offending were not justified. Lord Johnston has since died, but we can only hope the two surviving judges feel the shame and guilt they ought to for getting it so badly wrong. By the time they pronounced foolishly, as they did, he had already raped two of the other women and possibly the third as well. How he must have been laughing to himself inside as he walked from the court that day to have found three such gullible fools on the bench.

Of course, it’s easy to be critical of those who have great responsibility that most of us don’t carry daily, but it’s equally hard not to condemn them utterly. Judges tend to believe they see all of life before them and are somehow blessed with greater insight than the rest of us. Did the three take advice from any expert in sexual offending? Did they seek guidance from police forces or the prison service about recidivism among sex offenders? I don’t know for sure, but again I’d bet my life they didn’t. A combination of arrogance and sheer stupidity would have convinced them they knew best.

What training do the judges have for such tasks? What learned tomes do they have to devour and learn from? None. They get a red jersey, they become masters of all before them, and most of them just love it.

There is another very serious point to make here, and none of the newspapers would dare make it. Lord Johnston was for his last years on the bench unwell, and known to be unwell by colleagues on the bench and at the Bar because of his heavy use of alcohol. Had he been in the upper reaches of a powerful business, colleagues would have had words with the necessary powers that be to have him removed from the decision-making process. The late Lord Dawson, in fairly recent times, had similar problems, and again short of a few well-placed whispers, no one actually made the effort to remove him from an office he was not, by his end, fit to hold.

I have no idea what possessed Lords Eassie and Wheatley to go along with him, but I note from media reports that Lord Johnston was the first-named judge and therefore the senior of the three. Benches of three and five judges do disagree at times, but the senior judge will normally have his way. So our justice system allows unqualified men to make decisions about dangerous criminals that can lead to women and children being raped, and it does not step in when one of those unqualified judges has a further, deeper problem that renders him unfit for the job.

The justice system, and the powerful defence lobby in particular, is very resistant to claims that sexual crime is different and should be treated differently, but it is wrong. If we could measure such things on a reliable scale, we would find the trauma and violation experienced by women and children who are raped exceeds the suffering of other crime victims, and, crucially, the effects are always life-long. That is not to suggest to survivors that they should throw in the towel. Most of them cope with the rest of their life admirably, but all of them are scarred for life more surely than anyone is ever scarred by a knife or a bottle.

At the heart of the failure of the three judges in dealing with Wright was a common, even wilful, misunderstanding: Just because he’s done it once doesn’t mean he’ll do it again. Well I beg to differ. Most of us, thankfully, are incapable of rape. Those who are not do not just suddenly wake up one day and become rapists. Sex offenders generally start offending as adolescents and their offending tends to become progressively worse. Any man who has committed the heinous act of rape will almost certainly have carried out earlier and possibly less severe sexual assaults, and will definitely be capable of doing it again.

Why we don’t lock them up for life is beyond me. Instead, the sentences are getting shorter and shorter. It can only be a matter of time before we tire of this unacceptable situation, and society might feel it necessary to dole out its own justice rather than relying on the fools in wigs and robes in our courts, and the empty suits in our £440m parliament.

Been a while since I found the motivation to come on and blog, maybe because a lot of my work is published widely in newspapers and magazines, and I don’t really expect anyone to go looking for my thoughts beyond that, but was encouraged today to find positive comments. More than that though, I remain frustrated at the abuse perpetrated on mothers and their children by secret courts and by sheriffs and lawyers who abuse their position knowing that no one is watching and no one can report on their appalling behaviour.

I’ll offer just two examples: millionaire b/wanker who has put his ex-wife and young daughter through the mill following a bitter divorce. The daughter wants to be with mum, and is for the moment, but he continues to fight and argue that it is in her best interests to live with him. Recent court case saw the sheriff side with him, dismiss the opinions of experts in child psychology on no reasonable grounds whatsoever, and lambast the mother of the child even though he acknowledged that the father had beaten the mother up during the marriage, citing the husband’s own admissions and independent supporting evidence, including medical evidence. Our society is supposed to display zero tolerance of domestic violence. How did it manifest itself in court? The sheriff said he would make no further comment on the violence and berated the mother for having a tendency to exaggerate. Presumably medical evidence is not good enough for this guy.

Apologies but I’ve been asked to delete the paragraph that used to be here by the person concerned for fear of being ‘punished’ by our justice system. You’ll just have to take my word for it that this case represents the worst injustice perpetrated by the courts that I’ve encoutered in 22 years as a journalist, and I include the debacle that is Lockerbie because the people affected by this decision are children and they’re still alive.

You wouldn’t believe this was possible in Scotland, or anywhere in the UK, but within a culture of secret courts, supposedly *to protect children, anything can happen because the lawyers know no one is watching.

While desperate mothers betrayed by the courts fight for access to their children, who are usually desperate to return to living with their mums, often without the benefit of public money, the Scottish Legal Aid Board writes out blank cheques to murderers and rapists like that vile piece of scum William Beggs to enable them to complain about their prison food.

Is this a country we’re happy to live in?

*The notion of holding these courts in secret to protect children is a myth. In criminal cases of child sexual abuse, journalists can listen to the evidence and report on it. We must not reveal any information that would give away the identity of the child, so obviously we have to take special care when the accused is a relative of the child and care has to be taken that all the media report it in the same way so that composite identification does not occur by people reading two different versions of the same story. In civil cases, the same would apply. We would not want to identify children and we would not be able to, so why the difference in terms of our access? Secret courts do nothing to protect children, because the law protects them anyway (from identification, if little else). The secrecy exists to protect the lawyers and the legal system, which routinely abuses children by forcing them to give evidence in criminal cases in a system geared up for adults. This means they can be cross-examined by multiple defence counsel _ something that judges in England are careful not to allow. In civil courts, the abuse often involves a refusal to listen to what children want, and clear bias towards one party _ most often the father, often a professional with greater access to money and influence. It’s shameful.

Last week’s media coverage of numerous serious sex offenders being released from the standard inadequate sentences only to reoffend and destroy further lives was no surprise. We’re so used to it that such episodes are no longer guaranteed to make the front pages, although the Scottish Sun’s juxtaposition of the treatment of one such offender with the extremely harsh treatment of the van driver fined for not being in control of his vehicle because he was spotted by a twat of a copper blowing his nose (while standing still and with his handbrake on) was brilliantly used on its cover.

It’s of no comfort that similar things are happening in England as well. The mum of a girl of nine rightly wanted to know why Simon Heaton was bailed and free to rape her daughter despite having already been accused of a brutal attack on a girl of ten.

The law is reluctant to treat sex offending  as different from other types of crime. But it is different. The effects are life-long, unlike the joke sentences now being dished out by our courts. The rape of a child is now worth about six years _ which actually means serving between three and four, with four the absolute maximum even if you tell your psychologist as they prepare to release you that you plan to do it again. The police took such a case to court not long ago, demanding that an offender not be released as he freely admitted his ultimate fantasy was to abduct, rape and murder a pre-pubescent girl. They lost, and he’s in a community near you.

It’s time we demanded that the people who make decisions that ruin lives are made accountable. If a lawyer representing a sex offender demands bail under human rights laws or under the now outdated notion that an accused is innocent until found guilty (the standards of evidence have improved so much that you can be pretty sure if they’re in the dock they’re guilty), let him (or her) put their money where their mouth is. If the client offends while on bail, let’s make it an offence for the lawyer to have misrepresented said client to the court.

If professionals who assess a life prisoner decide he’s fit to release, or indeed if they release him earlier than necessary from a determinate sentence, let’s hold them to account as well if he reoffends. A few sackings might see them make their judgments with more care for the community and less for the offender.

It’s time voters left politicians in no doubt of how we want the justice system to deal with serious sex offenders. Ideally, we want them locked up for life, and if that’s unattainable they need to be tagged for life in the community. Most criminals of any description don’t want to be caught. The risk of rapists and child sex offenders reoffending and ruining more lives won’t disappear if they’re tagged, but if they know that tag will place them precisely at the scene of the crime, most will think again.

I’d suggest that such a policy, if embraced by any of the major political parties, might win them a few votes.