It's Way Past Time We Stopped Treating All Men As Sex Pests

By Martin Daubney: “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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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