.
Even if a person couldn't give legal consent because they were unconscious and another person has sexual relations with them, it's not rape if the unconscious person later say's it's all okay. That's what I'm getting from some of these posts.
That means a person doesn't always need consent to have sex with a person. As long as afterwards the two individuals are on the same page everything is fine.
It kind of blurs what legal consent really is if you ask me. I was thinking that anyone who has sexual contact with an unconscious person is clearly guilty of a crime. It made sense.
Now, I'm not so sure. You would have to look at why the unconscious person said it was all okay. Are they afraid of what would happen if they say they were raped? Does the person who did the act on the unconscious person have power over the other person financially? Are they afraid the accused would leave them? Things like that could make a person deny that they where a victim when they really are one.
Or, perhaps they really don't care about someone have sexual contact with them while they are unconscious.
JMO
In Earl's case, also the public nature of the crime I think... He's a bit of a special case in that often rape happens in more private setting, there aren't as many witnesses, the police doesn't get there immediately to catch you in the act and verify that you were in fact unconscious, and the tabloids aren't there to interview you straight after you step out of the police station. Daily Mail even published blurred photos of the event taking place... Isn't it usually considered bad journalistic form to publish photos of rape victims during the act?
So, let's say Earl wakes up with a headache, finds himself in the police station, gets confronted with the photos, questioned by the police while still hungover, memories hazy, tries to blurrily remember what happened, then there's a reporter, random shoppers knew he had been raped before he had any idea, add to that the embarrassment of having been so sloshed that you lost all control and chose an embarrassingly public place for sex (if it was consensual to begin with like Earl reports)...
That must have been one nasty way to wake up from a fun day out and Earl must have been under a lot of pressure.
Many rape victims have more time and privacy to process what happened and to decide if they want to define what happened as rape and if they want to report it to the police. But Earl was thrust into it with few choices, the police was already there when he woke up.
So he might be asserting himself what little dignity he has left, trying to define himself as "not a rape victim", trying to minimise and get rid of the reporter with the videocamera in his face, trying to protect his girlfriend because he loves her or because they have a lot of fun, spontaneous, very impaired sex regularly or because he just wants to be left alone and forget it ever happened or....
If it happened in his own bedroom he'd have had the choice of reporting it to the police or deciding nothing bad happened, I would have consented anyway, heck I started it before falling asleep, let's move on, I don't want the hassle.
Now with cameras, he had no choice not to let the police know and deal with it on his own terms. But does he still have some rights as a victim to define what happened, assert that he is not a victim and does not want punishment for the girlfriend?
