Opinions divide on the Annette Mangan affair as neatly as rivers fall in opposite directions at a watershed. Her false allegations led to the arrest of three young soldiers on charges of rape in Cyprus. They were finally released only after police discovered discrepancies in her story, and she has been imprisoned for four months.
Generally speaking, women seem to think that Mangan has been harshly treated. Olive Braiden of the Rape Crisis Centre alleges that there was more to the case than met the eye. Anne O'Donnell, former RCC director, speaking on Radio Ireland's The Last Word, said pretty much the same.
Firstly, this term "more than meets the eye" used to be used to suggest that a rape was not as simple as it seemed: maybe the rape victim was not such a victim after all; maybe she had been asking for it; maybe the culprit really wasn't a culprit. The "more to this than meets the eye" line of argument required no confirmatory evidence, merely knowing winks, tapped noses, remarks about no smoke without fire.
"Asking for it"
It was disgusting; it was the rapist's charter, the safe-conduct back to decent society, the assurance that the rapist was not answerable for what he did. And for a long time it worked. It took anti-rape activists decades to undo the lie that a woman could be "asking for it". The line, "there's more to this than meets the eye" bit the dust, to be heard of no more - until now, when men are victims, and the sordid old cliche is taken out of its wardrobe, dusted down and presented as a mysterious exoneration for a woman.
And wagons are circled. Olive Braiden says that the publicity the media are giving the case will deter rape victims from reporting rape. Anne O'Donnell said there was little reason to believe that Mangan could have managed to get the men convicted on her word alone because of Cyprus's record on human rights and its attitude to women.
Neither attitude is good enough. The crime of rape is now, finally, beyond the Pale. There is no exoneration, no mitigation, no boys-will-be-boys about it any more. The rapist is just about the most vilified person in society: murderers are held in higher esteem. To accuse three men of gang-raping a young woman is to accuse them of a truly dreadful crime, which properly attracts a dreadful punishment and a unique opprobrium.
As for Cyprus's record on human rights, or its respect for women, that sounds remarkably like a wogs-begin-at-Calais argument.
Cyprus's human rights record is probably no different from our own. It is a law-abiding democracy; and the only one which has imprisoned a man for infecting a woman with Aids. Suggesting that the Mangan rape-claim was not all that serious because a conviction could not have been successful on her uncorroborated word is hypothetical and irrelevant.
Retracted complaint
Annette Mangan went to the police because she wanted vengeance on men who had - we are told - photographed her lying on a bed in her underwear alongside one of their friends. No doubt their behaviour was distasteful, etc, etc etc: but we know under what category that comes under - drunken high jinks, unacceptable in the cold light of a clear day, but common enough when alcohol enters youthful bloodstreams.
Olive Braiden declared that Mangan had retracted her complaint; she did, but only some 15 hours or more after she had made it, certainly not of her own accord and only after close interrogation. Otherwise, those three men could have spent several months in custody and gone to trial - on an island sick and tired of drunken soldiery - on a charge of gang-rape which rightly attracts particular obloquy. That obloquy would most likely have survived a not-guilty verdict, which anyway would simply have been denounced by feminists as male indifference to female suffering ("there's more to this than meets the eye").
Annette Mangan accused these men of gang-rape and then let the law set about ruining them. That the accusation was the work of a perhaps overwrought moment is irrelevant - most criminals, from handbag-snatchers to rapists, will assure you there was no premeditation. In the day that followed her accusation, she did nothing to undo the life-destroying legal machinery she had invoked. If, as Olive Braiden fears, the case deters genuine rape-victims from reporting rape to the authorities, the fault is not ours in the media for reporting it, but Mangan's for doing what she did.
Vengeful exultation
Is four months too much? How long is a piece of string? I truly don't know, but I hope she is released soon. Charity demands it - but it demands also the release of ex-garda David Kerins, the rape-victim whose far more senseless imprisonment has in certain circles aroused a vile and vengeful exultation that I truly thought I would never see in Irish life.
These cases are not irrelevant. They suggest a vast gulf between men and women. Women fear rape, and then not being believed, in a way men do not understand; and we men similarly fear the accusation of rape - for even a not-guilty verdict would be enough to ruin my life and make me a universal object of contempt (for there's more to this than meets the eye, etc, etc). That is why the Annette Mangan case speaks so clearly but with such different voices to men and to women; and why the waters divide so clearly about it.