Too busy to blog !!

The title of this entry is inspired by a comment once made to me by a very senior manager at a company that I used to work for. As he barged past me, at speed, into the Gents swinging the door almost into my face he apologised thus "Sorry Simon, didn't see you there but I am in hurry - too busy even to go for a p***". Well so far this week I know how he feels. I wanted to blog this about 36 hours ago, but better late then never .. maybe!

And yesterday as I was driving to Leeds, listening to the radio, a talk show - there were two subjects that came up which I felt quite strongly about. Murder and Rape. I wanted to stop the car and call in myself and express my views.

The debate around murder was a reaction to the murder of a policewoman last week as she attended a robbery in progress. It is generally accepted in most civilised societies that murder is unacceptable but whenever a UK police officer falls victim then the reaction seems all the stronger. There are calls for the return of capital punishment for killers of police officers and suggestions that it is high time we armed our police officers.

1) I don't think that a police officer being murdered should draw a potentially higher penalty than the murder of any other person. A life is a life, period.
2) Capital punishment in my view is barbaric and experience in the USA would suggest that it is not an effective deterrent. But my over-riding concern is - if you lock someone up for murder and then at a later date the verdict is found to be unsafe or just plain wrong then you can release the person - whereas once executed, well it is obvious.

So what should we do? Someone convicted of murder should be locked up for life and a life sentence should mean life, oh and the place that they are locked up in should not be a holiday camp.

The subject of rape was being discussed as some organisation had been doing some surveys resulting in statements like "33% of people surveyed said that they though that women who flirted and wore sexy, revealing clothes were partly to blame for being raped". Now this made my blood boil - I really don't see how any woman can be blamed for an act of violence being committed against her.

And then the debate started. And there were two ladies being moderated by the radio show presenter, but he was not doing very well. Lady number 1 was from a rape victim support group - and was at one end of the rape spectrum basing most of her arguments around women who were not only attacked sexually, but subjected to other forms of physical and mental abuse. She talked a lot about women being raped by husbands and partners etc. Lady number 2, sounded very posh and mentioned readers digest a lot and was mainly focussed on women who dress in "glorified underwear" and go out "topless" and should expect to get groped. Her other argument seemed to revolve around women who apparently consent to sex once at say 8pm and then cry rape following a second occurence at 10pm. These two women were so polarised in their views that it just turned into a slanging match. With posh lady telling victim support lady that "she just wants more victims". How f***ing stupid can you get.

These two women seemed more interested in scoring points off one another instead of making it clear that rape is wrong, end of story.

I realise that I am trying make a point about two very serious types of crime that probably have thousands of books and other documents written about them, by people much more qualified than I am.

What annoys me to the point of, well still wanting to blog this 36 hours later ... is that our society is so screwed up that the national radio broadcaster had to even ask such stupid f***ing questions?

Why can't it be simply the case that murder is wrong, rape is wrong? Why does one victim have to be more important than another? Why is even sensible to try and apportion the blame for crime onto the victim?

I wish I could say that writing this all down has enabled me to feel that spleen has been vented - but I still want to yell very loudly and punch something hard ... not a person of course, I am far to civilised for that !!