THE COOL GIRL COURT

for the coolest girls around

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  • THECOOLGIRLCOURT

    the song that’s been getting me through my studies this week:

    WHAT THE LAW GETS WRONG ABOUT WOMEN: PART TWO

    Welcome to The Cool Girl Court

    Court is in session.

    The initial idea for The Cool Girl Court arrived somewhere between 2-4am in my university library, a labour of love (and caffeine) born from my law school notes and one too many late-night spirals about the world. I’m currently completing my law degree (potentially a strong statement), so I’m somewhere between thinking the world can still be saved and becoming a corporate sellout.

    This blog is for the women who want to understand the system without becoming hardened by it. The ones who want power and peace. The ones who are tired of being confused on purpose. For any of the more performative men that find themselves in this little corner of the internet make no mistake you’re still very much welcome.

    Here, we talk about law the way it actually shows up: in our relationships, our jobs, our bodies, our money, our safety, our online lives, and our futures. There will also be some focus on what I’m currently learning about week by week, otherwise this would be an almost complete waste of time, so feel free to enjoy some free legal education whilst you’re here.

    I’m not here to sound like a textbook, I never bought any so I couldn’t even if I tried. My mission here is to talk through my own understanding of the law as I come to understand it and hopefully we can all learn something new.

    The Cool Girl Court is equal parts legal education, chit chat, and whatever caffeine fuelled musings I can make about certain areas of the law. It’s for the girls (and guys, we’re inclusive here) who want to observe and understand what the law is, how it changes, and how close I personally come to losing it as I learn about it all.

    If you’re reading this because you want to support me on this journey, learn more about the law, show up to support the areas you may find yourself passionate about, then you’re in the right place. And if you’re a fellow law student, hopefully not one at my university (hello to any fellow Exeter girls), maybe this will help you or at the very least provide some comfort in knowing you’re not the only one who feels completely lost and overwhelmed!

    Thank you for coming along for the ride,

    Lots of love, TCGC x

  • THECOOLGIRLCOURT

    the song that’s been getting me through my studies this week:

    WHAT THE LAW GETS WRONG ABOUT WOMEN: PART TWO

    The Reasonable Person Was Never Gender-Neutral

    How supposedly neutral legal standards encode male experience

    The law often speaks in the language of neutrality. It offers standards that appear universal, detached from identity, and resistant to personal subjectivity. Few examples are more central than the “reasonable person”, the figure who silently shapes negligence, fear, responsibility, and credibility across legal doctrine.

    But the more closely we examine this legal subject, the less neutral it appears.

    The reasonable person has always been presented as objective. In Vaughan v Menlove (1837), the court rejected the defendant’s argument that he had merely exercised his own best judgment, insisting instead on an external standard of ordinary prudence. This doctrinal move was foundational: law would no longer ask what this defendant thought was careful, but what a hypothetical reasonable person would have done.

    That shift gave the common law coherence. It also embedded a serious problem. Because legal objectivity often disguises historical assumptions about whose experience counts as ordinary.

    The “reasonable person” in tort and criminal law has traditionally reflected assumptions about autonomy, confrontation, bodily confidence, emotional expression, and risk tolerance that were historically coded through male social experience. This becomes visible when law confronts harms disproportionately experienced by women: coercive control, stalking, cumulative fear, workplace harassment, or trauma responses that do not resemble the law’s expectation of immediacy.

    In negligence, the standard remains outwardly universal. Alderson B’s classic formulation in Blyth v Birmingham Waterworks describes negligence as failing to do what “a reasonable man” would do in ordinary human affairs. Yet what counts as ordinary is never socially neutral.

    For example, the law often recognises catastrophic physical risks more readily than patterned social harms. Broken bones are legible. Repeated intimidation, digital surveillance, and coercive domestic behaviours are often not.

    This matters because women’s legal harms frequently emerge through accumulation rather than singular dramatic events.

    The doctrinal language of reasonableness can therefore become a filter through which lived female experience is flattened into legal abstraction.

    A woman documenting escalating intimidation by a former partner may be told there was no sufficiently “immediate” threat. A workplace culture of exclusion may be treated as too diffuse to ground foreseeable psychiatric harm. A survivor’s hypervigilance may appear legally excessive only because the baseline of reasonableness was never built around cumulative gendered risk.

    This is why feminist legal theory has long challenged the myth of universalism.

    Catharine MacKinnon’s enduring insight that law often “sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” remains profoundly relevant here. The point is not that women need a separate legal standard. It is that standards presented as neutral may already be partial.

    The question is therefore not whether the law should abandon objectivity.

    It is whether objectivity has too often mistaken historically male social assumptions for universality itself.

    A more honest doctrine of reasonableness would remain objective while becoming context-sensitive:

    • attentive to cumulative threats
    • alive to trauma
    • responsive to gendered vulnerability
    • capable of recognising harms that unfold through systems, not moments

    The future of better legal design lies here. Not in rejecting the reasonable person.

    But in finally asking: reasonable for whom?

  • THECOOLGIRLCOURT

    the song that’s been getting me through my studies this week:

    WHAT THE LAW GETS WRONG ABOUT WOMEN: PART TWO

    When Governments Fail to Protect Women

    The state’s most consequential violence is often what it chooses not to do.

    The law says women are equal before it. But equality means little when the institutions designed to protect them are built around someone else’s life.

    The law likes to imagine itself as neutral.

    It speaks in the language of universality: rights belong to everyone, duties are owed to all, protections apply equally. In constitutional theory and public law doctrine, the state presents itself as an impartial guarantor of security and liberty. But women have long known that neutrality is often the mask power wears when it wishes to avoid responsibility.

    The most profound legal failure is not always the existence of openly discriminatory laws. Sometimes the deeper failure lies in what governments refuse to do.

    Women are harmed not only by private actors, but by public omission: by police forces that do not intervene, courts that do not listen, welfare systems that do not recognise dependency, immigration systems that trap women with abusers, and legislatures that design safety as though women’s lives are deviations from the norm.

    This is the quiet architecture of state failure.

    And because the law traditionally distinguishes so sharply between public wrongs and private harms, governments often escape accountability for the violence, coercion, and insecurity that shape women’s everyday lives.

    The Myth of “Private” Violence

    The family is still one of law’s most protected fictions, and one of the places women are least protected.

    One of the oldest legal mistakes is the idea that violence inside the home is somehow less public than violence in the street.

    Domestic abuse was historically hidden behind doctrines of family privacy, marital authority, and state restraint. Even where those formal legal doctrines have been dismantled, their logic survives institutionally. Police officers still treat intimate partner violence as a “domestic matter.” Prosecutors still downgrade coercive patterns into isolated incidents. Courts still ask why she stayed, why she returned, why she did not report earlier.

    Each of these questions displaces state responsibility onto women themselves.

    The problem is not merely bad enforcement. It is conceptual. Governments continue to inherit a legal imagination that treats the family as a space naturally resistant to intervention unless the violence reaches an extreme threshold.

    But coercive control, economic abuse, threats involving children, immigration dependency, digital surveillance, and reputational intimidation all flourish below that threshold.

    When governments fail to build legal systems capable of recognising cumulative harm, they become participants in the violence they claim only to observe.

    Protection Delayed Is Protection Denied

    Women rarely experience state failure as a dramatic constitutional event.

    More often, it appears as delay.

    The unanswered emergency call.

    The non-molestation order that takes weeks.

    The housing transfer denied because the evidence burden is too high.

    The child contact hearing that ignores documented abuse.

    The rape case dropped for “insufficient prospect of conviction.”

    Delay is one of the most normalised forms of institutional violence.

    A remedy that arrives after escalation is often no remedy at all.

    Governments often measure legal protection by the formal existence of remedies. But for women facing repeated abuse, the law’s slowness can itself become part of the mechanism of harm.

    No single decision may appear unlawful in isolation. Yet the cumulative effect of failures across policing, housing, welfare, child protection, and immigration can leave women exposed, impoverished, and effectively unprotected.

    The law is still learning how to see systems rather than moments.

    Immigration Law as a Tool of Entrapment

    Few areas reveal governmental failure more starkly than immigration control.

    For migrant women, legal status is often the terrain on which abuse is enforced. A partner may threaten deportation, confiscate documents, restrict access to legal advice, or weaponise sponsorship requirements. The state’s own rules become tools of coercion.

    The legal system may condemn the abuser’s threats while simultaneously making those threats true.

    When residency rights are tied to marital status, sponsorship, or financial dependency, governments create structural conditions in which leaving abuse can mean losing lawful presence, income, housing, and access to children.

    This is not a gap between law and reality. It is the design of the law itself.

    Social Welfare and the Politics of Credibility

    Governments also fail women through the distribution of economic vulnerability.

    A woman leaving abuse often requires immediate access to income, childcare, emergency housing, legal aid, healthcare, and flexible employment protection. Yet welfare systems frequently presume stable households, uninterrupted work histories, digital access, and documentary evidence that abused women may not possess.

    The law’s demand for credibility is deeply gendered.

    The state rewards the administratively legible victim: calm, organised, prompt, and perfectly documented.

    But trauma rarely produces linear narratives, and abuse often destroys precisely the records the state later requires.

    A government that designs protection around idealised bureaucratic behaviour mistakes survivorship for fraud.

    Reproductive Autonomy and State Power

    Governmental failure is not limited to inaction. Sometimes it appears as overreach.

    Where states restrict abortion, underfund maternal healthcare, criminalise pregnancy outcomes, or permit broad conscientious refusal without guaranteeing alternatives, they transform women’s bodies into sites of legal governance while disclaiming responsibility for the consequences.

    The language of morality often disguises a simpler legal truth: the state has decided women’s bodily risk is an acceptable policy cost.

    Women experience this not as neutral regulation, but as abandonment.

    Rights on Paper, Survival in Practice

    International human rights law increasingly frames states as having positive obligations: duties not merely to refrain from harm but to prevent, investigate, and respond to gender-based violence.

    Yet governments routinely ratify norms faster than they restructure institutions.

    Shelters close. Legal aid disappears. Specialist domestic violence units are merged away. Interpreter services are cut. Family courts continue to privilege parental contact over maternal safety.

    A right without infrastructure is a promise without protection.

    The state then points to the statute book as proof of compliance.

    Women are left with the difference between rights on paper and survival in practice.

    What the Law Gets Wrong

    What the law gets wrong is its persistent belief that state responsibility begins only where direct state action can be clearly identified.

    But governments shape the risk environment in which women live.

    They decide whether coercive control is recognised. They decide whether police are trained. They decide whether legal aid exists. They decide whether migration status can be weaponised. They decide whether childcare, housing, and welfare make escape materially possible.

    In this sense, protection is never merely reactive. It is infrastructural.

    Women’s safety depends less on abstract declarations of equality than on whether governments build institutions around the realities of women’s lives.

    The most dangerous legal fiction is the idea that harm inflicted by private actors absolves the public sphere.

    When governments fail to protect women, the failure is rarely passive. It is written into categories, thresholds, budgets, evidentiary rules, and policy choices.

    That is not protection.

    That is legal abandonment.

  • THECOOLGIRLCOURT

    the song that’s been getting me through my studies this week:

    WHAT THE LAW GETS WRONG ABOUT WOMEN: PART TWO

    Why Women’s Sexual History Is Still on Trial

    (Criminal Evidence, Consent, and the Law’s Weird Obsession with Women’s Past Sex Lives)

    Let’s start with a question that feels both obvious and somehow still controversial:

    Why does what a woman did in bed five years ago have anything to do with whether she consented last Tuesday?

    No, genuinely. Because legally speaking, we’re still entertaining that idea and feminist lawyers everywhere are tired in a very specific, very academic way.

    In theory, English law has moved on from the days when rape trials were basically moral purity contests. In practice? Women’s sexual histories still walk into courtrooms before they do, sit down comfortably, and start whispering about credibility. Meanwhile, the defendant’s violence waits politely in the corner until someone remembers it exists.

    Let’s unpack why this happens, how the law technically tries to stop it, and why it still hasn’t worked. (Spoiler: misogyny. But like, structural misogyny.)

    The Law’s Official Position: “We Don’t Do That Anymore”

    In England and Wales, the rules on sexual history evidence live in sections 41–43 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 (YJCEA). These are often called “rape shield” provisions, which sounds very heroic, like the law has thrown itself in front of women to protect them from invasive questioning. Unfortunately, the shield is…. more of a loosely held umbrella.

    The basic rule is this:
    Evidence or questioning about a complainant’s past sexual behaviour is not allowed.

    Why? Because Parliament recognised that:

    • It discourages reporting
    • It humiliates complainants
    • It reinforces rape myths
    • It distracts juries from the actual issue, whether the defendant committed the offence

    All very sensible. Ten out of ten. No notes.

    But then come the exceptions.

    Under s 41(3), judges can admit sexual history evidence if they think it’s relevant to issues like consent or the credibility of the complainant. And while that might sound reasonable in theory, in practice it has opened the door to precisely the kind of questioning Parliament was trying to get rid of, just with better legal handwriting.

    Enter: R v A (No 2) — The Case That Quietly Ruined Everything

    In R v A (No 2) [2001] UKHL 25, the House of Lords decided that the rape shield provisions had to be interpreted in line with the defendant’s right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

    That sounds very noble. Who doesn’t love due process? Unfortunately, the result was that judges were encouraged to read the exceptions to s 41 quite broadly, allowing sexual history evidence whenever excluding it might risk unfairness to the defence.

    In other words:
    Protecting women from invasive questioning became optional. Protecting defendants from inconvenience remained mandatory.

    Since then, courts have repeatedly admitted sexual history evidence, sometimes about past relationships with the defendant, sometimes about sexual behaviour with others, on the basis that it might be “relevant” to consent or credibility.

    Which brings us to the core problem:

    Why is a woman’s sexual past still treated as evidence about her present truthfulness?

    What This Looks Like in Real Life (Spoiler: Not Great)

    In actual trials, sexual history evidence doesn’t usually arrive wearing a badge that says, “Hello, I am here to perpetuate rape myths.” It comes dressed as logic.

    You’ll hear things like:

    • “She had sex with him before, so maybe she consented this time.”
    • “She’s had multiple partners, so she’s less likely to say no.”
    • “She engages in risky sexual behaviour, so she’s less reliable.”

    None of these statements are legally sound. All of them are culturally familiar.

    And that’s the point. The law claims to assess evidence neutrally, but it operates in a society that still believes women who are sexually active are:

    1. Less credible
    2. Less respectable
    3. More likely to be lying
    4. More responsible for what happens to them

    So when sexual history evidence enters the courtroom, it doesn’t just offer facts, it activates stereotypes. It turns trials into moral audits. And suddenly, the question isn’t “Did the defendant rape her?” but “Was she the kind of woman bad things happen to?”

    Which, legally speaking, is not a category.
    Culturally speaking, it’s doing a lot of work.

    The Myth Doing the Heavy Lifting: “Promiscuous Women Can’t Be Raped”

    Let’s name the elephant in the courtroom: the persistent myth that women who have sex, especially casual, non-marital, or enthusiastic sex, are somehow less capable of being raped.

    This is not a fringe belief. It’s a structural one. It shows up in jury reasoning, police decisions, media reporting, and, yes, evidential rulings.

    The logic goes something like:
    “She agreed to sex with others, so maybe she agreed this time.”
    “She dresses provocatively, so she must have wanted it.”
    “She didn’t behave like a ‘real victim’, so maybe she wasn’t one.”

    None of this has any grounding in law. All of it has grounding in misogyny.

    Consent is situational.
    Capacity is contextual.
    Autonomy isn’t cumulative.

    Your past “yes” does not become a transferable licence. Sex is not a subscription service. There is no loyalty card scheme where the tenth encounter makes the eleventh legally unavoidable. (I can’t believe I had to type that, but here we are.)

    And yet, the courtroom still treats women’s sexual histories as predictive of present consent, something we would never do with literally any other crime.

    Imagine arguing:
    “He’s been mugged before, so maybe he consented to this robbery.”
    “She’s driven recklessly in the past, so maybe she agreed to this car crash.”

    No. Because that’s absurd. But somehow, when the crime is sexual violence, absurdity becomes admissible.

    Credibility: The Real Defendant in These Trials

    One of the most damaging effects of sexual history evidence is how it reframes trials around credibility rather than conduct.

    Instead of asking:
    “What did the defendant do?”

    The courtroom asks:
    “What kind of woman is she?”

    Was she drinking?
    Was she flirting?
    Was she wearing something tight?
    Was she sexually experienced?
    Was she in a relationship?
    Was she too emotional?
    Was she not emotional enough?

    By the end, the complainant’s entire personality has been forensically examined, while the defendant’s behaviour often remains oddly abstract. Violence becomes hypothetical. Her choices become concrete.

    Feminist scholars like Liz Kelly and Nicola Lacey have long argued that this reflects a deeper legal problem: the law still imagines rape as something that happens to “good women” by “bad men” in dark alleys, not something that happens to real women by people they know, in situations that look messy, complicated, or emotionally ambiguous.

    So when a woman doesn’t match the “ideal victim” script, passive, sober, frightened, modest, the law becomes suspicious.

    Not because the evidence demands it.
    Because culture does.

    The Psychological Toll (Or: Why Survivors Don’t Report)

    Let’s talk consequences, because this isn’t just theoretical.

    Knowing that your sexual past might be dissected in court:

    • Discourages reporting
    • Increases trauma
    • Makes trials feel punitive
    • Turns victims into defendants

    Research consistently shows that survivors fear being judged more than they fear losing. And honestly, given the structure of cross-examination in sexual offence trials, that fear is rational.

    Imagine being asked about:

    • Who you slept with
    • How often
    • What positions
    • Whether you liked it
    • Whether you orgasmed
    • Whether you texted them afterwards

    And then being told this is necessary for justice.

    Justice for whom, exactly?

    The law insists that such questioning is about relevance. Survivors experience it as humiliation. Feminist theory would call it what it is: disciplinary, a way of reminding women that sexual autonomy still comes with surveillance.

    The “Fair Trial” Argument: Why It’s Not Neutral

    Whenever this issue is raised, the same response appears:
    “But defendants have a right to a fair trial.”

    Correct. They absolutely do.

    But here’s the question we never seem to ask:

    Why is fairness to defendants framed as incompatible with dignity for complainants?

    Why does protecting women from invasive questioning count as compromising justice, but protecting defendants from accountability does not?

    The assumption underlying decisions like R v A is that sexual history evidence is inherently probative, that it actually helps juries determine the truth. But there’s no empirical evidence for this. What there is evidence for is that such evidence activates bias and stereotypes.

    So the law isn’t choosing between truth and fairness.

    It’s choosing between:

    • A defendant’s right to deploy gendered narratives
    • A complainant’s right to be treated as a credible human being

    And it keeps choosing the former, while pretending that choice is neutral.

    (Spoiler: neutrality built on inequality isn’t neutrality. It’s just bias with better branding.)

    The Bigger Picture: What This Says About How the Law Sees Women

    At its core, the persistence of sexual history evidence reveals something uncomfortable about how the law understands women’s sexuality.

    Men’s sexuality is treated as:

    • Normal
    • Expected
    • Irrelevant to credibility

    Women’s sexuality is treated as:

    • Deviant
    • Risky
    • Evidence of character

    In other words, men have behaviour.
    Women have reputations.

    And the courtroom is still very interested in policing the latter.

    This isn’t accidental. Criminal law has historically been built around male experiences, male violence, male risk-taking, male autonomy, and then retrofitted onto women’s bodies. When women deviate from expected norms (sexual modesty, emotional restraint, physical passivity), the law reads that deviation as danger.

    Not danger to them.
    Danger from them.

    Which is… impressive, in the way that only centuries of patriarchy can be.

    Is the Law Getting Better? (Tentative Yes, But With Caution)

    There have been reforms. Judges are more aware of rape myths. Judicial training has improved. Appellate courts increasingly acknowledge the harms of sexual history evidence. Some rulings now emphasise that such evidence should be admitted only in genuinely exceptional circumstances.

    But “exceptional” still happens more often than it should, and survivors still report feeling on trial.

    The problem isn’t just doctrinal. It’s cultural.

    You can write perfect statutes, but if judges, lawyers, jurors, and institutions still believe that sexually active women are less credible, the law will continue to operate exactly as it always has, just with better footnotes.

    So What Would Justice Actually Look Like?

    Justice would mean:

    • Treating consent as situational, not cumulative
    • Treating credibility as evidential, not moral
    • Treating sexual history as private, not probative
    • Treating survivors as participants, not suspects

    It would mean recognising that sexual autonomy and sexual violence are not opposites, they coexist. A woman can enjoy sex, seek sex, initiate sex, love sex, and still be raped. These things are not contradictory. They are human.

    And until the law internalises that, women’s bodies will continue to be public property in private trials.

    Final Thoughts (Or: Why This Still Makes Me Furious in an Academic Way)

    The law likes to say it’s moved on. It hasn’t. It’s just learned how to say the same things more politely.

    As long as women’s sexual histories remain admissible in rape trials, the courtroom will continue to operate on an unspoken rule:

    Good women are believable.
    Other women are evidence.

    And frankly, justice deserves better than that.
    So do women.

    Honestly this one has been a hard research and even harder write. I hope that even though this is generally quite a heavy subject matter you’ve come away feeling you’ve learnt something. As always feel free to reach out if need be, we’re all girls here.

    Remember that there is always support available.

    On a lighter note get ready for the second instalment of The Cool Girl Spotlight which will release a couple days after this post. Something to lighten the mood and share some love.

    Happy Monday!

    Lots of Love,

    TCGC xx

    Legal Sources (England & Wales)

    • Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, ss 41–43
    • R v A (No 2) [2001] UKHL 25
    • R v Evans [2016] EWCA Crim 452
    • R v T [2020] EWCA Crim 110
    • European Convention on Human Rights, Article 6
    • Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence
    • Nicola Lacey, Unspeakable Subjects
    • Temkin & Krahé, Sexual Assault and the Justice Gap

  • THECOOLGIRLCOURT

    the song that’s been getting me through my studies this week:

    WHAT THE LAW GETS WRONG ABOUT WOMEN: PART TWO

    The “Rough Sex Defence”: Why “She Asked For It” Should Never Be a Legal Argument

    Hello all, apologies for the mild (moderate) hiatus. The first couple weeks back at uni have consisted of very little lecture attendance and almost perfect club attendance. So in attempt to lock back in, today we’re talking about the rough sex defence. It’s probably one of the most divisive areas of the law, and honestly it should be. We also did our assignment on this, so in theory you could call it knowledge consolidation.

    Lock in and enjoy my mid-afternoon musings.

    This argument, sometimes raised by defendants, usually men, who claim that a woman’s death or serious injury occurred accidentally during consensual sexual activity involving violence. Translation: I didn’t mean to hurt her, she wanted rough sex. If you’re a woman alive today, you’ve most definitely heard this, or something along the lines in the past.

    If your first instinct is to question why on earth this is a thing, so was mine.

    Today, I want to unpack what this defence actually is, how it operates in law, why it disproportionately harms women and girls, and why many legal scholars are deeply concerned about its continued use.

    It’s good to be back, I hope you enjoy.

    First Things First: Is the Rough Sex Defence Actually a “Defence”?

    Short answer: No, at least not formally.

    There is no statutory defence called “rough sex.” Instead, defendants rely on a combination of:

    1. Consent — arguing the victim agreed to the acts that caused injury or death
    2. Accident — claiming there was no intent to cause serious harm
    3. Lack of mens rea — asserting they didn’t foresee the risk of death or serious injury

    So when we say “rough sex defence,” we’re really describing a narrative strategy, not a doctrine. A story defendants tell juries: This wasn’t violence. This was intimacy gone wrong.

    Which raises the obvious question: how wrong does intimacy have to go before we call it violence?

    (Spoiler: way sooner than some courtrooms historically have.)

    The Legal Problem: You Can’t Consent to Serious Harm. Or Can You?

    Traditionally in common law jurisdictions (including England and Wales), the rule is that a person cannot consent to serious bodily harm, unless the activity falls into a recognised exception, things like properly conducted sport, medical procedures, or tattooing.

    Sexual activity does not automatically qualify.

    So in theory, consent should not excuse violence that causes serious injury or death.

    In practice? Things get… fuzzier.

    Courts have sometimes accepted that defendants lacked the necessary intent for murder or manslaughter because the harm arose during consensual sexual conduct. In other words: He didn’t mean to kill her , this was just sex that tragically went too far.

    Which sounds less troubling until you realise how often “sex that went too far” looks exactly like domestic violence with better PR.

    Let’s Be Honest About the Pattern

    The rough sex defence is not being deployed equally across gender lines. It is overwhelmingly raised in cases where:

    • A woman is dead or seriously injured
    • A male partner is on trial
    • There is a history of coercive control, abuse, or violence

    And yet the narrative shifts away from violence and toward erotic accident. The defendant becomes unlucky. The victim becomes reckless. The harm becomes mutual.

    Somehow, the woman manages to be both dead and responsible for her own death, which is quite the multitasking feat, honestly.

    Why This Defence Is So Dangerous (Legally and Socially)

    1. It Normalises Violence Against Women

    When courts entertain arguments that strangulation, beating, or extreme injury were just “part of sex,” they help blur the line between desire and domination, pleasure and pain, consent and coercion.

    This matters because strangulation, in particular, is one of the strongest predictors of future homicide in domestic abuse cases. Treating it as erotic experimentation instead of lethal warning behaviour is… not great public policy.

    Or public safety.

    Or public sanity.

    2. It Repackages Abuse as Sexual Liberation

    There’s something especially insidious about how this defence cloaks violence in the language of sexual freedom.

    Now, let me be clear: consensual BDSM exists. People can and do negotiate power dynamics safely and ethically. This blog is not here to kink-shame.

    But the rough sex defence doesn’t tend to show up in cases involving negotiated boundaries, safe words, aftercare, or mutual pleasure. It shows up when women are dead.

    That’s not sexual freedom. That’s legal fiction with a body count.

    3. It Reinforces Victim-Blaming, Even Beyond Death

    The defence effectively puts the victim on trial. Her sexual history, preferences, messages, and relationships become evidence against her.

    She is interrogated, posthumously, about what she “wanted,” what she “liked,” what she “agreed to.” Meanwhile, the man who caused her injuries gets the benefit of the doubt.

    It’s the ultimate evolution of “What was she wearing?”
    Now it’s “What was she into?”

    Progress. How riveting.

    4. It Makes Prosecution of Violence Against Women Harder

    When juries are told that the victim consented to violent acts, it muddies the waters around intention and culpability. Defendants may avoid murder convictions or receive lesser sentences, even where the facts show extreme brutality.

    And that sends a message: women’s bodies are legally riskier terrain than men’s, and harming them during intimacy may be excusable.

    That message doesn’t stay in courtrooms. It seeps into culture.

    Legislative Pushback: The Law Is (Finally) Catching On

    In response to public outrage and campaigning, particularly by feminist organisations and families of victims, England and Wales passed Section 71 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which clarifies that:

    A person cannot consent to the infliction of serious harm for the purposes of obtaining sexual gratification.

    In other words: “She wanted it” is no longer a legally acceptable explanation for serious injury or death.

    This is a major step forward, though legal reform alone doesn’t dismantle cultural myths about violence, sex, and women’s credibility. (Sadly, Parliament has not yet passed the “Stop Believing Men by Default” Act.)

    Still, progress is progress.

    The Deeper Feminist Issue: Whose Desire Counts?

    At its core, the rough sex defence isn’t really about sex. It’s about power.

    It asks us to believe that women’s desire naturally includes pain, fear, degradation, and risk, while men’s desire just happens to involve inflicting those things.

    It treats women’s bodies as spaces where danger is eroticised and harm is ambiguous. Meanwhile, men’s violence becomes understandable, accidental, or unfortunate.

    It’s patriarchy’s favourite magic trick: turning domination into intimacy and calling it mutual.

    But What About Sexual Autonomy?

    This is the part where people worry that criticising the rough sex defence threatens women’s sexual agency.

    But here’s the thing: protecting women from violence is not incompatible with respecting their autonomy. In fact, it’s essential to it.

    True sexual freedom requires:

    • Safety
    • Mutual respect
    • Meaningful consent
    • The absence of coercion

    Not the freedom to be injured, strangled, or killed, and then blamed for it in court.

    Autonomy without protection isn’t liberation. It’s exposure.

    Final Thoughts (and One Gentle Joke, Because We’re Still Us)

    The rough sex defence represents one of the most unsettling intersections of law, misogyny, and myth, where violence becomes intimacy and victims become evidence.

    It reminds us that the legal system doesn’t just adjudicate facts; it adjudicates stories. And for far too long, the story has been that women’s suffering is ambiguous, negotiable, or worst of all, sexy.

    Which, respectfully, is not what you want is it.

    As women in law, and especially as women educating other women and girls, our job is not just to understand doctrine, but to interrogate whose bodies doctrine protects, whose harm it excuses, and whose stories it believes.

    And if anyone ever tells you that “rough sex gone wrong” explains a homicide, feel free to respond with the most devastating legal critique of all:

    “That sounds like a crime, actually.”

    Bold. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary.

    I know this is slightly more serious than my usual tongue in cheek post however it’s an area of the law I have a particular gripe with. I felt it necessary to deal with it the only way I know, this blog. Hopefully this has been both informative and fun, that’s what I always aim to do here.

    I’ll back to regular posting now I’ve gotten my life sorted, and purchased a planner (its doing wonders for my time management).

    Happy Monday, Lots of love,

    TCGC xx

  • THECOOLGIRLCOURT

    the song that’s been getting me through my studies this week:

    WHAT THE LAW GETS WRONG ABOUT WOMEN: PART TWO

    What the first term of law school is REALLY like

    Law school. Absolutely nothing like they make it out to be in the media. A lot less cool and a lot more stressful.

    Picture this, its mid September and I’ve just been dropped off at university, I’m sat in my room hoping I’m not the only person in this godforsaken prison-esque accommodation I’ve found myself in. Luckily I’m not, there ended up being two people moved in on the same day as me and I very promptly embarrassed myself in front of both of them when I took it ever so slightly too far that evening on our first night out together. I blame the nerves.

    This term has been very defining for me, I’ve made some (or a lot) of mistakes, dressed up in some beyond humiliating social costumes and spent more time getting acquainted with the bar in my local club than I have in my lectures. But in all seriousness the workload has been very very daunting. Maybe it’s just a me thing or maybe everyone is secretly thinking the same thing but most people on my course at least seem to have come out of the womb with 3-5 different internship opportunities and work experience ventures, oh and a passion for ‘saving the world’. Definitely not the money. Definitely not.

    Now that I feel 10 years behind everyone in my class and I don’t understand the content (turning up to my lectures may help that one) I find myself absolutely drowning in term 1 work. I think I have focused on entirely the wrong parts of uni so far, although I’ve got some cracking and frankly embarrassing anecdotes to tell at family dinners now.

    This term we’ve delved into criminal law which is by far my favourite. It’s also the only module I’ve attended on a regular basis so perhaps there is correlation. If we were to discuss legal foundations I’d not only not be able to tell you what the hell legal foundations means but I’d also not be able to tell you who teaches it or where the lectures are. That’s what you get when you timetable things on Thursdays.

    We have also began to cover constitutional law (unnecessarily long and wordy) and contract law (don’t even ask me about this one) but mostly these past 11 weeks have been more of a lesson in how to chop a pint than to write an essay. Probably would have been more valuable to pay attention rather than online shop but hey, you get out what you put in. (many many bershka orders if anyone is curious)

    One term down, eight left. What does the future hold? Who knows, hopefully some clarity on what I’m supposed to do with my life.

    Post Christmas break I will be actually delving into the academic side of all of this, but for now I hope you enjoy my 6am ramblings about how much of a fool I’ve made of myself in the name of ‘the social’.

    Lots of love, and Merry Christmas,

    TCGC x