Show caption Jemma Beale was jailed for 10 years after making a series of false rape and sexual assault allegations. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA Opinion Jemma Beale lied about being raped – but was sentenced by a flawed system Zoe Williams False rape allegations are a serious crime. But the way offenders are dealt with reflects a legal process in which men are the norm and women the deviants @zoesqwilliams Fri 25 Aug 2017 17.11 BST Share on Facebook

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There are no winners in the case of Jemma Beale, the 25-year-old woman given a 10-year sentence this week for a series of false rape allegations. She reported four separate incidents, between 2010 and 2013, claiming she had been sexually assaulted by six men and raped by nine, all strangers. One of the accused was convicted and serving a seven-year sentence when he was exonerated on appeal in 2015. Southwark crown court found Beale guilty of four counts of perjury and four counts of perverting the course of justice; the prosecution described her life as a “construct of bogus victimhood”.

If this were fiction, one’s next question would be about Beale’s mental health: plainly, no one turns their life into a construct of bogus victimhood for fun. But there is no place for that question: to ask anything about the perpetrator, especially anything that might mitigate her mendacity, would be to minimise the suffering of the victims. Even those accused who were not deprived of their liberty must have had a life-alteringly horrific experience.

The Crown Prosecution Service under Keir Starmer published a report on false allegations of rape, examining a 17-month period in 2011 and 2012. In that time, there had been 35 prosecutions for a false accusation, against 5,651 prosecutions for rape. Starmer explicitly drew the public’s attention to the fact that false claims “involved young, often vulnerable people. About half of the cases involved people aged 21 years old and under, and some involved people with mental health difficulties. In some cases, the person alleged to have made the false report had undoubtedly been the victim of some kind of offence, even if not the one that he or she had reported.” It is not the law that finds this difficult to comprehend, a perpetrator who is also a victim; rather, where the media intersects with the law, moral complexity is left at the sidelines of the hurtling imperative to find a goodie and a baddie.

There lingers this question over the length of sentence: 10 years is atypical; recent, similar cases have resulted in two-year sentences. Yet it is by no means unheard of for a false accuser to get a 10-year sentence while a rapist is imprisoned for eight years. Prison is inevitable, according to Mr Justice Henriques in a 2009 finding, because false allegations drive “yet another nail into the conviction rate”.

By this rationale, a mendacious woman has undermined the access to justice of all women, since she has made them less likely to be believed. There is common sense to this – rape defences hinge on the possibility that the putative victim is lying, which is made more plausible every time a woman lies. Yet it’s not something ever levelled at rapists, that they’ve made it more likely for other, innocent men to be convicted. Men never have to act as ambassadors for one another in a court of law.

Arguably, a stiff sentence for a false allegation in itself compromises women’s access to justice: any reported rape, if it fails to secure a conviction, has the potential to be turned into a counter-accusation of perjury.

It is a well-documented nightmare to bring a charge of rape: to do so falsely is vanishingly rare for that reason

The sexual offender is the criminal the law was devised to tackle: however much harm he caused, he has done nothing to undermine the system. The perjurer, meanwhile, has attacked the law itself. It is routine in cases of false allegations for the wasted police time and the cost of the trial to be central elements of the prosecution; you would never hear how much police time a rapist had taken up. That’s what the police are for – how could you call it a waste? All crimes are a waste of time, in the sense that, had they not occurred, the police could have done something else. Yet no crimes are a waste of time, in the sense that they are what justice is for.

“It is precisely because these cases are so rare,” Frances Crook from the Howard League observed, “that the sentencing must be exemplary.” False rape claims get a lot of publicity, on the basis of that rarity, and the sentencing reflects this urgent sense that other women must be deterred. In fact, women generally do not need to be deterred, any more than they need case law to discourage them from child trafficking or smuggling rhinoceros horns. It is a well-documented nightmare to bring a charge of rape: to do so falsely is vanishingly rare for that reason, and not because we’re all waiting to see what kind of custodial sentence we can get away with.