I still don’t believe that anything would have happened if I had reported that man to the police It would have been his word

I still don’t believe that anything would have happened if I had reported that man to the police It would have been his word against mine. But I do wish that I’d told everyone I knew what had happened to me and warned them against falling into the trap that I had.I do believe that there are different kinds of rape and sexual violation, and that the distinctions are all to do with the kind of kick a man is after when he forces any kind of sexual advance on another person. The law should reflect that, because at the moment our definition of rape is both too broad and too narrow to protect us. We need to rethink our definitions of rape so that men cannot stand in a dock making petty physical distinctions that they claim stop them from being rapists, and so that ordinary young men stop believing that sometimes rape is not an unforgivable violation. Most of all we must find a way of making it clear that men rape women with their minds as well as with their sexual organs.. The director of the Disability Alliance replies to yesterday’s column by

David Aaronovitch
THE ARTICLE by Dave Aaronovitch (“Helping the disabled does not mean believing all they say”) was a strange piece of work, betraying a lack of understanding both of the benefits system and of the considerable extra costs that come with disability.Let’s unpick a few of the myths.

Myth one: the threshold for incapacity benefit has been lowered and unemployed people are getting disability benefits. In fact, the introduction of incapacity benefit in 1995, replacing invalidity benefit, was accompanied by a much stricter eligibility test and a lower level of benefit. Government figures show that the number of claimants has fallen each year since 1995.If the Government believes that there are still people on benefit who are not really sick or disabled, then the way to tackle that is to look again at the eligibility test. It is not acceptable to deny benefit to thousands because some may be wrongly getting it.Myth two: the Government’s proposals to means-test incapacity benefit for people with occupational and private pensions will affect only the well-off.In fact, it proposes to start reducing benefit when a disabled person’s annual income reaches pounds 6,071, removing benefit entirely when annual income reaches pounds 9,542. Hardly the well-off.Myth three: money saved is being targeted on the severely disabled. In fact, severe disablement allowance is being abolished for new claimants. A majority of the 16,000 losers per year will be severely disabled women.Far from demanding that “half the entire budget” is spent on disabled people the disability lobby is trying to prevent a further pounds 750m cuts to disability benefits, on top of cuts from 1995 – now amounting to pounds 1.3bn a year..

CHILD OF MY TIME: AN ENGLISHMAN’S JOURNEY

IN A DIVIDED WORLD
BY MARK FRANKLAND, CHATTO & WINDUS, pounds 17.99MARK FRANKLAND was a foreign correspondent for 30 years. I worked with him for a short time at The Observer and was looking forward to reading about his life and times in Russia, Vietnam, America, etc. He certainly had enough of them to fill any amount of pages.Not that he would. Frankland writes beautifully, but he doesn’t like to overdo things Nor would he want to write about the obvious. He lived in those countries long enough to know something of what people really thought. This, then, was to be a book about the lives that history does not record, friends and enemies, and the tangled-up times of the Cold War.Or so I thought. And it is, except for the fact that Frankland has also tried to do quite a bit more with Child of My Time.