Gentlemen and most ladies, Do you ever think there will be a time where society will acknowledge that laying a false rape complaint against a man will be considered equal too if not more than damaging to the man as rape would be?
NZ's legislation and public policy is often influenced by advocacy research, which is designed to produce a pre-determined outcome. A classic example is the Hitting Home Report, winner of the 1995 NZ Skeptics Society ‘Bent Spoon Award'.
Nearly 30 years later, the committee declared the award was not justified, and appologised for “lack of critical thinking”.
NZ teacher Peter Joyce’s settled life was disrupted when a woman he had never met accused him of historic rape. With a unique brand of angry humour, his diary plots the stages of his despair and traces his attempts to find justice in the face of the current insistence that we must “believe the victim”.
Dry Ice is a compelling memoir, but much more. The accusation made the writer a reluctant expert on similar cases from all over the world. He throws light on everything that limits public knowledge of false sexual allegations, from dangerous counselling to flawed statistics, and he exposes police investigation methods as blinkered, inefficient and insensitive.