The Rape of a Label Why It would Be Wrong to Follow Canada in Having a TSingle Offence of Unlawful Sexual Assault

With the enactment of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the UK has just had its biggest shake-up of the existing law on sexual offences. Rape has been widened to include oral sex, a new offence of assault by penetration has been created, and what was indecent assault has been renamed sexual assault. Twenty-one years ago the Canadians did away altogether with the legal term of rape and created an all-encompassing offence of sexual assault. While the UK is experiencing an all-time low in securing convictions for rape, this article asks what can be done to reverse this. Could doing away with the label of rape make it easier to obtain a conviction in rape trials? Perhaps reversing the burden of proof, or tightening up the requirements for obtaining consent, or tackling the biggest new phenomenon in sexual offences, date rape, is the way forward. What we call something may not seem all that important, but this article aims to show that the social stigma attached to the word rape is as important as the sentence itself.