Eight years’ jail for a girl with a strap-on. What’s Britain coming to?

In a TV stunt, a Brazilian actress recently lay on a beach asking male passers-by to rub suncream into her back. Many were eager to oblige only to recoil, when she turned over and they saw a bulge – a prosthetic penis – in her bikini. It is a good job she didn’t try it here, else she might be facing the best part of a decade behind bars.

There have been many times since the accusations against Jimmy Savile came to light three years ago that I have wondered whether Britain’s traditional prudishness over sex is developing into a national psychosis. Is there any other nation where a dozen police officers would raid the flat of a pop star who had been accused of groping a teenage boy 30 years ago, any other country where police would call the accusations of a man who claimed to have been abused by a government minister as ‘credible and true’, when we now know they were anything but?

The psychosis is confirmed with the sentencing yesterday of Gayle Newland to eight years in jail for fooling her female sexual partner that she was a man by means of a prosthetic penis. Newland, who like her former girlfriend is 25, might well be ‘deceitful’ and ‘scheming’, as the judge described her, but does that really mean she deserves the kind of sentence which until recently was considered par for the course for men who raped female strangers at knifepoint?

There is no suggestion that Newland’s partner did not consent to having sex with her, even if it was not quite the kind of sex she was expecting. She was presumably attracted to Newland, even if she considers herself to be heterosexual. She agreed to wear the blindfold which Newland used to cover the deception. Moreover, she presumably enjoyed the sex as she consented to it being repeated on approximately ten occasions.

Neither is there an issue, as with men who might say they are going to use a condom and then don’t, of Newland’s partner being exposed to a risk of pregnancy or disease to which she did not consent. A prosthetic penis has considerably less scope for causing harm than the real thing. If Newland’s actions are a crime at all they are surely at the very lowest end of the spectrum of sex offences.

So why eight years? Newland is the victim of a hysteria which has seen sentences jacked up to meet a presumed public demand for ever harsher punishments for sex offences. The whole criminal justice system has adopted the morality of a male prison, where the mildest of sex offences are regarded as a moral outrage by men who are quite at ease with their own history of murder, manslaughter and grievous bodily harm.

Trouble is, few in the current atmosphere are prepared to speak up for the likes of Newland if it means in any way appearing to sympathise with a sex offender.  I suspect that if the genuine, private views of individuals could be collated into an opinion poll most would agree that Newland’s sentence is an outrage, and the police’s obsession with prosecuting 40-year-old cases of groping a misuse of their time. Public attitudes to sex offences are, I suspect, a bit like Newland’s penis: not quite what they seem.

But until the tide turns and we can again face these issues with a sense of proportion, how difficult it is going to be for British ministers to criticise countries like Saudi Arabia which have their own exaggerated punishments. In the meantime, anyone in the habit of faking their orgasms ought to be extremely careful.