Nikita Hand’s case against Conor McGregor challenges the myth of the ‘perfect victim’

We live in a nation that, for better or worse – as new public health statistics published this week have made clear – has normalised living to excess. The session is lauded here. The figures reveal that more than 42 per cent of men binge drink on a typical night out. Women are decidedly lower, at 14 per cent. Sobriety in Ireland can be hard work – in periods of alcohol avoidance, I’ve found defending that decision to be more burdensome than abstaining from the jar.
There are many undesirable byproducts of our drinking culture, but one that is underinterrogated, perhaps because of the very understandable fear of victim-blaming, is that alcohol makes people (especially women) unsafe, as we navigate decision-making around inebriated intimacy. Perceptions on this differ. I recall being asked whether victimisation of an intimate nature when drunk is not analogous to other harms experienced when incapacitated, for example being hit by a car. Surely, both driver and drunk-walker are somewhat culpable? To which, it must be responded, not if the car is trying to hit them.
During the recent civil action taken by Nikita Hand against Conor McGregor, judge Alexander Owens referred to the role of alcohol, saying “John Jameson and Arthur Guinness and the makers of Bacardi were co-conspirators in this”. His guidance also gestured at the difference between drunken disinhibition and genuine sexual intention.
[ Judge in Nikita Hand’s civil action against Conor McGregor delivered a masterclass in consentOpens in new window ]
Much was made of the details and context of that night in reporting on the civil case. There was a protracted partying session. Alcohol and cocaine were involved. Hand is a mother, and she wasn’t single at the time. She went along when the celebrations were moved to a hotel suite. Against evidence her lawyers produced – including reports from paramedics of the extreme nature of her bruising and the doctor’s evidence about the difficult extraction of a tampon she had been wearing on the night in question – the defence showed CCTV of Hand behaving in a way many commentators saw fit to find inappropriate to the aftermath of a sexual assault.
During the case, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre reported a surge in calls, including from those who say they have witnessed an increase in negative victim-blaming. But after the jury found that McGregor had raped her and awarded her nearly €250,000 in damages, it felt like attitudes towards victims might finally be shifting. The judge had warned the jury, “You should be cautious about what you think about what someone who is a victim of sexual assault should have done. They may respond to that event in ways that may seem irrational … The fact that a woman engages in risky activity like drinking or taking drugs does not mean they are up for sex.” He asked them to “look for sound evidential basis and not lazy assumptions or victim blaming”.
In doing so he was challenging the myth of the perfect victim. Sociologist Nils Christie discussed the “the ideal victim” in 1986, seeking to highlight aspects of victims and their victimisations that make them likely to be regarded as victims. By “ideal victim” he meant those “who – when hit by crime – most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim”. “Ideal victim” is a public persona, comparable to who society readily accepts as a “hero”. Christie’s criteria included: perceived weakness of the victim; perceived respectability of victim’s activities; location of the victim during the incident; and the relationship between the offender and the victim.
Reactions to the recent case reminded me of the words of Chanel Miller, the woman sexually assaulted by Stanford student Brock Turner in 2015. Miller was anonymous during the criminal trial, but later relinquished anonymity and published a memoir about her experience of assault on campus.
[ ‘I know what happened in that room’: the full story of the Conor McGregor caseOpens in new window ]
Miller explains what she remembers from the night, including what she drank and wore. She wrote: “I, to this day, believe none of what I did that evening is important, a handful of disposable memories. But these events will be relentlessly raked over, again and again and again. What I did, what I said, will all be sliced, measured, calculated, presented to the public for evaluation. All because, somewhere at the party, is him.”
For those of us who enjoy a bit of revelry, deciding to call it a night can be hard. Momentary disinhibition is as addictive as stimulants. But decision-making to prolong revelry is not sexual consent. We should be really careful about what kind of message we want to send about who deserves to be listened to, who deserves sympathy, and who deserves justice. As Christie noted, non-ideal victims greatly outnumber ideal ones.
There’s a difference between information that is circumstantially explanatory and that which is morally relevant. Of course, inebriation makes it hard to defend oneself and more likely our intentions will be misinterpreted, but to factor that into the moral issue is mistaken. To say a survivor of a violent sexual assault is culpable because they were inebriated or wanted to party is like (returning to the car analogy) blaming someone who was run over by a driver trying to hit them for not being athletic enough to jump out of the way.
The session isn’t going anywhere. Until we create a culture in which we are all sending a clear message that sex with the incapacitated is completely unacceptable, the difference between a night of revelry that might be sheepishly regretted in the morning – of the kind many people will be enjoying over the next few weeks – and a sprawling human tragedy comes down to this: who shows up to the party.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin