The three main issues discussed were those of: (1) anonymity; (2) revealing the victim’s sexual history; and (3) whether or not women sometimes make false claims of rape.

This memorandum was prepared at short notice by a group of members of the College, representing different interests and with varying experience. The outstanding finding was that few of the questions could be answered clearly and that differences of opinion of a most polar nature occurred in many cases. This was found to be due to two main factors: (a) the perhaps unrecognized fact that the experience of psychiatrists, in general, in connection with cases of rape is surprisingly small; and (b) that rape, in fact, is not a clinical entity but a collection of a number of different forms of sexual behaviour, backed by varied circumstances and personalities, so that single answers to any question from a psychiatric point of view could hardly be expected. We also found that all the issues were closely linked and interdependent.