The man who killed Moss was given less than five years in prison, after claiming she consented to being choked. His mitigation? The ‘rough sex’ defence that is no longer supposed to be allowed
Last July, the home secretary, Priti Patel, fired off a triumphant tweet: “We have published a clause to end so-called ‘rough sex defence’ which enables perpetrators to avoid justice by claiming their victims consented to rough sex.” The tweet was the result of rising fury over cases such as that of Natalie Connolly, the 26-year-old mother from Worcestershire, who in 2016 bled to death after sustaining more than 40 injuries, which her partner, John Broadhurst, claimed occurred as part of consensual sex. (His account was believed and he served less than two years for manslaughter.) In 2018, the campaign group We Can’t Consent to This began collating cases and found that uses of the so-called “rough sex” defence increased tenfold between 1996 and 2016 – and in 45% of cases had led to lesser charges of manslaughter rather than murder, or sometimes no charge at all.
This weekend, the Sunday Times reported that nine British soldiers made jokes about “choking” a Kenyan mother, Agnes Wanjiru, whose body was found dumped in a septic tank in Nanyuki, Kenya. Following a local police inquiry, a 2019 inquest presided over by a Kenyan judge concluded that one or two British soldiers were responsible for the death, but the MoD took no further action.
