Sarah Langford, barrister and author of In Your Defence, shared some fascinating law facts that few of us were probably aware of:
1. In England and Wales anyone of ten years old and above can be charged with a crime. Our age of criminal responsibility is lower than in any other country in Europe.
2. It is an offence to perform sexual activity in a public lavatory. This offence can be committed even if you are alone, and your motive and intent are irrelevant to your guilt. No one even needs to be offended by your activity: the fact you have done it is enough for the law.
3. One in four family cases in court have no lawyers because of cuts to legal aid. This means that parties are regularly being cross-examined in court by their ex-partners. It happens even when they have made allegations of abuse, violence or, sometimes, rape, against the very person who is now asking them questions.
4. In law it is still the case that a husband and wife alone cannot be guilty of a conspiracy. This law comes from the legal fiction that a husband and wife are of one mind, and are presumed to have one will. As a conspiracy requires an agreement between two minds, a husband and wife cannot – in law – conspire alone. There has to be a third party.
5. The number of children in the care system is at its highest since 1989. There are 13,000 more children in care than there were ten years ago, and the number of applications made to remove children in 2017 was at a record high. If a woman has a child removed by the state she is 25 per cent more likely to have her next child removed as well. The removal of a child from its mother therefore makes it more, rather than less likely, that history will repeat itself.
6. There is no such thing as a Sexual Offences Register. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 requires certain offenders to notify their local police of their personal details (their address, foreign travel plans, bank account and credit-card details, etc). They must do so three days after their conviction and every year thereafter for the rest of their life. Failure to do so is a criminal offence punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.
7. In England and Wales it is an offence for a person to ‘loiter, or solicit, in a street or public place for the purpose of offering services as a prostitute’ on two or more occasions in any period of three months. In many other countries, including Northern Island, the criminality of prostitution has been flipped so that it is illegal to buy sex, rather than to sell it. Many, including an all-party parliamentary report published in 2016, believe we should do the same.