Lord Rennard: Women should beware of slapping Old Goats

Following the allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour against the Liberal Democrats’ former chief executive Lord Rennard, some dangerous advice has been going the rounds. Basically women are told: if your chief executive touches you and you don’t like it – just slap him. Or throw drink in his face. Or give him a Chinese burn. This is the advice from Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist – and it is wrong. Slapping a chief executive is both a criminal and a sacking offence.

Now we must be careful. Lord Rennard has insisted no inappropriate conduct has taken place on his part. So for illustrative purposes we are going to assume that at some time, somewhere some chief executive or another has inappropriately touched a woman’s knee, rubbed another woman’s leg or put his hands down another couple of women’s backs “and places where they had absolutely no business being”. We shall call our fictional chief executive “the Old Goat”.

The idea of slapping such a man seems to be based on a fanciful 1950s notion of morality. Our male lead (rather handsome with jutting jaw – so different from our own oleaginous, balding fifty-something fictional chief executive) gets a little fresh with our rather prim heroine. She delivers the slap; it knocks sense into him; he admires her feisty qualities; lust turns to love. There are flowers, a dinner date, a proposal of marriage.

None of those outcomes in reality is likely to occur – nor are they likely to be desired by the victim of our Old Goat’s attentions. The danger of resorting to violence is that it prompts only violence, and Sarah Vine is asking women who have been wronged in this way (touching people without consent and a sexual motive is a sexual assault: see Section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003) to expose themselves to increased violence.

Lib Dems could – and should – have put Rennard through disciplinary procedure

Note: Since this post the Liberal Democrats have gone through all manner of wrangling to ultimately drop the minor disciplinary case against Lord Rennard of bringing the party into disrepute. Tim Farron, party president, has said lessons have been learned and the party had worked hard to “fundamentally change the way our party treats these matters” (Guardian 20 August 2014)

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has apologised and said his party “did not respond in the right way” to the allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour against the party’s former chief executive Chris Rennard. Nick Clegg might be well advised to say nothing more. It is possible that the Lib Dems could be on the hook for this debacle – with the matter being bloodily and expensively fought out in court.

If the Lib Dems want to feel a particular chill running down their spine they might look at the recent Supreme Court De La Salle case (The Catholic Child Welfare Society and others [2012] UKSC 56 Judgment (PDF) ) where vicarious liability for sex abuse was extended to a Catholic organisation, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, who supplied the head and other teachers to an approved school.

The organisation was deemed liable even though it did not employ those teachers – they were members, not employees, of the Brothers. The principle established was that liability for members’ actions may extend to an unincorporated society. Rennard is a member (not employee) of the Lib Dems and a political party is an unincorporated society, arguably with “corporate features, including a hierarchy of authority” as described in the De La Salle case. The position is further explained below, but some legal background is useful first.