Abstract
This article uses the trial of Rose West as a window through which to examine and understand some of the processes underlying decisions to allow or exclude similar fact evidence in rape and other sexual offence trials. Drawing on research which has explored decisions to admit past sexual history evidence, it suggests that the same gendered presumptions which have informed them are at work in decisions to exclude similar fact evidence of previous rapes. In these areas, where the law allows for broad discretionary decision-making, such discretion is frequently exercised to the detriment of female complainants, but in the West case it was exercised to the cost of Rose West, a female defendant. The article argues that judicial decision-making should therefore be understood not just in terms of pro- or anti-defendant tendencies, but in terms of gendered thinking.
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