Say hello to 2018, where crimes against women don’t count

et’s say, in the interests of fairness, that John Worboys is a reformed character. Let’s imagine that the Parole Board was convinced beyond reasonable doubt that he would not offend again, this convicted rapist, this man who drove around London in a black cab, picking up women who he could deliver, unsafely, home, a “rape kit” in his vehicle so he could drug and assault them and leave them wondering forever more what he did to them.

Yes, let us imagine this – sadly, imagine is all we can do given that the body is forbidden from explaining the reasons for its decision, despite calls from Yvette Cooper, the chairman of the home affairs select committee no less, to immediately publish them. But let us assume that Worboys is fully rehabilitated, that nine years in a Category A prison has ensured he will never commit again the awful crimes that took place in the three years leading up to his conviction on 19 counts of drugging and sexually assaulting at least 12 women, and raping one of them. That’s six weeks per victim, just in case you were wondering.

Even when you try to look at this case in the best possible light, you can’t help but see how very dark it is: the revelation that several victims were not informed of his release; the fact that, despite the police believing he was possibly responsible for another 100 attacks and some 75 women coming forward to allege that they, too, had been victims of Worboys, the Crown Prosecution Service at the time decided not to prosecute extra cases against him. Both of these things point to an unpalatable truth in our culture, that rape is still not taken seriously, that if you are violated by someone sexually and manage to get that person prosecuted, their punishment is likely to be roughly equal to the amount of time it takes a bone fracture to heal.

You would think, from the reporting about the two extremely unfortunate men who were recently found to have been falsely accused of rape, that there was a queue of women lining up outside police stations, waiting to fabricate evidence about blokes who they’d taken a dislike to; in actual fact, false allegations, though incredibly serious, are rare, and entirely disproportionate to the number of rapes that end in conviction.

Professor Nick Hardwick, the man from the Parole Board who appeared on Today yesterday, meekly explained that he hadn’t yet been able to speak to anyone about the two victims who hadn’t been informed of their attacker’s imminent release; it wasn’t the responsibility of the Parole Board, he said, but the Victim Contact Scheme. Pass the buck, a game usually played by small children, was now being played out by one of the most senior members of the judicial system on the country’s most serious news programme.

And this is where we are in 2018, 100 years after women got the vote in the UK – a centenary that, so far as I can tell, is currently only being celebrated by Vogue, who have produced a glossy guide to the new suffragettes, and

Celebrity Big Brother, who have done their bit by briefly sending in an all-female group of housemates. I wonder what Emmeline Pankhurst and her fellow warriors would make of the fact that crimes that are predominantly committed against women are viewed so leniently, that they are perhaps the only instances where the accused is often believed more than the accuser. Maybe they wouldn’t be surprised.

Last year’s Me Too hashtag, born out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, seemed to mark a turning point in public willingness to be silenced by powerful people. But it’s likely that the only punishment (or trial) Weinstein will ever receive is in regards to his career, and now we have a situation where powerful bodies mutely refuse to explain why a man convicted of serial sexual assault is suddenly allowed to go from a Category A prison to the outside world. But just as John Worboys should be given the opportunity of rehabilitation, so everyone else in the country should be allowed to know why a decision has been made to release a convicted rapist, especially one who, because of original police blunders, was left free to continue preying on women.

John Worboys is one of the most prolific sex offenders in British criminal history. He begins this year a free man, while the women he attacked are left feeling imprisoned by a system that seems not to value them. Welcome to 2018, people. Welcome.

Even when you try to look at this case in the best light, you can’t help but see how dark it is