Fines for intrusive police rape inquiries
Enforcement action will be taken against officers who deter victims from continuing investigations
POLICE forces will for the first time face fines for “intrusive” and “disproportionate” investigations into rape victims’ private lives, the information commissioner has warned.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, John Edwards said he would take enforcement action against officers to end “digital strip searches” of victims through analysis of their mobile phones and excessive trawls of their medical, social service and education files.
He cited the case of a rape victim challenged by police officers over a parental letter she forged as a child to get off school 10 years before the assault. “How on Earth can that be relevant to an inquiry of an assault that occurred last Saturday night?” he asked.
Mr Edwards warned that such intrusive approaches risked letting rapists go free to attack again by deterring victims from sticking with an investigation.
At least one in five rape victims withdraw before the trial purely because of invasive police queries, research by the victims’ commissioner found.
“When women withdraw from these processes because they can’t bear the intrusive distress, that means the prosecution can’t proceed. That means the offender isn’t held to account. That means that he is out on the streets able to offend again,” he told The Telegraph.
He urged victims’ groups and rape charities to be his “eyes and ears” in reporting police and prosecutors who spurn the new guidance he has set out in a legal opinion published today.
He said some aspects of police trawls were unlawful as they breached data protection rules. Where there was “systemic non-compliance” by a force, it would face fines, he said. Others would be subject to enforcement action to make them stop the practices.
The intensifying of searches has been blamed on a series of cases that collapsed due to inadequate police checks. The highest profile was Liam Allan, who was wrongly accused of rape in 2018 after officers failed to find key evidence among 57,000 messages on the alleged victim’s phone.
But victims groups say police have over-compensated with increasingly intrusive checks. Along with court delays, the latest Home Office figures show just 1.3 per cent of the 67,125 rape allegations led to a prosecution. Mr Edwards said victims were now being told to consent to hand over “extraordinary” amounts of personal information, which left them feeling like they were “being treated as suspects and re-victimised by a system they expect to support them”.
He said police should limit scrutiny of victims’ mobile phones to, for example, a 48-hour period before the rape to check for “unusal” messages.
“It’s really difficult to justify downloading everything on somebody’s phone, including messages that they’ve sent intimate partners and all their banking records and the rest of it,” he said.
Police and prosecutors should ditch so-called “Stafford statements” that give them blanket consent to access victims’ confidential information held by third parties such as schools, GPS and social services without requiring further justification, said Mr Edwards.
“If the police go along to a victim’s GP and say they need to access all their medical records, they could go back decades and reveal matters which are very intimate, but which have no bearing on any investigation. It has got to be relevant and proportionate. Those words carry a lot of weight,” he said.
Third parties should also bear in mind that handing over data to police was voluntary, added Mr Edwards. “They need to be clear that any information that’s passed on might end up in the hands of a defendant,” he said.
“I don’t hold those organisations culpable for complying with what looks to be a very official police request. In some circumstances, complying might not be in the victim’s best interest. You could in fact harm a therapeutic relationship that the victim has with a person.”