What happened to those 1,381 reported rape cases

The Rape Monitoring Group aims to help research what happens to cases of rape to give information on how the police and criminal justice system are working together.

There is also a category for initial reports of rape that were subsequently not recorded as a crime. Nationally, that number of rape incidents not recorded as crime has increased from 8,624 to 11,913.

Women and girls make up around 90 per cent of all reported rape victims, compared to around ten per cent of men.

Of the 1,381 reported incidents in Sussex from March 2017 to March 2018, 149 were cases involving children under the age of 13 and nearly 30 per cent involved people aged under 16.

What is behind the rise in reports?

Sexual offences are generally considered to be underreported to police and other authorities.

With the advent of advocacy services and other support for people accessing the criminal justice system, a rise in reports of rape from one year to the next may be a reflection of increased confidence from victims that they will be listened to.

When publishing its report, Rape Monitoring Group emphasised the importance of prevention work from police alongside the criminal justice system to reduce the prevalence of rape in real terms.

It wrote that: “Prevention and encouragement are not mutually exclusive activities. Both are necessary if rape is to be tackled more effectively.”

Why the drop in charge rate?

The report compiles data from the Home Office on what types of crime are reported, the Crown Prosecution Service on decisions to charge and the Ministry of Justice, which reports how many convictions or prosecutions it has made for each police force.

Because of how long it may take to find an outcome or make a decision to charge or bring a case to trial, the figures for each body are not directly comparable within any one year.

From 2016-17 to 2017-18, the number of reported rapes rose but the number of cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service by Sussex Police went down.

There can be multiple reasons why a case, though a serious allegation, is not referred to the CPS.

Figures from the Home Office show that in Sussex, of the registered outcomes for rape incidents in 2017-18, around 80 per cent were not progressed due to evidential difficulties.

Half of cases assigned an outcome in Sussex were not progressed due to evidential difficulties where the victim did not support the action and around 30 per cent had evidence difficulties where the victim did support action.

In 2016-17, evidential difficulties prevented around 67 per cent of cases.

Other reasons for a rape case not being taken to the CPS include cases where it is not possible to identify the suspect, or where the offence is transferred to another authority to deal with, or where the charges change from rape to another type of offence.

Yvonne Trainor, from Rape Crisis, said that one of the biggest myths about rape was that women lied about it for gain of some kind, when in reality the figures for false accusations for sexual offences were extremely low, particularly compared to other offences.

“There’s no money in it,” she said.

“If you’ve been raped or sexually abused, it’s about wanting that perpetrator brought to justice so they don’t do it to other people.”

What can numbers do to help?

The chairman of the Rape Monitoring Group, HM Inspector of Constabulary Wendy Williams, has said it is ‘vital’ that information and statistics about rape are made as transparent as possible, so that agencies could refine their prevention strategies and give victims the justice they deserve.

She said: “Data gives crucial information about how incidents of rape are processed by the criminal justice system, providing detailed numbers and figures about local areas.

“We hope it will help police, prosecutors, and the entire system, to improve their work to provide justice for victims, convict the guilty and do all they can to prevent this most heinous of crimes.”