We must investigate the attackers, not us victims
IN May 2015, I woke up naked in a hotel bed next to a man I’d never seen before.
I remembered nothing about the five hours since I finished lunch with my father in a local restaurant.
I immediately thought I had been drugged and had probably been raped.The police were called straightaway.
I knew getting justice would be invasive and horrible. But I believed my attacker would eventually be taken to court. I was completely wrong.
A few months later I got a letter from the Crown Prosecution Service saying they were not taking my case forward. There would be no justice.
For days after I read and re-read the letter. I could not imagine our criminal justice system would allow the attacker to escape facing a jury. It did not feel real.
But my experience is the same as almost all rape victims in this country.
Last year, 98.4 per cent of victims who reported their rape to the police got some version of this letter.They are told their attacker will never have to answer for this horrible crime.They won’t even have to go to court.And that’s not OK.
You might think this is because lots of people lie about being raped. That’s just not true. 97 per cent of the time if someone says they were raped, they aren’t making it up. People lying about being raped is rare.
We should not just automatically believe everyone who says they’ve been raped. But we should at least investigate and let a jury decide.
So why do such a tiny proportion of rape cases end up in court? That is what the Government’s End to End Rape Review, published today, has been trying to find out and I’ve been working with ministers and
EMILY HUNT attempted suicide after reporting she was attacked in a hotel in East London, in May 2015. By the time the police arrived she was having a panic attack and police called an ambulance. Pervert Christopher Killick had filmed Ms Hunt while she was unconscious. But the Crown Prosecution Service did not pursue the rape allegation due to a lack of evidence. Two policewomen told her: “We know how it is, you go out, you get drunk. You don’t want your boyfriend to know of this so if you don’t file a report we won’t tell anyone.” Killick pleaded guilty to voyeurism and was sentenced to a 30-month community order and given a £2,000 fine.
officials to unpick what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. Police and prosecutors approach rape differently to any other crime. Not by investigating the crime or looking into the suspect’s background, but instead by trying to work out if the victim is “credible”.
Rape victims often say they feel like they are the ones under investigation. That’s because it is true.
And it has not even been standard practice to check if a suspect has done anything similar before.This really matters because rapists can often be serial offenders.
Which makes our abysmal prosecution rate all the more horrifying.A project in Avon and Somerset recently found almost a quarter of suspects in sex offence cases had been named in at least one other sex offence as well.
The police force there has now decided to investigate the background of suspects from the start – avoiding unnecessary focus on a victim’s credibility.
The Home Secretary
is writing to every Chief Constable to ask their forces to do the same.
The aim is for this new evidence-based model to be in place for all police forces and prosecutors within 24 months.We must do better and investigate suspects rather than doubt victims.
And we need to support victims through the justice system because everyone who reports this crime is not just doing so to secure justice for themselves but to protect all of us.