Just 3% of rape claims end in a conviction
Lawyers blame police delays
‘Something must be wrong’
ONLY 3 per cent of reported rapes led to a conviction last year, figures reveal.
More than 58,600 cases were recorded by police in the year to March, but just 1,925 ended in a prosecution.
It came as lawyers blamed the police for failing to provide timely evidence in rape cases.
The official data for England and Wales showed convictions have gone from bad to worse.
In the previous year 4.8 per cent of rape cases led to a guilty verdict or a guilty plea, and it was 7.2 per cent the year before that.
The alarming figures come in a major report by the watchdog HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, which said it was broadly not the CPS’s fault that so few cases led to a conviction.
HM Chief Inspector Kevin McGinty said the CPS was only part of a ‘systemic’ problem when it came to handling rape cases. ‘If 58,657 allegations were made in the year but only 1,925 successful prosecutions for the offence followed, something must be wrong,’ he said.
‘Since 2016 there has been a substantial increase in rape allegations, while the number of rape prosecutions has fallen significantly – which indicates there is a serious problem. The CPS has been accused of only choosing easy cases to prosecute, but we found no evidence of that.’
He added: ‘While the CPS needs to improve the way it works with the police, the CPS is only a small part of a larger systemic problem in the criminal justice process in dealing with complex cases. More work is needed to investigate the discrepancy between the number of cases reported and the number of cases prosecuted by the CPS. This is a matter for the Government to consider in its Violence against Women and Girls strategy.’ Lisa Longstaff, of campaign group Women
Against Rape, said Government cuts were behind the low conviction rates.
She said: ‘Every agency of the criminal justice system has been slashed in a decade of austerity cuts: police, CPS, courts, probation. It’s a damning indictment of Government that violence against women and children is almost irrelevant.’ A survey of
CPS lawyers carried out for the report pointed the finger at police forces providing insufficient evidence.
Asked whether police gave ‘sufficient evidence... to enable you to provide charging advice for rape cases at the first request’, just under 22 per cent said ‘never’ and 59 per cent said ‘rarely’.
Asked if the police were responsible for delays, 19 per cent of CPS lawyers said ‘all the time’ and 56 per cent said ‘most of the time’.
Director of Public Prosecutions Max Hill QC said: ‘I share the deep public concern over the growing gap between the number of rapes being reported, and the number of criminals being convicted of this sickening offence. Our prosecutors are highly trained, dedicated and committed to taking even the most challenging cases to court whenever the legal test is met.’ Deputy Chief Constable Sarah Crew, the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman on rape, said: ‘Policing has been under huge strain in recent years with rising crime and more complex investigations mismatched against our resources.
‘The shortage of detectives, the large increase in digital evidence and tackling disclosure challenges have all impacted on the number of cases referred to the CPS and the time taken to investigate and prepare these.
‘The recruitment of 20,000 officers over the next three years will help us to ease the pressure on investigators and improve outcomes for victims.
‘We are already working to address many of the issues raised in this report, drawing on the evidence that is already emerging from the review.’