Prosecuting women while violent men have impunity to rape
Sarah Cheverton
WVoN co-editor
Twenty-seven women’s organisations set out to educate the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, yesterday in a letter that called upon him to end the prosecution of women for making supposed false allegations of rape.
For the casual observer, this may seem a strange move.
In fact, I can almost hear ‘Outraged of Oxford’ cracking his fingers in preparation for the Daily Fail comment page, accompanied by the distant cries of ‘It’s political correctness gawn mad…’.
At first glance, one might be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking that making a false allegation of rape is a terrible thing and that the DPP is right to take action to prevent women from doing such a thing.
And that seems fair.
So what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is that false allegations of rape are extremely rare. And while we may have a pop culture, soap-opera sense that alleging rape is the common reaction of a woman scorned, actually it is not.
In fact, argue Women Against Rape (WAR), in most cases what we are prosecuting women for is making a rape allegation that wasn’t proven.
“Just because a woman is disbelieved by sexist officers doesn’t mean she lied,” said WAR’s Lisa Longstaff.
The 27 organisations and many individuals who united to create yesterday’s letter are unequivocal in their condemnation of the handling of such cases.
“Prosecutions for alleged false allegations often follow biased and negligent rape investigations,” the letter states.
“Perpetrators are believed in preference to victims, evidence is lost or not gathered, witnesses not interviewed, statements not taken.”
And in a damning statement against the criminal justice system, the letter continues: “Therefore, we cannot trust police or the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) to reliably assess whether a woman is lying or not.”
And the statistics on rape would seem to support that view.
According to WAR, 90 per cent of rapists ‘get away with it’ as 90 per cent of rapes are never reported, up to 45 per cent of reported rapes are ‘no-crimed’ – meaning the police decide to take no further action, literally deciding that no crime has taken place’ – and the conviction rate for reported rape is 6.5 per cent.
By contrast, it seems that prosecutions of women for supposedly making false allegations of rape are on the rise.
As there are no official figures for false allegation prosecutions, this is impossible to measure.
But Women Against Rape point to the increasing number of cases reported in the media – with three prosecutions reported each month on average in 2010/11.
Such cases include a number of miscarriages of justice directly resulting from this increasing trend.
These include the cases of Gail Sherwood and Layla Ibrahim. Their violent attackers were never found, and both victims were subsequently accused of causing their own injuries and jailed.
Yes, you read that right.
Another such case was reported last October, when a Welsh woman was jailed after reporting her violent husband for rape, then retracting her story – a common occurrence, particularly when, as in this case, women are pressured by violent perpetrators.
Although she was later released on appeal to serve a community sentence instead, she now has a criminal record.
Her violent ex-partner does not.
Most worrying of all, though, are the concerns that the increasing prosecution of women will deter more women from reporting rape, for fear that they will be prosecuted if they are not believed.
And let’s face it, there are very good reasons why women might feel that the criminal justice system will fail them if they are raped.
Our justice system is already failing huge numbers of women because of an embedded inability for the system to respond well – or even barely adequately – to crimes that, coincidentally, predominantly affect women.
We simply cannot afford to deter women from reporting rape by prosecuting those women who do.
So let me be clear.
Yes, we need to find an effective way of addressing the rare problem of women deliberately making false allegations of rape.
But this isn’t it.
And before we turn our attention to the problem of addressing ‘genuine’ false allegations, let’s look at the bigger failure of the criminal justice system to address rape.
Look over those rape conviction figures one more time and ask: Where is the real travesty of justice here?
This alas begs the age old question, how do you prosecute a crime where the evidence is not in dispute but rather the interpretation of that evidence? If we remove the violent stranger assaults from the mix to focus on the difficult ones we have two people in some kind of relationship having a dispute about consent making the evidence useless. To convict beyond a reasonable doubt when there are two sides with only the issue of consent and or timing becomes very difficult. If this was a civil matter it would be much easier to prosecute, however as a criminal matter it becomes nearly
impossible to up the conviction rate without prejudicing justice against the accused.
Perhaps that is what we need, to separate ‘violent rape’ as a criminal offense because we can achieve prosecutions and make a civil ‘date rape’ category that allows some justice to be given on a lesser evidence basis with the capability to be upgraded to a criminal offence on something like a three strikes basis? (I am aware that sounds horrible but I can’t think of a better way to phrase it, allowing someone to rape three women is horrific but if the individual cases are too weak then at least maybe we can see justice done on a wider scale instead of allowing the three cases to languish and disappear into the void of no crime).
I think the main problem seems to be that when there are only two witnesses, why is it that it is the man that is backed all the time. Having suffered a domestic violence assault, the policeman that attended did his best to bully and intimidate me into being a co perpetrator til I pointed out the physical evidence fitted my story that I was defending myself, rather than my partner’s story that he was the victim. The social services didn’t even bother interviewing him and when I tried to lodge an official complaint the police refused to note it via phone or 4 hour personal visit and then when I complained to the IPCC they said that I had failed to complain in the required time period – they didn’t go anywhere near addressing the point that I had complained, it was the police that had refused to take down my complaint. I was left with the distinct impression that 20 years on from lads mags appearance, we now have a police force, social services network and general infrastructure that is inherently biased against women reporting gender orientated violence and unable to tell truth from lies. The law is a game now, politicians, policemen, judges, social workers are all in it together, playing along in an enormous game of charades where if we deny the crime has taken place then there is no victim to look after and no violent perpetrator to have to arrest and waste valuable resources on proving the truth of what happened. Because, after all, if only 1 in 10 women are now reporting rape when it happens and 45% of those can be no crimed by policemen weaned on lads mags – we can rid of rape in society within the next 5 years or so – can’t we?
Vicky,
You describe exactly why the evidential difficulty expressed by 2ndnin often isn’t the reason for lack of a conviction, but rather the inadequacy of the justice system. Evidence goes uncollected or is lost, investigations and cases are forgotten, dropped or conducted with appalling neglect and incompetence. Overhaul the system and start taking the prosecution of rape seriously, let us then see the size of the evidential problem. I don’t dispute it is significant given the burden of proof on which the justice system rests, but there are many solvable problems which are contributing to the woeful conviction rate.