John Worboys: serial rapist aided by police neglect

The U.K. has a rape conviction rate of 6%. According to the Campaign to End Rape, in 2003/04 “[o]ver two-thirds of [rape] cases dropped out at the police stage and did not make it as far as the courts”, “[o]ne quarter of incidents initially recorded as rape were subsequently ‘no-crimed’ by the police” and “[h]alf of all the cases that were ‘crimed’ resulted in ‘no further action’ (NFA) by the police”.

It is hardly surprising that a questioning light is being shone on police procedures regarding the case of serial rapist John Worboys. Worboys, driver of a black cab (a respected form of taxi service in London), was convicted of one rape and five sexual assaults last Friday. The cases that Worboys was tried for involved 14 female passengers that were assaulted or raped over the course of a several month period between 2007 and 2008. A hotline set up for police to find other potential victims has received at least 85 calls. And that could be the tip of the iceberg.

Worboys strategy for assault was thought out. He picked up single women at night, after they’d left an establishment where they had been consuming alcohol. He told a story about how he had just won the lottery (showing cash to prove it) but didn’t have anyone with whom he could drink a celebratory glass of champagne, thus playing into both the women’s sense of pity and their culturally ingrained fear of seeming rude.

The champagne was laced with a sedative and the women were assaulted while under the effects of the drug. Some awoke while Worboys was in the act; others woke after the acts were completed, left only with the sense that something had gone horribly wrong and, in a few cases, a small bit of evidence such as their own blood or condom lubricant. Worboys knew that the women’s complacency in drinking the champagne and drug-fueled memory gaps would set them up to be ignored and/or blamed.

The police played right into Worboys’ hand. Women reporting assaults at the hands of a black cab driver began coming in as early as 2002. Between that year and his final arrest in February 2008, twelve women went to the police. But the police only took Worboys into custody once, in July 2007. He was released because CCTV cameras caught his drugged victim giving him a kiss as she exited the cab, supporting- in the minds of the police- Worboys’ story that she had been heavily intoxicated and he’d merely helped her get home. His DNA was taken but that was to be of little use. Worboys told a later victim, “You can’t go and say you’ve been raped because I always use Durex”.

The Worboys case prompted a Scotland Yard review into the behavior of police regarding rape cases. They found that in six London boroughs, rape reports were being classified as crime related incidents (CRI), a classification that kept the rapes from showing up in crime figures (for which there are targets to remain low) and meant that little would be done by way of investigation. These crime “downgrades” were most often applied to cases in which the victim couldn’t remember what had happened, instantly casting off the credible claims of the many victims who had been drugged by their attacker.

The crime statistics looked quite different once the Scotland Yard review corrected the inaccurate filings:

When the procedure was corrected it led to a spike in recorded rape cases, up by 25% over the past year, at a time when overall crime in London fell.

According to Scotland Yard’s own figures, in the 12 months to December 2008, 2,366 rapes were recorded at the Met, compared with 1,897 in the year before – an increase of 469 recorded rapes. It is believed the bulk of this increase follows the error having been corrected.

Between John Worboys’ 2007 arrest and release and his final capture in 2008, he assaulted at least seven more women. And he had the freedom to do that because the police cut corners and acted according to their biases towards victims.

It is hard to change the ways of a rape culture when those on the frontline of the defense lay down their weapons and walk away. The Scotland Yard review is a start but it is nowhere close to being enough.