It’s been a tough week for rape and sexual assault survivors across the world. The media, even on this side of the pond, is overwhelmed by coverage of the extraordinary Christine Blasey Ford speaking up against Brett Kavanaugh during his hearing to potentially become a Supreme Court judge. Last night’s BBC News at Ten devoted around half of its airtime to the hearing, and coverage in online and print outlets, as well as on social media, has been plentiful.
This case is bringing up difficult memories for many survivors and, here in the UK, that is exacerbated by data from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that shows that our rape conviction statistics leave a lot to be desired. This has been the case throughout living memory, but for things to actually get worse is particularly alarming.
The first remarkable statistic revealed by the CPS was that men aged 18 – 24 who are charged with rape are significantly less likely to be convicted than older men, with less than ⅓ of prosecutions resulting in a conviction. The figures for men aged 25 – 49 stand at 46%, by comparison. And that is in the cases that proceeded as far as the CPS – many get abandoned at the police stages.
Senior members of the CPS told the Guardian that this was thought to be because jurors are wary of labelling such young men as sex offenders, and the result of this, of course, is that the age of the person who is accused has a notable effect on the likelihood survivors have of seeing justice in their cases.
Nazir Afzal, the former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England and adviser to the Welsh government on violence against women, told the Guardian, “in my experience, juries are more likely to make allowances for a defendant the younger he is, this idea that he may not have known what he was doing at 24, but if he was older than that he does”, while Dr Dominic Willmott from the University of Huddersfield, said that his research “shows us quite clearly that jurors are simply less willing to convict young defendants of rape for fear of the consequences such a ‘rapist’ label will have on their future”, even if the juries believe him to be guilty.
Other aspects of information about the CPS have shown that cases that were supposedly “weak” were being “taken out of the system”; often those where the accusers are young, have mental health problems or are otherwise not “credible” to a mainstream jury. In training sessions, prosecutors and others were told “If we took 350 weak cases out of the system, our conviction rate goes up to 61%.”
The course in question has since been scrapped. The information that it transmitted, however, is not especially new in rape and sexual assault cases. If the victim does not fit a narrow bill of “acceptability”, or the accused comes across as more palatable and socially acceptable, the chances of a conviction plummet. And this should not be a worry because of CPS stats, it should be a worry because juries are not convicting guilty men and they are letting down their survivors.
And yet we are still supposed to report our abusers and those who assault us. We are criticised, like Blasey Ford, if we do not report and yet to report is often a humiliating and difficult experience that, as we can see from this data, is far from guaranteed to produce the desired outcome. Especially if the man who assaulted you is young. Especially if your case is ‘weak’. Especially especially especially.
There are few circumstances in which the chances of a prosecution are favourable and those that do lend themselves to ‘better’ jury outcomes tend to be the rarest kinds of assaults – strangers hitting you over in the head in a dark alleyway before raping you.
I didn’t report, though I spoke to police about the possibility. They said that my mental health problems (resulting from the rape) would make me an ‘unreliable witness’ in the court. It was a vicious cycle that it was impossible to break out of. Unless your reaction to your assault is no reaction at all, it will count against you in a court of law. The police woman also laughed at me because I found it too difficult to recount the details.
It was not a welcoming or encouraging encounter and it did not encourage me to follow through with a report. It put me right off, to be honest. So that was that. And while the police proclaim that they have changed – and I hope they have – if they do not work closely with the CPS and if jury education is not improved and myth busting is not widely disseminated, we have little opportunity to improve the chances of women coming forward to get the conviction they so need. That society so needs.
Photo: Brad Hagan