Last month, the CPS published the final findings of its research on how to improve its responses to cases of rape. This came as part of Operation Soteria, a national Home Office-funded research programme to transform the way police investigate rape and serious sexual violence.
Operation Soteria included the development of a national operating model for rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO), which in 2023 was rolled out across all 43 police forces in England and Wales. These recent findings come from independent research from the University of Warwick, commissioned by the CPS, assessing the impact of Operation Soteria so far.
Following a drop in rape prosecutions to the lowest on record, the government published The Rape Review, issuing an unprecedented apology to victims and survivors for its failures and committing to addressing the problem in a timeframe leading up to June 2023. By that point, minimal progress had been made – in March 2023, a review conducted by Baroness Casey found evidence of “a strategic and operational failure to tackle rape and sexual offences within the Met which compounds the harm for victims”. These failures included a fridge containing forensic samples being switched off by accident, jeopordising a rape investigation. The Review has been extended to December 2024.
In October 2022, Independent Adviser on the Rape Review Emily Hunt announced her decision to step down from her role, saying she had “lost faith” in the system.
Seven years prior, Emily Hunt had woken up naked in a London hotel room next to a man she had no memory of meeting. It was only several days after the incident that she was told by police that sex acts had taken place while she was unconscious.
The CPS did not bring charges, claiming a lack of evidence. But a year later Emily Hunt discovered she had been filmed unconscious and naked while the man performed a sex act beside her – and that the police had known about this from the start. In 2016, Hunt was diagnosed with PTSD, and as with about 10% of rape victims, Hunt attempted suicide.
After a five-year fight, in 2020 the man was charged with Voyeurism and given a restraining order. When this was breached, he was given a suspended sentence. Hunt called it “laughable”.
Emily Hunt joined the Rape Review Action Plan team in 2021. She quit a year later. “It was so dispiriting because I would be in these meetings, where people were talking about how things were getting better. And then I would get to experience the opposite.” If the MoJ’s Rape Adviser can’t get justice for her assault, who can?
In 2021 and 2022, the HMICFRS and MCCPSI published the two-part ‘Joint Thematic Inspections of the Police and CPS’s Response to Rape’ which found that the criminal justice system had a greater focus on the credibility and behaviour of the victim than that of the suspect. According to the University of Warwick’s latest findings, this hasn’t changed.
Through interviews with prosecutors, police, and independent sexual violence advisers (ISVAs) conducted between July 2022 and November 2023, academics found that “There’s still an obsession about the victim’s credibility”.
Alongside this, they found that the CPS downplays teenage sexual abuse, employs victim-blaming language, and allows rape myths and stereotypes to inform decision-making about victims’ cases, at every stage of the justice process.
The report also found that a victim’s mental health significantly affects the likelihood of a rape case proceeding. Mental health issues are weaponised as a reason to cast doubt upon a victim’s experience, despite solid evidence showing the links between a person’s mental ill-health and their vulnerability to RASSO. Prosecutors (who play a significant role in advising police in the early stages of an investigation) also engage in intrusive searches for information that they think could undermine a victim’s case, including private counselling notes, school reports and medical records.
It’s not difficult to see why 3 in 4 RASSO survivors’ mental health is harmed during the process of the police investigation.
There’s a daunting mountain to climb to achieve a world in which cases of RASSO are properly investigated and prosecuted. It’s a deeply troubling reality that victim-blaming is so embedded in every stage of decision making – but to at least half of the population of the UK, it unfortunately won’t come as a surprise.
The myths and stereotypes about rape and its victims instilled in the CPS and weaponised by prosecutors do not come from nowhere. Tackling the prevalence (and rise) of misogyny in schools and online is a mountainous task in itself, but it is the foundational step towards a future law and order workforce untainted by these beliefs.
It’s hugely encouraging that Starmer’s Labour seems to understand this and has a plan to tackle it. Starmer’s Mission to “halve violence against women and girls within a decade” is ambitious and long-term, supported by preventative policies such as its plan for uprooting misogyny in schools.
However, preventative policies do not address the short-term. And in the short-term, around 798,000 women and girls are sexually assaulted in England and Wales every year – that’s 1 in 30 of us.
Labour plans to put specialist taskforces in place in every police force, trained to properly treat and investigate crimes of VAWG. This is a part of Starmer’s mission that will tackle the short term – but only if done alongside significant scrutiny and oversight. There must be routine checks, in which cases are selected at random on a regular basis and the investigation process reviewed from beginning to end, supported by interviews with any willing victims on their experiences with their case handlers.
With trust in policing so low, appalling conviction rates, and the shocking revelations from Warwick University’s report, unfortunately Labour’s specialist VAWG taskforces may not be enough. There must be a body dedicated to scrutinising every officer, every case, every conviction. It must be focused on the treatment of victims, and on ensuring everything possible was done to secure a conviction for the perpetrator. It is unbelievable and unacceptable for evidence in rape cases to be lost, or for a victim not to be told of video evidence of their assault – but as there is no short-term way to uproot misogyny, these miscarriages of justice are inevitable, and all we can do is catch them after the fact.
As part of his VAWG Mission, Starmer has stated that police under a Labour government would be required to pursue perpetrators using counter-terror levels of data analysis and urgency. This must be implemented the second Sir Keir Starmer walks through the door of Number 10. Every time an attacker is left to walk free, we face the highly likely chance they will assault another victim. The best preventative measure we can take against high rates of RASSO crimes is to make sure assailants cannot attack again.
Today, 300 women in Britain will be raped. Of those 300, only three cases will end in a perpetrator being charged. Ultimately, the reality of how RASSO cases are investigated is horrifying. If we, as Starmer said, “want to imagine a society where violence against women is stamped out everywhere”, we first must imagine a society in which those who perpetrate it are prosecuted.
If you enjoyed this piece, check out How can women and girls ever trust the police again? Lessons from the inquiry into Sarah Everard’s murder.
To find out more about Labour’s mission for tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, join us at Progressive Britain Conference 2024 on May 11th.
