How the police are letting sexual assault victims down

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2014/nov/21/police-letting-rape-victims-down-too

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It felt like the final blow. In a month where we’ve seen victim-blaming attitudes surface and swirl in conversations about the Ched Evans case, and heavy sighs over Dapper Laughs and his “jokes” about rape, it was one last punch in the gut to read a new report revealing that a shocking 26% of all sexual offences (including rape) reported to police are not even recorded as crimes.

As we grapple with the reality of a society in which victim-blaming attitudes are rife and rape is all too frequently seen as something to joke about, it is particularly devastating to see statistics revealing that the police are also letting victims down.

The HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report also revealed that a fifth of decisions to “no-crime” rape reports had been found to be incorrect. (A no-crime occurs when a recorded crime has subsequently been found not to be a crime and is, in effect, cancelled, supposedly with verifiable information that a crime was not committed.) For the worst forces investigated, this figure rose to two-fifths. Furthermore, the report found that in many cases there was no evidence that victims had even been informed that their report had been “no-crimed”, meaning they might continue to believe that their rape was being investigated when that was not the case.

It is particularly damning that levels of under-recording and no-criming are so much higher for rape and sexual offences than for almost all other crimes, with the exception of violence against the person. According to the report, 3.1% of all crime recorded by the police is no-crimed. However, for recorded crimes of rape, the level of no-criming is 7.3%. (As we know, this discrepancy is not explained by false allegations of sexual offences.)

What’s most painful about these numbers is that each incident when a crime is not recorded, or is wrongly designated a no-crime, does not represent a single event, but a lasting legacy. For many survivors, particularly within a culture that belittles rape and blames victims, the process of building up the courage to report a sexual offence can be painstaking and terrifying. Only 15% of rape victims report the crime to the police. To be met with disbelief is devastating. And it doesn’t just deny a survivor the prospect of justice and potential catharsis, but also, in some cases, the access to services and support they badly need. Most women who have recounted such experiences to the Everyday Sexism Project have one thing in common: they never reported again.

Equally, each perpetrator left uninvestigated represents not a single miscarriage of justice, but a longer-lasting danger to others – a potential further sexual offence, or string of offences, that could have been prevented had the first victim been believed.

The impact of failings like these on public faith in the police can be enormous, especially when victims from communities particularly affected by different forms of institutional prejudice – including women of colour, sex workers and LGBT people – may already be justifiably wary of turning to the authorities for help. How can we encourage survivors to report the crime, knowing that they may be made to feel dismissed or disbelieved? How do we build people’s confidence to come forward, when police blunders leave victims bereft of justice? One eight-year-old girl wrote to police three years after her rape to say: “When I was five something very bad happened and it was your job to make sure he was properly dealt with and punished. But you didn’t do your job and you let me down.”

As chief inspector of constabulary Tom Winsor told the BBC: “The police need to institutionalise a culture of believing the victim. Every time.” It really is that simple.

In one case study cited in the inspectorate’s document, officers chose to no-crime a report of rape made by a 13-year-old girl, because of a lack of evidence or witnesses: “From the investigation notes it appeared the officers did not believe the victim and had for that reason no-crimed the report.” In another example, officers no-crimed a report of rape on the basis that the victim – when intoxicated and told to do so by her attacker – had removed some of her clothing. The case study explained: “Whilst they had initially recorded the incident as a rape, they no-crimed it on the basis that because she had taken some of her clothes off, she must be presumed to have consented to sexual intercourse, despite her insistence that she did not.” In common with so many others in our society, these examples suggest that even the police do not understand the concept of consent.

According to the report, it was only explicitly established that 7% of all failures to record crimes were due to police disbelieving the victim. However, it said, disbelieving the victim is more likely to occur in relation to particular types of crime, including sexual offences. In addition, other factors, such as “inadequate supervision”, which is listed as the most common reason for crimes wrongly going unrecorded (including the bulk of rape cases), is not clearly defined, and in 20% of cases, no reason was recorded for the decision. The proportion of cases where victims were disbelieved may in reality be significantly higher.

We need to see more rigorous evaluation of the reasons behind these figures, and extensive, mandatory training to improve police responses. Improvements should be carefully monitored, and failing forces held to account. These statistics are symptomatic of a wider failure in our societal and institutional responses to sexual violence. You can see it everywhere, from a student culture rife with rape “jokes”, and high-profile, public victim-blaming, to the dismissal of victims by authority figures because of sexism and class prejudice. We seem to ignore wake-up call after wake-up call, but yet another must surely come in the form of these most recent, damning statistics that over a quarter of victims who find the strength to come forward are being denied even the very first step towards justice.