Rape: Prosecutions

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what are the main factors that have led to decades of low levels of rape cases being prosecuted, and continue to prevent such prosecutions, and what steps are they taking to resolve this.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I would like to thank in advance all noble Lords who are speaking today. I will be listening very closely to the two former Met Police Commissioners here today, because they probably not only understand the problems but know exactly where the solutions lie. I hope the Government will be listening to them as closely as I will.

We all know that our country is failing rape victims, who are mainly but not exclusively women. I could stand here all day and quote figures that show how bad things are now, and how bad they were a decade ago or even three or four decades ago. Misogyny is not new, and it is the root of most rapes. There have been times when women could be priests, or even gods, but extreme misogyny arose in Assyria two and a half thousand years ago and brought it into politics and religion.

I could talk about the way that young working-class girls in Rotherham were not believed and were ignored. We could explore the allegations of police collusion and corruption, with links to local drug gangs, or I could go back a decade and talk about the failures of the police when the Yorkshire ripper was killing sex workers. There is the scandal of Jimmy Savile, operating as a sexual predator in plain sight, with powerful friends in the BBC and Downing Street; or Worboys, the taxi driver who the police believe had 100 victims, some of whom had reported being assaulted before he was finally caught.

Each of these cases has the common threads of women and girls not being believed or fearing they would not be believed. There are the half-hearted investigations of women who do report and the professional scepticism of Crown Prosecution Service staff about whether a jury is going to convict. There is the character assassination of survivors and the intrusive exploration of their personal lives by the authorities, which are meant to be supporting them in getting justice. These high-profile cases open up the public debate, but they are the merest fraction of the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of women and girls who have reported, or not reported, gone to trial, or tried to, and then given up in despair.

What is striking in reading through the library of previous reports, inquiries and ministerial speeches is the repeated themes and recommendations. They tend to broadly agree with the existing policy relating to the investigation and prosecution of rape and then state that this policy is not being properly implemented. These kinds of failures are long standing. It can feel as though the repeated commissioning of these reviews and inspections is a way for government and other authorities to indicate concern, while never following through with the action and resources needed to make change. I am absolutely positive that this Labour Government will do better than that.

From the 1980s onwards, we had a slow but positive shift in the way the police and Crown prosecutors handled rape cases—from the setting up of rape investigation rooms and the swift collection of forensic evidence, to a merit-based approach to prosecution that looked at the evidence, rather than second-guessing what a jury might or might not decide. Coming out of the scandal of grooming gangs in several northern towns, Sir Keir Starmer, the then head of the Crown Prosecution Service, argued that it was not a question of the victim’s behaviour or criminal record, but whether the crime had happened. He said:

“if the yardstick traditionally used by prosecutors for evaluating the credibility of a victim in other cases were used without adaptation in cases of sexual exploitation, the outcome would potentially be a category of vulnerable victims left unprotected by the criminal law.”

He was absolutely right.

These changes, combined with the #MeToo campaign and a series of high-profile historical scandals, led to a huge increase in the reporting of rape cases. This was a success, but it came just as austerity led to the slow collapse of the criminal justice system. The result has been a disaster for rape victims—rape survivors—who have been seriously let down by an overstretched judicial system that has responded in the worst of all possible ways. It is a system that promises justice but delivers delays and failure.

The numbers of rapes recorded by the police increased steadily from the 1980s but tripled between 2014 and 2018, reaching their highest-ever volume. The number of reported rapes being successfully prosecuted has, however, dropped from 25% in 1981 to 1% or 2% in recent years.

Instead of our society recognising the scale of a hidden scandal and putting resources into achieving justice when hundreds of thousands of people started reporting this horrendous but regular, everyday crime, what the last Government did was to cut police, lawyers and police time. The Crown Prosecution Service quietly dropped the merit-based approach and rationed cases going forwards based on a Ladbrokes betting shop analysis of the odds of a jury convicting the alleged assailant—I am going to be very careful about naming the person I believe is responsible for that, because I am not sure whether saying it in the House of Lords gives me cover from prosecution.

The solution is more resources, and that means making it a priority within the judicial system—no more delaying trials for a year or more, so that the rape survivor gives up all hope of justice and drops out from emotional exhaustion. As long as rape is a crime that people think they can get away with, they will do it. Do this Government, or any Government, want rape legalised? The year-on-year failures make that appear, near enough, the outcome of austerity.

The other thing the Government can do is education and changing the culture. This is incredibly important and I feel that this avenue of recovery has not been explored. In France, Gisèle Pelicot has done this and changed the culture of shame from being all on the survivor to the shame being directed at all the men who raped her, all those who colluded and all those who did not report to the police what was happening. We need Ministers to get behind survivors and make it clear that rape is not just about grooming gangs, spiked drinks, dodgy taxi drivers or even police officers. All those need dealing with but, distressingly, most sexual assaults are about familiar and comfortable environments and people whom you know. Therefore, education is absolutely basic to sorting out this problem. I look forward very much to hearing what the Minister will say in reply. If he could pick up that point about education, I would be very grateful.