Rape: Prosecutions

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, on securing this debate and on her powerful speech. I regret very much that it is needed. During my research for this debate, my feelings were of—I do not use this word lightly—anger and incredulity that it is 2025 and we are still talking about this. I have three young daughters. My eldest is 14 and is just at the stage where she is travelling around London on the bus on her own. She asked me what I was doing today and I said I was coming to talk about this: the failure of the criminal justice system to protect victims and survivors of one of the most brutal and degrading offences.

Looking at the last Parliament, there was a recent victory for campaigners in last year’s change in the law to better protect survivors’ counselling notes. The cross-party work done by my noble friend Lady Bertin and others in the House—supported by the Minister when he was in his shadow role, as I remember—highlighted the uphill battle to ensure that survivors are treated with dignity and care.

I want to focus my remarks today on the first stage of the reporting process: the early stage, when victims and survivors of rape decide whether they are able to go to the police or, indeed, whether they are not. We can see the barriers: the ONS Crime Survey for England and Wales reported that of respondents who had told someone that they had been raped but not the police, 38% thought that the police could not help them and a quarter thought that the police would not believe them. The last Government’s rape review reported that the percentage of victims who withdraw at the police stage has never fallen below 41% and, at the time of its report, it was sitting at 61%.

I acknowledge the action taken by the previous Administration and picked up by this one to improve processes. I welcome the progress made by Operation Soteria, the College of Policing and others, but it has taken far too long for victims’ voices to be heard and longer still for this to be translated into action.

We have a strategic policing requirement, which includes requiring violence against women and girls and domestic abuse to be tackled, but it is a depressingly patchy performance at best. Operation Soteria recognised that good practice was observed but was dependent on individual officers rather than built into systems and policies. I very much welcome this Government’s commitment to establishing specialist teams and the other commitments they have made on vetting, et cetera. I urge them to continue at pace, but the fundamental issue here is one of trust. While systems and processes are core to that trust, there is a deeper issue at play.

What really drove me to sign up to today’s debate is the need to spend more time talking about the culture within police forces, specifically attitudes to women and girls. Of course, given the topic today, it is important to acknowledge that men are also victims of rape, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, and I would never seek to minimise that. As the Home Affairs Select Committee recognised, women are more likely than men to experience rape, and the majority of perpetrators are men. I feel unable to strike an optimistic tone in this debate because too many revelations—from the 2022 IOPC review and the 2023 Casey review of the Met—have highlighted sexist and misogynistic behaviours in policing.

I am aware that many police officers do an excellent job. Like everyone in this Room, I am sure, I was brought up to respect and trust the police, and I am bringing up my own daughters to do so. They do a very difficult job. I am not saying that the failures on this specific issue are directly related to misogynistic behaviour—mistakes are made and the two are not necessarily linked—but the fact that the College of Policing is, in 2025, running a strategy to tackle misogynistic behaviours within policing tells us a lot, surely, about the impact of culture on performance. If women are to come forward, trust comes first. If their experiences when they come forward are to change, then culture is at the heart of it. Surely, given that our police forces clearly want to be able to recruit the best people to tackle violence against women and girls, they need to ensure that their culture supports this without fail.

Having listened to Ministers in the previous Administration and this one at the Dispatch Box, I believe that there is the political will to end violence against women and girls. That will require commitment to supporting police leadership to drive change, but also holding them properly to account by asking what exactly they are doing to call out such behaviour when they see it and hear it.

I finish by paying tribute to the victims and survivors. I hope that we can continue to work cross-party to do better.