Rape and Sexual Violence

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point so passionately. She is absolutely right, and of course this needs to be looked at and changed.

The impact of these failings in the criminal justice system is all too real for many of those with lived experience of it. One survivor at a recent roundtable I held along with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) told us that while they had come to terms with what had happened to them, they could not come to terms with how they had been treated by the criminal justice system. Survivors continually tell us that they often feel as though they are the ones being investigated or standing trial, and that lengthy court delays compound and extend their trauma. One survivor said:

“I still have flashbacks to the whole process and ask myself what I could have done differently. The defendant had help on what to expect in court, but all I had was someone saying ‘if you tell the truth then that’s enough’—well I did tell the truth but it wasn’t enough.”

Another said:

“It was my belief that all of this extra pain and suffering being endured by myself in order to go through the investigation with only a slight chance of it going to court wasn’t worth it in my opinion. Especially since I would have had to face my perpetrator in court and I was told it most likely wouldn’t end up with a prosecution anyway.”

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for the excellent comments she is making in emphasising the importance of hearing the voices of survivors of sexual assault. Will she join me in congratulating my constituent Anna Robinson, who has written a play about her experience of sexual assault and going through the criminal justice system with the many failings and delays in it? The play, which is touching and moving, and also funny, is playing at the Alphabetti theatre in Newcastle right now and is a marvellous example of the victim finding a voice.

[Ellie Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and the tribute that she pays to her constituent Anna Robinson. It sounds like a fantastic play, and I am sure she has shown great bravery and courage in using her experience to shine a light on the difficulties that women face.

The cases that I referred to are not unique. The recent criminal justice joint inspectorate report said that the criminal justice system is failing victims of rape and that widespread reform is needed. Despite all this, action from the Government has been lukewarm and lacks urgency. We welcomed the end-to-end rape review, but it took over two years to publish it, and we are now one year on from that with little noticeable change. The review’s commitment to developing a better understanding of the impacts of trauma on rape victims and survivors across the criminal justice system, and the important commitment to taking a more suspect-focused approach to rape investigations, was encouraging and welcome. Yet even so, the review’s proposals were just piecemeal ideas without the funding and real accountability to make the change needed, and there was a concerning lack of urgency in the timescales put forward. The scorecards, which are a useful tool for transparency, completely lacked an equalities analysis, meaning that there is a blind spot in understanding justice outcomes for rape victims and survivors who are black and minoritised, deaf and disabled, or LGBT+. As long as this information remains missing it will show a fundamental lack of commitment to making our justice system work for everyone.