Defendant Anonymity

Nia Griffith Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this important debate, but I am concerned and saddened that the coalition Government have proposed to give anonymity to rape defendants. I do not wish to repeat many of the excellent points made by my hon. Friends, and by the hon. Members for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) and for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who have brought their professional expertise to bear on this subject, but this is a serious issue.

Being falsely accused of any serious crime can have devastating effects on a person’s life. However, experts in the field confirm that false accusations of rape are very rare. The Association of Chief Police Officers rape lead, Chief Constable Whatton, has said:

“The public perception is that there are lots of false allegations; my professional view is that there aren’t”.

Likewise, Baroness Stern’s “review into how rape complaints are handled by public authorities in England and Wales” states that

“those we spoke to in the system felt that there were very few. A Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyer told us, ‘They are extremely rare. I have been prosecuting for 20 years, and have prosecuted for a false allegation once.’ The judges we talked to said these cases occur very infrequently. An experienced police officer had come across two such cases in 15 years.”

So giving anonymity only to rape defendants sends out a very clear message to rape victims that they alone are not to be believed. It tells them that they alone are not to be taken seriously. It suggests to them that there is no point in coming forward because nobody will believe them and, worse than that, as they will not be believed there is no chance that the rapist will be convicted and so there is no point in reporting rape. This would be a very backward step. Rape has a devastating effect on the victim, with the after-effects lasting for years. It is a particularly difficult crime to report and it can occur in a wide range of circumstances; it is far more widespread than is commonly known, with some 2,000 women raped every week and some 10,000 women sexually abused.

Victims of rape naturally find it very difficult to come forward, because they are often very embarrassed about what has happened, and manipulative rapists can often make the victim somehow feel partially responsible for the assault that has taken place. Victims are very worried about having to describe to complete strangers what has happened. They are also very worried about what they know will be a very long and complicated process and about being cross-examined about intimate details. Over the years, those difficulties have been recognised and efforts have been made to improve facilities and to increase the availability of specialised professionals, but it is still a big step for a victim to come forward to report rape.

One major deterrent to rape victims coming forward is the worry that they will not be believed. Giving rape defendants, and only rape defendants, anonymity sends a very clear message to rape victims, more than 90% of whom are women, that they are unlikely to be believed. It reinforces many of the insidious myths about rape—for example, that somehow the victim was asking for it or was somehow responsible for it happening.

Victims are very worried about the attitudes they will encounter if they report rape. Unfortunately, in a report produced in 2007, Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service inspectorate has shown that a key problem in the investigation of rape cases is “a culture of scepticism” among many police officers and prosecutors. Giving anonymity only to rape defendants will serve merely to reinforce that culture of scepticism, and although the culture might be slowly changing, the perception of many women is that it still exists. The fact that women perceive that to be the culture is making them reluctant to come forward and giving anonymity to rape defendants will only reinforce their concerns.

The proposal is like giving some sort of charter to serial rapists. Whereas now when a defendant is named, other victims are given the courage to come forward and provide additional evidence that can help to secure a conviction—many such cases have been cited this afternoon—what is proposed will do the opposite. It will hamper police investigations and make it much easier for serial offenders to avoid detection and to reoffend again and again. We all know that it is well documented how such people try to get themselves into a position of trust or a position in which they know they will have the opportunity to repeat their crime again and again.

Do the Government recognise that giving rape defendants greater protection could reduce conviction rates, particularly for serial rapists? Do they realise what a negative message they are sending to victims of rape—that they, and they alone, are not to be believed?

Enormous efforts have been made to improve the treatment of rape survivors in the criminal justice system, but no matter what is done reporting rape will always be traumatic. I implore the Minister not to proceed to accord anonymity to rape defendants because it would be an immense backward step and would undo a lot of the good work that has been done in this area.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Ellis]

In the absence of statistics, one can only go by one’s anecdotal experience, and it is reasonable for barristers who have worked in the Crown Court daily for many years to draw on that experience. I differ from what the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) said about the number of cases prosecuted as perversions of the course of justice or malicious reporting of rape. That number will be very much lower than the average. That is because it is very difficult to prove a negative, and one would normally have to ascertain that the complaint was made in wholly and probably dishonest circumstances—for example, it might later transpire that the complainant and the victim were in two different locations. But it is illogical for the hon. Lady to draw the conclusion that because there are X prosecutions for perverting the course of justice, there are not that many false accusations. The two are totally different.

[Nia Griffith]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that I was quoting the professionals who have been involved for many, many years in such cases? I was not quoting the number of actual cases that might have been brought. I was quoting what the professionals had said, and they said that the number of false accusations being made anywhere in the process was extremely low.

[Michael Ellis]

Nothing that I have said is designed to protect the guilty. I accept what the hon. Lady says. As far as I am concerned—I emphasise this—anyone convicted of this sort of crime deserves the full wrath of the law and society. I am motivated here—I am sure that all Members would sympathise with this—by the protection of the innocent, and the ancient principle that all in this country are innocent unless or until they are proven guilty is a principle that we should never derogate.