Another part of the party’s policy paper ‘Real Women’ has been released to the media today, highlighting the shocking news that the already dreadfully low rate of conviction for rapes has fallen even further:
Fewer than one in 16 rapes reported to the police results in a conviction in court, research by the Liberal Democrats has revealed. Figures revealed in a Parliamentary answer show that the conviction rate has fallen from less than one in 13 in 1998.
The Liberal Democrats have today called for up to 15 more Rape Crisis Centres to be opened across the country, and for more money to be invested in centres that provide medical care and counselling to the victims of sexual assaults. This would double the Government’s pledge on Rape Crisis Centres.
The measures are part of a wider range of proposals designed to prevent violence against women, and to provide help to the victims of violence.
Other proposals include:
- Investing millions more in Rape Crisis Centres, opening up to 15 new centres
- Investing more in Sexual Assault Referral Centres to provide forensic medical examinations and counselling
- Rolling out classes about rights and fair treatment in relationships in schools with organisations like Relate
- Providing better systems in schools and social services for children and adults to report abuse
- Ensuring that women living in refuges can continue to work…
Liberal Democrat Women’s Spokesperson, Lynne Featherstone said:
“The low conviction rates across the country in rape cases are nothing short of a national disgrace. We the worst rape conviction record in Europe.”
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33 Comments
What fraction of those are actual rapes, rather than “I got drunk and now regret my actions so I shall blame the other person”? It’s well-established that a huge proportion of cases reported to the police are in this category (which almost certainly makes it harder to prosecute the real ones).
Can we get a source on that research?
Out of interest, Andrew, can we get a source on your “well-established” claim while we’re at it please?
Let’s get this right. Less than 1 in 16 PROSECUTIONS for rape result in a conviction. I realise that a small but vital part of English law about the presumption of innocence unfortunately gets in the way of the LibDem Court of Outraged Popular Opinion (Kangaroo Division), but twelve men and women hear the evidence and form a verdict.. It’s called Justice. Now if you wish to convince me that in 15 cases out of 16 the Jury get it wrong, you must first explain why such a high-profile and abhorrent crime is treated so lightly by members of the public and why the jury so invariably fails to convict. Then this thread can become a worthwhile debate on the subject.
Atropos: you say “Let’s get this right” but then your very next sentence gets the statistics wrong as far as I can see. My post quoted a figure for the proportion of reported rapes that result in a conviction. You talk about the proportion of prosecutions that result in a conviction, but still apply the 1 in 16 figure to it. That’s incorrect, isn’t it (because many rapes do not result in a conviction in the first place)?
Andrew: like Dave, I’d be interested to know what your evidence is for the “well-established” claim you make.
“That’s incorrect, isn’t it (because many rapes do not result in a conviction in the first place)?”
Hmm. I assume you mean prosecution, not conviction.
I think the point is that it’s not “1 in 16 rapes”, as your headline has it, but 1 in 16 alleged rapes. Point-scoring aside, the distinction is an important one.
I just wrote a long comment based on some things I know from my professional circles but the website rejected it as “a bit spammy.” Hello?
“I think the point is that it’s not “1 in 16 rapes”, as your headline has it, but 1 in 16 alleged rapes.”
If I am burgled but, for example, the suspect is acquitted because the CCTV evidence isn’t of very high quality then no-one would question me if I continued to refer to having been burgled.
Everyone pretty much agrees that something must be done. The problem can be illustrated by the fact that none of the proposals set out above would do anything to increase conviction rates (possibly the ones on SARC might but at the margins)
@Anthony – the internet automatically filters out informed comments 🙂
Yup, that’s what I meant Herbert.
Headlines can’t contain all the details of a story, which is why the post went on to expand on exactly what figure was being quoted. “Alleged rapes”, the phrase you use, ironically given your point isn’t much clearer on its own either because the normal use of the word “alleged” would include cases where someone says (alleges) they were raped but for a range of reasons don’t report it to the police. It’s only if you take a very technical definition of alleged as equalling reported to the police that the ratio of alleged rapes is 1 in 16.
The distinction between number of cases where someone says rape has taken place and number of reports to the police is an important one (and to be fair to the police an area in which they’ve made a huge amount of progress in the last couple of decades).
Antony: it’s not in the spam filter I’m afraid, so nothing there I can restore.
Mark
“Yup, that’s what I meant Herbert.”
Good. Then, assuming that you are capable of understanding why the distinction between an accusation and a conviction is an important one – as I assume all liberals would be – it’s a shame you couldn’t respect it by the simple expedient of inserting the word “alleged” into your headline.
Hywel
Of course, the difference is that the question of consent very rarely arises in cases of alleged burglary, but very frequently arises in cases of alleged rape. That’s why this is such a difficult problem, and it does nobody any favours to gloss over it.
“the question of consent very rarely arises in cases of alleged burglary, but very frequently arises in cases of alleged rpe.”
All of them in fact
Most of these proposals are for women* who believe they have been rped. Unless you are saying that counselling and support is only available to victims following a successful conviction then that is the only sensible standard to use. If a women believes she has been rped but in the legal sense there is no case then there is just as much need for such support.
(*Not sure where male rpe and sexual assault victims feature in this. I’d prefer to see policy on rpe and sexual developed other than in a gender specific paper but that’s another matter)
“it does nobody any favours to gloss over it.”
What’s that stuff? Like Goldy and Bronzey only made of iron?
The missing “a”s are to get through the spam filter!
Hywel
I am simply saying it’s incorrect to say that “Less than 1 in 16 rapes result in a conviction”, because it’s important to distinguish between “rapes” on the one hand and “alleged rapes” on the other (or perhaps “alleged rapes reported to the police”, but the principle is the same).
Do you disagree?
Herbert: for the reasons I gave in my comment, I don’t think say “alleged rapes” would be any clearer as it isn’t “alleged” in the normal meaning of the word. It needs a much longer phrase to fully explain what is and isn’t included in the statistic – which is what the post itself does. A headline is a headline, not a full description of the story.
I note that the article is headed and footed with outrage at the conviction rate but the actual proposals in the main body of the piece have little or nothing to do with solving that issue.
Mark
Do you really not see the importance of distinguishing between rapes and alleged rapes, even in a headline?
I can only hope you’d be more careful if you were writing about an individual case.
But in that case a named individual is involved. There is no need for such language when making generalisations.
I would also expect that a negligable number of the allegations from people regretting their own actions while drunk actually end up as prosectutions, so don’t form part of the statistics.
There is, however, about the same amount of evidence behind my assertation as Andrew’s.
This is just more populist pandering from the Lib Dems, after Jo Swinson made an idiot of herself earlier this week over ‘airbrushing’.
As I have explained on my blog and others have explained elsewhere, low percentage of rape convictions relative to other countries can result from a huge number of factors. Different numbers of accusations, differences in the legal systems, different thresholds for providing evidence, different methods used by the police when dealing with accusations etc etc. As mentioned above by another commentor, the need to stand firm on the requirements for providing evidence that puts a conviction beyond any reasonable doubt is essential, and this kind of Daily Mail-esque scaremongering by the Lib Dems on such a delicate and sensitive issue is appalling.
Simon:
“I would also expect that a negligable number of the allegations from people regretting their own actions while drunk actually end up as prosectutions, so don’t form part of the statistics.”
If I understand correctly, we are talking about alleged rapes reported to the police, not prosecutions.
In response to your earlier point, obviously there’s a need for clarity and accuracy, even when the discussion is a general one – as you have just demonstrated!
One of several research projects investigating the question: False rape allegations, Eugene J. Kanin.
Usual estimates are that in the region of 30-40% of rape accusations are false (about 10% are disproved in court, the rest are either dropped or simply fail to convict; I don’t have numbers of the proportion of which go on to secure perjury convictions for the offenders). That would suggest that 7 of those 16 cases reported to the police were false, so the actual rate of conviction is closer to 1 in 8.
We had this same nonsense on ATW a while back. The fact is that whether the Righteous like it or not, Britain convicts rapes in Court at almost the exact average rate that it convicts other crimes. In fact in those terms we are actually convicting at a higher rate than several other European countries. This headline is misleading at best, and the kind of thing I’m sure Mr.Pack would scream to high heaven about were it, for example, the Daily Mail talking about immigrant conviction rates and using the figures for ‘crimes allegedly committed by immigrants’ instead of cases which actually went to Court.
The solution? ‘Double what Labour will do.’ This country is bankrupt, in case none of you noticed. It’s just a game where you pluck figures out of the air and promise more than the other guy, isn’t it?
Lynne Featherstone’s further statement is also an outright lie.
@Andrew Suffield
I followed the link you provided and it doesn’t support you at all. Your quote “These false rape allegations constitute 41% the total forcible rape cases (n =109) reported during this period.” doesn’t come from the conclusions to the report which was clearly not an investigation of the incidence of false reports but of the reasons for such false reports. It’s also based on reports from a single “police agency of a small metropolitan community”: no indication of how representative said community was, or explanation (perhaps there is one in the full report, I could only see the abstract and preview) of how reliable the local police figures are.
To be clear: I am not suggesting that nobody ever lies when making a rape allegation. People lie about everything, and there’s no reason to think rape is an exception. But as evidence for your claim that “It’s well-established that a huge proportion of cases reported to the police are in this category ” the report you cite is useless.
Of course you can deny evidence unearthed by research for as long as you want – that is what politics is for, after all. Here’s a couple more:
“False Allegations,” Forensic Science Digest, V. 11, no. 4, Dec. 1985, p. 64, by Charles P. McDowell
(20-30% false claims; n=1218)
Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence After Trial
The US DoJ processed about 10,000 cases for DNA evidence between 1989 and 1996; 20% conclusively disproved the “victim”‘s claims, and another 20% failed to support their claims while not managing to prove the “suspect” innocent.
Since we’re on the subject of our own police forces, let’s look at their own statistics behind that “1 in 16” figure – since nobody else could be bothered, I hunted down a report with the numbers. It’s A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases, Home Office Research Study #293, from 2005. They looked at 2284 cases after discarding errors, and had 12% who admitted filing a false report to the police, 17% cases where the accuser dropped the case, 17% where the accuser abandoned the issue before the complaint was filed, those last two presumably including some percentage of false accusations that were not admitted, and 5% where there was no evidence found to support the accuser’s claims – hence presumed false, that doesn’t include the 21% cases considered genuine but for which the evidence was insufficient to prosecute.
So, let’s put some real numbers on that “1 in 16 (6%)” figure: 21% where the police tried but couldn’t prove anything (not much to do about that), 13% where the suspect could not be found (okay, we could do better there), and a staggering 47% of dropped cases for which the accuser was entirely responsible, either for not pursuing the case or for lying about it in the first place.
About .3% were let off with a caution (sounds reasonable to me). 1.5% were dropped by the CPS, for whatever reason (could do better there, but it’s not a terrible number). 14% actually went to trial.
Of the cases brought to trial, 32% (4% of the population) were acquitted. 28% pled guilty, 20% were convicted. Those last two added together are your “1 in 16” figure (actually it’s 1 in 15, but I presume that’s just the variation between 2005 and 2009). The rest of the cases were dropped at trial or partial convictions.
So, a few salient points:
– more than half the people who pled innocent were acquitted
– there were more people who admitted making a false accusation than there were convicted (12% vs 8%)
– half the time it’s the accuser’s decision to drop the thing
This report also has an excellent section dealing with the subject of false accusations.
I’m not going to re-type all the longer comment I wrote that was spam filtered. A lot of interesting points have been made by various other people.
I’ve prosecuted a rape case. It was a young man who raped at least two young women on the same housing estate estate. He is now serving a long sentence.
One problem for any jury in rape cases is that they are often, like domestic violence cases, one person’s word against another.
My advice for any victim of rape is to report that matter as soon as possible. I know it it easy for me to say that, but it really helps build the case if, for example, your bruises are still visible to be seen by a doctor. And be consistent as you can be. Do not exaggerate or embelish a single detail. Trust me, you do not need to do so in order to get the authorities to believe you. If you do exaggerate or embelish you will probably be caught out and the jury will have a reason to doubt your credibility.
Letters from a Tory: the only scare-mongering seems to be from yourself, with your decision to raise the issue of “the need to stand firm on the requirements for providing evidence that puts a conviction beyond any reasonable doubt is essential”. There are plenty of ways of turning concern over the low conviction rape into action without getting into that issue. By raising that, and only that, possible measure you’re the one doing the scaremongering.
Andrew: thanks for posting the details, but your numbers and logic look pretty faulty. Two examples: first, you’ve still not quoted evidence to support your original comment about people getting drunk.
Second, you talk about “47% of dropped cases for which the accuser was entirely responsible”. But that’s not what the 47% really is. There are all sorts of reasons why an accuser drops a case, including – for example – a fear of how they will be treated in court and having to answer questions in public about extremely private behaviour. They may make the decision to drop the case but that doesn’t mean there isn’t responsibility shared more widely. How the legal system treats women (or men) who report rape is part of what determines the frequency of such events. Suggesting that for all of them it is “entirely” their responsiblity is just shifting the buck and turning your back on people who deserve far better than that sort of dismissivness.
I also get very uncomfortable when statistics like this are quoted.
Are we saying that, of every 16 cases where rape is agreed to have occurred, only one is solved? That would indeed be damning, and cause for serious contemplation.
Or are we saying that out of every 16 rapes alleged, only one is eventually proven against a suspect in court? If that is the case, I have no concerns at all.
Rape is, in most cases, horribly easy to claim, but horribly difficult to prove. That’s not fair, to anyone. But neither is it anyone’s fault. Only in conditions where rape has unequivocally taken place, can conviction statistics have any qualitative value.
So, which is it, please?
So glad to see you’re not all getting stuck in a little bit of detail, whilst not actually addressing the substance of the article!!
Personally, I think the measure that includes teaching about rights and fair treatment in relationships at schools would be a great help. Violence towards women, perpetrated by men, whether sexual or not, is deemed as acceptable in many social groups – educating young people that it’s not, has to be a good thing.
Anthony – your advice is no doubt good advice to support a lawyer in trying to do their job more easily but what about a legal and justice system that takes account of the actual experience of victims and the psychological issues that rape victims suffer from that means many times they don’t come forward immediatley.
You know, a society that tries to adapt to how people actually are, rahter than one that expects people to adapt to it and how it thinks they should be?
Jo
Surely, the substance of the “article” – certainly as presented above – was about the rate of conviction for rape. That’s what most of the discussion has been about.
What’s not apparent is how “classes about rights and fair treatment in relationships” will improve the conviction rate. Or what changes you’re advocating when you say you want the legal system to “[take] account of the actual experience of victims and the psychological issues that rape victims suffer from”, or in what way “society … expects people to adapt to it and how it thinks they should be”.
No doubt everyone would like to encourage rape victims to come forward as early as possible, and no doubt if they did that would improve the conviction rate. The question is, how can that be achieved? Vague statements about “a society that tries to adapt to how people actually are” don’t seem terribly helpful.
So are you saying that the reason why other European countries have higher rates of conviction, is that they don’t have “the requirements for providing evidence that puts a conviction beyond any reasonable doubt”? because I’m fairly sure France, Germany etc, require the same standards of evidence.
“Different numbers of accusations” – Yes true, and as mentioned above, this post should really have said “alleged r*pes”. Either way, there’s still a problem to solve here: either more women here are crying wolf, or more men are getting away with r*pe (proportionally). One of those is true, and so there is a problem that needs solving.
“differences in the legal systems, different thresholds for providing evidence” – Unlikely, especially since most of the relevant countries are under the ECHR. And which do you think is more likely anyway: that the differences in our legal systems mean that we don’t convict as much as we should, or that the differences in our legal systems mean THE WHOLE OF EUROPE convicts more than it should? The latter seems the most likely of the two IMO, and therefore should be looked at surely?
“different methods used by the police when dealing with accusations” – and surely this is also a problem that would need to be looked at, namely: why is our police force being harsher to women in alleged r*pe cases? Which is more likely: that our police force is using overly harsh methods when dealing with allegedly r*ped women, or that THE WHOLE OF EUROPE’s police forces are a bunch of pansies?
Yes, there are potentially numerous reasons why we have such a low conviction rate in r*pe cases. But all of these reasons are things that can and should be solved if they are the real reason.
Apparently mentioning the word “rape” to many times counts as spam. LDV, please, for these types of threads, loosen up the spam filter.