Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:190801 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 31/7/2019 18:40 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Thursday 1 August 2019 The Guardian •
3
Joan
Smith
S
o what’s the plan? Has rape eff ectively
been decriminalised in Britain? I think
we should be told, because that’s
what it looks like to me – and no one in
authority is prepared to do anything
except order another bloody review.
How many reviews do we need? We all
know the chances of any rapist being
sent to prison are now vanishingly small. The mayor
of London’s victims’ commissioner, Claire Waxman ,
has just published a report on the rapes reported to the
Metropolitan police during a single month, April 2016.
There were 501 in all, and only 3% led to a conviction –
and even they, on average, took 18 months.
Predictably, things have got even worse since then.
Up-to-date fi gures obtained last week by the Guardian
show that only one in 65 rapes reported to the police in
England and Wales leads to a charge or summons – just
1.5 %. But then the criminal justice system has been
failing women for decades – and I think I know why.
Rape is unique because there is no other crime where
victims are regarded with such a degree of scepticism,
not least from the professional experts : police and
prosecutors. The culture of suspicion is now so deep-
rooted that police forces are subjecting complainants to
a massive invasion of privacy, demanding that they hand
over mobile phones and school, college and medical
records that predate the alleged attack by decades.
Just about every other expert on sexual violence –
feminist lawyers and academics, chief executives of
women’s organisations and victims themselves – is
outraged by this. But they tend not to be highly regarded
by the criminal justice system; sometimes they’re
even regarded as opponents, as endlessly making
unreasonable demands and banging on about the impact
of inequality. Black women are over represented among
the victims in Waxman’s report, yet we know from
organisations supporting black and minority ethnic
women that they fare even worse when it comes to
getting support after an attack, let alone justice.
This is a powerful argument for diversity in the
criminal justice system. Unconscious bias abounds,
something I fi rst noticed when I covered the Yorkshire
Ripper murders as a young reporter in the late 1970s.
Peter Sutcliff e’s victims included white, black and Asian
Joan Smith
is the author of
Home Grown
and a former
co-chair of
the mayor
of London’s
violence against
women and girls
panelCampaigners
protest during
the early
1980s against
the handling
of the Peter
Sutcliff e case
PHOTOGRAPH:
KEYSTONE/GETTYwomen. But the investigation was placed solely in the
hands of white working-class men who then reinforced
each other’s prejudices.
Detectives catastrophically misconstrued the killer’s
motivation, insisting he was driven by a hatred of
prostitutes and categorising his attacks on other women
as “mistakes”. They dismissed the testimony of one of
the surviving witnesses, who insisted that the man who
had brutally attacked his victims spoke with a Yorkshire
accent. Instead they convinced themselves that they
were being taunted by the killer, haring off in search
of a fraudster from the north-east who mocked them
in letters and a tape. And the real killer, Peter Sutcliff e ,
remained free to attack other women.
It was a painful insight into the failure of the criminal
justice system to understand the nature of male
violence. Years later I had another epiphany, when I
noticed that all the men who carried out fatal terrorist
attacks in London and Manchester in 2017 had a history
of abusing women. When I pointed it out in a meeting
with one of the country’s most senior police offi cers,
he looked aghast and said no one had mentioned the
connection before. The next time I saw him, he told me
he had returned to Scotland Yard and asked if there was
any data on terrorists who had previously abused wives
or girlfriends – and was told it didn’t exist.C
ounter-terrorism experts had
somehow managed to miss the
vital link between mass killers and
violence against women and girls.
Yet I found enough examples of it to
write an entire book, listing dozens
of terrorists and mass shooters who
started out by terrorising female
family members. Women who work with victims of
domestic and sexual violence had noticed the pattern –
but nobody talked to them.
Eight years ago, following a series of damning
reports by the then Independent Police Complaints
Commission about the force’s handling of serious sex
off ences, the Met adopted a new policy of believing
women (and men) who reported a rape. It shouldn’t be
a big deal for offi cers to accept that a sexual crime has
been committed, just as they do when someone reports
a burglary, but even getting that far had taken years
of campaigning. Last year, however, the Met police
commissioner, Cressida Dick, reversed it.
It was part of the fallout from Operation Midland,
the force’s catastrophically mishandled investigation
into lurid claims about the existence of a VIP paedophile
ring by a man known as “Nick”, now revealed to be
the convicted paedophile and fraudster Carl Beech- who was sent to prison for 18 years last week for
perverting the course of justice.
Detectives are not usually so quick to believe rape
allegations, and it’s hard to avoid a weary sigh over the
way senior offi cers allowed themselves to be duped
by a male fantasist. But it’s also hard to think of a more
egregious example of listening to the wrong people - men talking among themselves, in other words, as
they have for centuries.
The criminal justice system needs to do many
things if it is serious about tackling its dismal track
record in rape cases. One of the very fi rst is showing
some humility and listening to the people who really
know what’s going on. Frankly, if you really want to
understand male violence, you need to listen to women.
To understand
violent men,
ask the women
who know
Opinion
The Yorkshire
Ripper case
was placed solely in
the hands of white
men who then
reinforced each
other’s prejudices
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS