Web of injustice - Police Federation of England & Wales

Photography:Anderson Photography
Web of injustice
The two questions typically asked of women colleagues by
often male senior officers investigating rape are: 'Do you
believe her? Is it real rape?', according to some female
police officers. Rape is an especially difficult crime to
investigate, prosecute and convict because independent
corroboration may not be available, the witness may not
be credible and juries are reluctant to return guilty
verdicts. Allegations of rape are often contested. To be
labelled either a rapist or a liar is equally serious yet there
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Feature
Can a web of myths about sexual behaviour result in a failure to
bring about justice for rape victims? Academics Jennifer Brown
and Miranda A.H. Horvath look at the evidence
is a public perception that the greater harm may be done
to a man wrongly called a rapist than to a woman wrongly
called a liar. As a consequence there is a dramatic gap
between the number of offences recorded by police and
the securing of convictions. This has been referred to as
the attrition problem. Attrition is the identification of
instances within the sequencing of reporting, recording,
prosecuting and trying of rape where cases are dropped
out of the system.

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Feature
In order to convey the extent of the justice gap, our
research evidence suggests that about 100,000 women are
raped every year in England and Wales. Figures available
from the British Crime Survey indicate that approximately
12,000 cases are annually reported to the police which
means that perhaps as many as 8 out of every 10 rapes go
unreported. Once a rape has been reported, between half
and two thirds of cases are dropped by the police and are
either no crimed or no further action is taken. Of the
remaining cases about a third to a half are dropped by the
Crown Prosecution Service and when they do get to court,
about half the cases result in a guilty verdict although this
only represents about six per cent of the original number of
cases coming to police attention.
How may we explain the attrition problem? We argue that
a series of rape myths about what constitutes a criminal
case of rape are pervasive within society and influence all
those involved, such as the victim, the offender/defendant,
police investigator, prosecutor, and members of a jury.
Rape myths are beliefs that operate to deny, downplay or
justify sexual violence that men commit against women.
Typically rape myths blame the victim for their rape; a
woman could resist if she does not want to have sex, express
disbelief in claims of rape; women exaggerate assault
behaviour; exonerate perpetrators; what does a woman
expect if she is wearing skimpy clothes, implies only certain
types of women get raped; those who get drunk, hang out
in bars. Reliance on these beliefs help people explain and
understand confusing and contested events and rationalise
problematic behaviours. Susan Estrich, an American
academic lawyer, describes “real rape” as a stereotype of an
unsuspecting woman forced to have sex without her
consent with a man she does not know and who has a
weapon with which he threatens or uses to overcome her
resistance. Estrich observes that a “real rape” victim reports
her attack directly to the police without washing away any
of the forensic traces of her attacker. In reality, the presence
of all these elements in rape is relatively rare. The research
evidence highlights that women are far more likely to be
assaulted by people they know under social circumstances.
Some recent research carried out by Betsy Stanko and
Emma Williams in the Met Police indicated two thirds of
the rapes took place in the home belonging to either the
suspect or the victim, not in a dark alley; 40 per cent of the
victims say an acquaintance raped them and 24 per cent
indicated that the perpetrator was a former intimate partner
not a stranger. Only about ten per cent of allegations were
classified as false. So the problem is not the truthfulness of
the victim rather the difficulty in determining whether the
sex that took place was criminal or not. But judgements
about what took place hinge on what the woman says
rather than the man to figure out whether it was a rape.
Vanessa Munro and Liz Kelly propose in their work,
A vicious cycle, attrition patterns in rape trials,
that a ‘vicious cycle’ operates in which stereotypical thinking
about rape continues to inform decision-making at all
stages of the criminal justice process. Rape myths may
inhibit women from reporting rape, because they think they
are not the type of woman who gets raped and are unlikely
to be believed. Police officers confirm their beliefs in high
rates of false reporting when there is an insufficiency of
evidence or women withdraw their allegations. Prosecutors
anticipate juror’s response to cases in which the evidence
deviates from the “real rape” scenario and jury’s continue to
acquit because they apply a very high threshold to beyond
reasonable doubt. The vicious cycle creates a self
perpetuating feedback loop in which the prejudicial
disbelief of women’s experience is confirmed by the
attrition process within the criminal justice system. It is
women who are considered deviant if the rape is not of the
“real rape” type.
The representation of rape is in part drawn from media
depictions which feed into myths about rape. Disputed and
contested cases fit into the media agenda of exciting and
dramatic stories and there is an increasing coverage of
stories about false allegations. The emphasis is on the
stranger, serial or multiple perpetrator rape which amplify
the stereotype. Rape is portrayed as exceptional, unusual
and not normalised or routine.
Acceptance of rape myths also predicts that a particular
piece of information is used prejudicially against the victim
such as her drinking or being drunk. Rape myth acceptance
(RMA) allows people to infer from absent information, for
example if a woman knows the defendant, then high RMA
is associated with the belief that she consented to the sex
rather than it being coerced. Police investigators seek either
to test the truthfulness of the woman’s account or they
attempt to generate proof that it happened as she said.
Lesley McMillan and Michele Thomas, Police Interviews of
Rape Victims: Tensions and Contradictions, provide some
examples from their police officer research participants of
this proof seeking or truth seeking dichotomy: ‘I’m not a lie
detector but what I do...is to get the fine grained detail. Now
the more detail you get the more easy it is to prove whether
they are lying or not’ contrasts with ‘We do our damnedest
to find the evidence if its there’.
So victims are in a double bind. On the one hand they
may be inhibited from reporting a rape if they think that
they are not the type of women who might be expected to
be raped. On the other hand if the woman has been
drinking or was raped by someone she knew, this deviates
from the “real rape” stereotype and is likely to be viewed
with disbelief. This situation is further compounded by the
belief that women must be lying because there are so few
convictions. The paucity of guilty verdicts also allows men
to rationalise their own aggressive sexual behaviour or
justify the pressures put on women to have sex they do not
want and, as such, men then normalise such sexual
encounters and do not interpret these as rape. How might
we close the justice gap? From a practice perspective, there
clearly needs to be a programme of practitioner/academic
engagement to develop practical solutions to challenging
stereotypes and combat rape myth acceptance which could
lead to better training materials and ultimately provide
women with justice at last.