The laudable drive to change attitudes towards violence against women
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Version 0 of 1. In the face of great odds Keir Starmer and his team of prosecutors have convicted 15,000 more men of violent crime against women in the past four years in the UK, with a 21% increase in cases to a record 91,000 last year. Those odds include a government that has cut the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) budget by 25%, public pronouncements from ministers that not all rape is "rape-rape" and an early proposal, admittedly quickly dropped, that women who accuse men of rape are named and somehow further shamed. It may seem odd to welcome an increase in crime but when set against the fact that every year in the UK more than one million women suffer domestic abuse, more than 300,000 are sexually assaulted and 60,000 women are raped, according the British Crime Survey, the gulf between actual crime and reported crime is surely even odder. As Starmer said in his remarks on the latest report on violence against women: "We face a situation where fewer than one in four people who suffer abuse at the hands of their partner – and only around one in 10 women who experience serious sexual assault – report it to the police." Such statistics have led to the oft-reported shocker that of all rapes committed, only 6% end in a conviction of rape. While others have wrung their hands about the problem of "his word against hers", or suggested that emotional attachment means women are likely to forgive and forget, Starmer and his team have quietly tried to deal with ways of increasing public confidence in reporting abuse. And they have achieved results. Some 3,000 prosecutors were trained as domestic violence specialists, with more than 800 as experts in rape cases. Then there were specialists on so-called "honour-based" violence, prostitution and trafficking, stalking, cybercrimes, female genital mutilation and child sexual exploitation such as grooming. The strategy was about informing the opinion of those who speak to victims, encouraging them to tell the truth and, more importantly, to speak out. Starmer's words during a typically robust interview with John Humphrys on Radio 4's Today programme on Monday morning caught my attention. Asked whether the now infamous Rochdale case was really about different culture attitudes of the mainly Asian men who abused these girls, Starmer admitted that this could be an issue, but not the main one. This, he said, were the "assumptions" made about these "very, very vulnerable individuals" who were just not thought credible by prosecutors. Young, desperate for affection and therefore "asking for it", they were repeatedly raped by older men for perhaps a drink or drag of a cigarette. Starmer is to chair a separate group later this year looking at the Rochdale prosecutions to learn lessons from the case. And there's more. The CPS has highlighted gang membership and female genital mutilation, which has never been subject to prosecutions in this country despite the fact that campaigners believe that tens of thousands of young girls are being cut in this way in the UK every year. His decision to tackle the "myths and stereotypes" surrounding sexual violence and the assumptions made about the "kind" of women bringing allegations of assault, has brought about the biggest single difference in the CPS's attitude. And, while this often fumbling government can seem the worst villain, we all share our part of the blame for a culture in which a victim of sexual violence is often blamed in the media and the pub either for her behaviour, or her dress, or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. |