Rape action plan: investigations must ‘focus on accused, not complainant’

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accused, consensual, consent, myths, rape

Rape action plan: investigations must ‘focus on accused, not complainant’

Prosecutors and police investigating rape cases must place greater emphasis on examining whether suspects sought consent for sex from alleged victims, according to an official action plan published on Friday.

In a coordinated attempt to reverse declining conviction rates, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, and a senior Metropolitan police officer, Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt, have agreed to examine how a suspect’s “reasonable belief” that consent had been given is assessed by the courts.

The focus on establishing what steps a defendant took to ensure that sexual activity was consensual and whether the alleged victim was capable of giving consent is aimed at improving procedures.

While the number of prosecutions and convictions has increased following changes to the way rape cases are handled, the conviction rate dropped from a record high of 63.2% in 2012-13 to 60.3% in 2013-14.

CPS figures express the percentage of cases charged as rape and resulting in conviction for rape or another offence. Most rape complaints do not lead to charges being brought while as few as 10% of rapes are estimated to have even been reported to police in the first place.

The Rape action plan, agreed by Saunders and Hewitt, who is the national policing lead on rape offences, is partially a response to a sharp drop in the number of cases being referred by police to the CPS in 2012-13.

The document urges police officers and prosecutors to “focus their cases on the behaviour of the accused, not the complainant”, noting that pervasive myths remain, not only among investigators but society as a whole, which may be a barrier to justice for vulnerable victims.

“Despite efforts to raise awareness, many people still believe a rapist is a man in a balaclava in a dark alley, and a victim is a woman who shows her fear through fight,” the plan adds. “That is very rarely the case – most rapists know their victim, many victims do not physically fight, and the trauma of being raped will effect each victim differently.

“There is an urgent need to change the discourse on rape. Our police officers, our prosecutors, our courts and our communities must reject the out of date myths and acknowledge the realities of rape. We also need to debate and understand the fundamental issue of consent.”

Another proposed change is in the handling of cases that do not result in charges. Officers and prosecutors are to be encouraged to “develop an exit strategy following a police decision to take no further action in order to assess the risk of reoffending by the alleged perpetrator, and to safeguard the victim against future abuse”.

The action plan is the outcome of more than six months of discussions by a rape scrutiny panel convened to investigate the fall in the number of rape-flagged cases referred by police to the CPS. The latest figures show an 8% rise in the volume of police referrals for 2013-14 compared with 2012-13. Seven hundred more defendants have been charged over the same period – an increase of 25% from the previous year.

Saunders, said: “Even though there have been slightly more defendants convicted, the steady increase in conviction rates we have seen in recent years has halted, and this must be addressed immediately.

“The new action plan makes very clear that, as with cases of child sexual abuse, the focus of any investigation and case preparation should not be on the credibility of the victim but on the credibility of the overall allegation, including the actions of the suspect.

“Where cases turn on the issue of consent prosecutors must focus on what steps a suspect has taken to seek consent from the complainant and the extent to which an alleged victim is capable of giving consent.”

Hewitt, said: “All the changes we have made in the way police deal with sexual offences – specialist training of officers, the introduction of early evidence kits, greater access to sexual assault referral centres and working closely with support groups – are changes that have emerged from looking at ourselves and realising that we can do things better.”

Labour’s shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry MP, welcomed the plan. She said: “We have been pressing for months for action on falls in the numbers of rape cases charged, prosecuted and convicted so it’s good to see some concrete measures.

“However, given that the proportion of rape cases referred by the police for charges fell to a third in 2012-13 and that conviction rates are falling sharply as well, it remains to be seen whether these measures will be strong enough to turn around these worrying trends. If we don’t see the necessary change, ministers will need to consider imposing more stringent obligations on how prosecutors and police handle these cases.”

Professor Liz Kelly, co-chair of End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “Everyone reporting sexual violence deserves the highest standards from the criminal justice system and the national scrutiny panel has identified actions, which, if implemented consistently across England and Wales, provide an opportunity to achieve this.”

How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?

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consent, peer pressure, rape, relationships, responsibility, Self-esteem, sexual assault

How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?

“Young people will describe scenarios where, I think ‘this sounds abusive’,” says Rhiannon Holder, a youth worker for Brook, the sexual advisory service for young people and co-chair of Bread, a Bristol youth project.

“They’re not sure if they had sex or they wanted sex – and if they did have sex they’re not sure if they consented to it. As professionals, we’re having to reflect to young people [that some] of the situations they have experienced could be labelled as sexual bullying or assault, or rape.”

With politicians such as George Galloway and Tony Benn spouting shameful ideas of what consent means (having sex with someone who is asleep is “bad sexual etiquette”, not rape, according to Galloway), a worryingly high proportion of the adult public doesn’t seem to grasp it either. A survey for Amnesty found 37% of respondents thought a woman was responsible for being raped if she didn’t say “no” clearly enough. With attitudes like this, is it any surprise young people may be dangerously confused?

They certainly seem to be. Only 69% of young men would not try to have sex with someone who did not want to, and one in 20 said they would try to have sex with someone who was asleep, according to a shocking 2010 survey of young people aged between 18 and 25 by the Havens, the specialist London-based sexual assault referral centres. A significant proportion also seemed confused about what constitutes rape: only 77% of young men agreed that having sex with someone who has said no was rape. While in 2009, a study for the NSPCC found a third of girls aged between 13 and 17 who were in relationships had experienced unwanted sexual acts, and one in 16 had been raped.

So, what needs to change? “Too often [consent] is viewed as a simple yes or no, and it’s much more complex than that,” says Holder. “I don’t think many young people are offered the opportunity to explore all of the factors involved in giving consent: peer pressure, alcohol and drugs, self-esteem, coercion, gender issues.”

When Holder does workshops with young people, she asks them to consider different scenarios, “and generate discussion around what it means to be in a relationship; what it means to have safe and positive sex. For instance, we would look at situations where you have had sex with someone before, or if you’ve kissed somebody; does that mean you have to go on and have sex? Also it’s about taking responsibility for consent, so making it clear it’s not just the person who has the responsibility for saying ‘yes’. Young men should actively be seeking consent.”

It isn’t just about the words, she says. “We’ll explore what ‘yes’ does, and doesn’t, look like.”

“Often people don’t say ‘no’ but they’ll say ‘that hurts’, or ‘not yet’, or ‘I don’t like it’. Or it might be in their body language,” she adds.

Then there are the assumptions about timing, she says. “A lot of the young people I have met are shocked that you can revoke consent – you might have had sex with somebody before, or started a sexual act, but that doesn’t mean the sex can’t stop at any time.

“I’ve spoken to young people who have said they didn’t really want to do it, but they didn’t know how to say ‘no’ or ‘stop’.”

Whitney Iles, a community activist, agrees. She thinks many young people are confused by “so many different messages. On one side, you’re told about how you should have sex within a loving relationship, on the other side you can see how pop culture is highly sexualised. It’s a real confusion over identity and value of self, which then makes it harder to know what you want and where the line is. There is a blurred line of what is normal, or what has become normalised, and what is crossing a line.”

Earlier this year, the government launched an online and TV advertising campaign to educate teenagers about rape, and consent, but it seems a poor substitute for good sex education in schools. The problem, says Simon Blake, chief executive of Brook, is that sex education “is incredibly patchy, and what young people have been saying for a really long time is ‘too little, too late, too biological’.”

The Labour government failed to do enough to make personal, social, health and economics education (PSHE), of which sex and relationships education (SRE) is a part, a statutory requirement for schools. “Although secondary schools have to teach some SRE, virtually nothing is specified and there is no agreed curriculum for it, so schools can teach what they like,” says Jane Lees, chair of the Sex Education Forum.

The government’s review of PSHE, which ended last year, is still to report, but things could get even worse, Lees fears. “Our concern is that it is likely to slim it down much more, or reduce the expectation that schools will teach it,” she says. “When the coalition came in and started the review of PSHE, one of the issues that they raised was about consent, so it is on their minds but we still have no final outcomes from it. We’re in limbo at the moment.”

“A lot of young people are growing up without really knowing what consent means,” says Whitney Iles. “But then I think a lot of adults don’t really know either.”