LONDON — Only an estimated 15 percent of female victims of rape and sexual assault in England and Wales report the crime to the police. Many of the rest say they chose not to because it was “embarrassing” or they considered the attack “too trivial or not worth reporting,” or because they “didn’t think the police could do much to help,” according to new official statistics released last week.
The publication by the Justice Ministry and the Home Office for the first time of “An Overview of Sexual Offending” also revealed that one in five of all women had been the victim of a sexual offense since the age of 16 and that there were about 400,000 adult female victims of sex crimes every year, including 69,000 victims of rape or attempted rape.
The release of these startling figures was followed a day later by the police report on the full scale of the sexual crimes committed by the late BBC host Jimmy Savile, which noted 34 rapes among 450 individual complaints and disclosed that the vast majority of victims who overcame their embarrassment to report assaults during Mr. Savile’s lifetime were not believed.
The information has triggered a wave of sober introspection about attitudes toward rape here — forcing a judderingly abrupt shift of geographical focus. For the past month, newspapers and news channels in Britain have devoted considerable attention to the unfolding details of the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in New Delhi, with commentators lining up to discuss how India is a country battling deep-seated misogyny and to condemn official reluctance to tackle seriously the issue of violence against women.
Blithely criticizing failings in attitudes toward women thousands of miles away is easy. Focusing on why it is that so few women come forward to report crimes in this country has proved harder.
The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, last Friday apologized to Mr. Savile’s victims and called for victims of any sexual abuse who felt that their complaints had not been dealt with seriously to contact the police again and have their cases reviewed by new panels that are to be set up across the country. This would be a “watershed moment” in the way that victims of sexual assault would be dealt with, he promised, stressing that it was important that victims be believed.
Campaign groups are also hoping that this will be a turning point.
“We must change the cultures and attitudes which allow abusive behavior to go unchecked,” a statement from the End Violence Against Women Coalition declared. “There is a real opportunity now to make the U.K. a global leader in how it deals with sexual and other violence against women and girls.” The low conviction rates for rape are probably part of the reason that so many women here believe that the police cannot “do much to help.”
Campaigners have previously estimated that only 6 percent of allegations of rape reported to the police resulted in a conviction for rape, but this widely cited figure has always been controversial, contested by the police and increasingly seen as part of the problem because it makes victims so cynical about the system that they decide not to press charges.
The latest statistics from the report last week suggest that conviction rates are improving, if you look at cases that get to court; of those cases prosecuted in court, 62.5 percent ended in a conviction.
Police guidelines for the sensitive handling of rape cases have been in use for some time. Staff members investigating sexual violence are trained how to talk to victims who have been raped. Those interviewers know that while they can ask any of the when, where, what and how questions, they must never ask “Why?” and particularly “Why did you do that?” because this questions a woman’s own decisions and suggests shifting some of the blame from attacker to victim.
A visit to one of Britain’s well-respected sexual assault referral centers (where victims are sensitively fast-tracked through police questioning and medical examination so no evidence is lost) shows that where they are well staffed and funded, they provide an excellent service.
But while considerable work has been done to improve police attitudes toward rape cases, the general public (which makes up the juries that listen to rape cases in court) remains very judgmental. Burglary victims are not expected to prove that they have been burgled, because people tend to believe them; rape victims still find themselves having to prove that something has happened to them and needing to justify their actions.
And it is remarkable how frequently unhelpful attitudes are revealed by people who should know better. The senior Conservative politician Kenneth Clarke got into trouble last year when he was justice secretary for giving an interview in which he talked about “serious rape,” inadvertently suggesting that he thought there were categories of less serious rape.
Then there was the senior BBC editor who, when explaining why he had chosen not to air a program about Mr. Savile’s crimes last year, breezily said there was not enough substance to the material, using the now notorious line that there were “just the women” — only the testimonies of the victims themselves.
With attitudes like these, it is hardly surprising that so many of the 85 percent of victims who were asked why they did not report the attack indicated that the process was too embarrassing and ultimately futile to undertake.
Amelia Gentleman is a journalist with The Guardian. Katrin Bennhold is on sabbatical leave.
