Female Rape Survivors Deterred From Reporting And It Isn’t Due To Shame.
99% of cases of rape don’t even make it to court due to prejudice against females within the justice system.
The recent pandemic has brought every terror of the human condition to the forefront; we have had very little to do with our time but worry, wash our hands, and think long and hard about the things we have done that have led to where we are. War, selfishness, irritation, anger.
Here is the paragraph where I invite you to drop off your “not all men” rhetoric. Take a ticket, you can pick up your privilege again when you leave but we cannot knowingly allow that sort of nonsense in this place. Should you choose to continue with your license to lament over virulent ‘misandry’, do so you at your own risk. But you know what they say about knife crime; you are twice as likely to be stabbed if you carry a knife. It’s sort of the same; you are far more likely to be wounded by the patriarchy here if you’re carrying it…the result will be less messy, use up fewer services; but it’s still going to cause an injury.
Suitably warned? Okidokie!
Bold statement: No woman, assigned female at birth (AFAB)or no, given the choice would choose to publicly check the “female” box.
Those that present as female to the world are treated differently. And by differently, I mean worse. It is not some petty feminist argument, it is not a reason to free the nipple, it is not an excuse for some #metoo merch; it is simply a well-studied fact. A survey of pandemic induced unemployment in the United States between February and April of 2020 indicated that female unemployment rose nearly 10% higher than that of men. Though those levels have evened out, women are still at a 2 to 3% disadvantage.
Younger women in female-oriented industries (nursing, teaching and social care) had a higher risk of infection but the gender-pay gap remains steady.
However, no-where is the gender disparity more demonstrated than in the circumstances of reporting, prosecuting and convictions in sexual assault and rape.
Bold statement: No woman, assigned female at birth (AFAB)or no, given the choice would choose to publicly check the “female” box.
The ONS revealed that between March 2019 to March 2020, although there was 2% drop in reported cases of sexual violence across the United Kingdom, over 4 times as those female/female identifying than men reported sexual assault or violence, including rape. 70% of women knew their assailant and 50% reported it being a current or ex-partner. This 2% drop could be affiliated with the minority of rapes committed by strangers given the pressure of the pandemic beginning to restrict socialization; there was less opportunity for rapists to rape. Or 2% of rapists took a holiday. While we wait for the official results of information gathering for 2021, we can look to other genderized crime in order to determine a prospective rise.
Domestic Abuse cases of all kinds across the board have increased exponentially throughout the pandemic with the ONS indicating a 9% increase overall within the first 3 months of lockdown in 2020. This remained at a 10% increase overall into 2021 with the majority of crimes being reported, again, by women.
The world is slowly returning to some semblance of normality. So let us see where we left off.
In January, 2020 (that feels like so long ago) Britain was rocked by the news that a young girl was returning from Aiya-Napa, Cyprus, with a conviction for purportedly lying about a gang rape involving 12 men taking place in July 2019. After 7 months of being held by the Cypriot authorities, she came home traumatized and with the general public criticising the overall handling of her as an individual, and of the case. It went so far as to result in a public outcry to boycott the holiday destination.
The 70-page case-file revealed every stigma, suspicion and failure one could press onto a young woman on holiday, alongside the few successful executions of justice to obtain a ‘suitable verdict’. What was made abundantly clear was that the Cypriot government insisted that this woman, regardless of the transpiring events, had goaded these 12 gentlemen into the group sexual act and then reported them out of subjective shame. She received a 4-month suspended sentence for “public mischief” was allowed to return home. The case is currently awaiting appeal.
It turns out there was little need as the majority of the United Kingdom, and the rest of the world, descended into international lockdown. No-body was going to be going anywhere.
I am going to be very blunt; though Cypriot government has a poor track record when it comes to the management of cases of physical or sexual violence towards women, you have to give them the credit of doing it so openly. The attitude that women earn their sexual assault through dress or behaviour still remains with 3 out of 10 people in Scotland.
There is no longer a question for why a victim does not report? Why bother when your case is most likely going to be tossed aside because 2500 rapes and sexual assaults came before yours…
Focusing on our own homes and to our own communities, the United Kingdom currently holds itself in high regard when it comes to the treatment of women who come forward with allegations of rape insisting that only 1 in 10 people believed that a woman would lie about rape. The majority of services focus on prevention, and aftermath. In the wake of the pandemic, the government increased funding for services dedicated to preventing violence of all types against women. It might be hard to believe considering the clear danger of this gendered crime, but until the end of 2019 there was no specifically allocated budget for Women’s Services at all.
Pre-pandemic numbers suggest a very contentious backstory to this. With Covid-19 putting a stopper in most public courts, those seeking justice become part of a backlog that has, somehow, been clearing itself since 2015 revealing fewer charges, even fewer prosecutions and even fewer convictions. You can give Women all the Services you want, but if you are not going to nip the problem in the bud, how will the female population thrive, or even trust those services.
Could this be due to the fact that, as far as the public are concerned, 3 out of 10 women goad men into sexual assault by wearing a short skirt. Or that a quarter of people maintain that men are a slave to their sexual urges towards women and are, therefore, blameless and incapable of deciding whether it is right, moral and just to rape?
What is scarier, and lesser known, is that there are limits and goals to how many rape prosecutions are actually seen by a judge. The Crown Prosecution Service monitors and collates data in order to determine success and failures in prosecution across localities. Similar to league tables for school achievement, poor prospects are held back so higher achievement takes focus and targets can be met. Sometimes the decision comes down to whether a prosecution for a rape crime will result in the gold star of a conviction, adding to the 85% pass rate of successful convictions.
The majority of cases are ruled out at this step due to similar public bias; lack of evidence, so called Romeo & Juliet bias, perception of relationship, sexual history, gender, circumstances of report, victim character and, my biggest gripe, the victim’s refusal to pass over their mobile phone or laptop as evidence.
I remind you; I am talking about the United Kingdom, here.
Overall, 99% of rape cases, including my own, do not make it to the court room for one reason or another but the very process introduced to protect survivors serves to avoid the process of restorative justice completely. In some cases it needlessly exacerbates the stress so the survivor simply gives up.
It has little to do with revictimization. It has little to do with the crime at hand. It is more to do with projections for success overall in a court system based in a gender bias. There is no longer a question for why a victim does not report? Why bother when your case is most likely going to be tossed aside because 2500 rapes and sexual assaults came before yours; all of them are far more subjectively convincing than yours because you were wearing trousers and living with your assailant.
Your case will bring down the entire reputation of your local prosecution. With only 1.4% of rape and sexual assaults reports resulting in even a charge, a woman has to suck it up because, if she’s aiming for justice, the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze. In fact, she will probably die of thirst before she savours even a drop of integrity.
One of the few ways women appeared to catch a break was with Corona-19 itself; In the UK, women, with COVID-19 were more likely to live and less likely to need intensive care. This is offset by the fact that transwomen have suffered even more so than those Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB) socially and financially. “Long-covid” symptoms appears to have less of an effect on women than men. Yet mother nature triumphs again without prejudice across ages; all genders seem to be surviving equally. But it’s a poor show when a rampant, killer virus demonstrates more sense of social equality and justice than the race of sentient creatures it infects.
References
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48095118
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/18/ons-survey-finds-one-in-14-women-have-been-victim-of
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50406598
https://www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk/resources-stats-key-info/#rlslider_4
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/sexualoffencesprevalenceandvictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales
https://news.sky.com/story/99-of-rapes-reported-to-police-in-england-and-wales-do-not-result-in-legal-proceedings-why-12104130
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Cyprus_rape_allegation_case#:~:text=On%2017%20July%202019%2C%20the,22%20years%2C%20for%20eight%20days.
https://coronavirusexplained.ukri.org/en/article/cad0007/#:~:text=Share%20this&text=Data%20collected%20from%20many%20countries,could%20help%20to%20explain%20why.
https://www.econ3x3.org/article/why-women-have-fared-worse-pandemic
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46554.pdf
