Humanising the victims

LOUISE NOUSRATPOUR hears how attitudes towards rape must change.

Monday June 4, 2007
The Morning Star

"I WAS gang-raped by three boys last June and left half-naked in a park," Suswati Basu told a one-day conference on Rape, Media and the Criminal Justice System in London's City Hall on Friday.

"When I called the police, a female officer came to the scene and, as soon as she smelt alcohol on me, she judged me," Ms Basu reported, adding: "She was extremely rude and unsympathetic."

She recalled how she was made to feel suicidal by police and the prosection, who treated her case with little sympathy and later cautioned her for "crying rape" while her perpetrators still roamed free.

Ms Basu's lawyer Harriet Wistrich explained that she had to convince the court to delete the caution imposed on Ms Basu and warned that Britain was not far from practicing "state-sponsored misogyny."

Sadly, Ms Basu's uphill struggle for justice is not an isolated case.

Conference heard that countless sex-crime victims face institutionalised prejudice, with the victim often held partially or wholly responsible on the basis that "her skirt was too short" or that "she had too much to drink."

With an estimated 47,000 rapes a year in Britain, the dismal 5.6 per cent conviction rate is a stark reminder of the scale of the problem.

London mayoral adviser for women and women's issues Annie Marjoram said that the event aimed to "drag the issue into the public eye and stress that rape is state business, not private."

She celebrated the successes of the three groundbreaking rape centres, called "havens," established around London as well as the Metropolitan Police specialist unit the Sapphire Team.

"These should be seen as a gold standard for the rest of Britain," Ms Marjoram said.

As the government looks to develop new legislation on rape, she stressed the need for a public debate on how to best improve conviction rates.

Speakers were particularly scathing about the disproportionate amount of media coverage given over to anomalous stories of women who "cry rape."

And they attacked the justice system for bringing charges against these women while letting rapists go free.

Conference demanded that police and judiciary adopt firm policies against such "nonsensical" charges.

Guardian women's editor Kira Cochrane admitted that the mass media often churns out salacious headlines, reconfirming public prejudices, when reporting rape.

She complained that the news agenda is skewed by a constant quest for fresh, headline-grabbing stories, making it difficult to report on age-old issues such as rape.

The veteran feminist and women's writer challenged journalists to look for "new and interesting ways to put rape on the news agenda."

Alice Vachss, who is one of the most successful sex-crime prosecutors in the US, urged Britain to adopt the US system whereby the jury is vetted for prejudice and prosecutors receive specialist training, with direct access to victims from day one.

By comparison, there are few specially trained prosecutors in Britain and they have no contact with the victim until the day of trial.

The prosecution must pile on the details to build a profile of her mental state and background to "make the victim human," Ms Vachss argued, adding: "The truth lies in the details."

Richard Sumray, who is chairing a government review into rape convictions, admitted that the criminal justice system was letting the victim down and pledged to "change what is wrong with the system."

A 2005 Amnesty International report found that one-in-three respondents believed that women who behaved flirtatiously were partially or wholly responsible for being raped. Around 5 per cent of women and 3 per cent of men held her "totally responsible" if she was drunk.

Mr Sumray acknowledged the need for more trained specialists within the police and judiciary as well as "a significant public-education programme to change prejudiced thinking and influence the way people - and therefore police and the jury - think."