Society
No one talks of "crying burglary"
Published 14 June 2007
There is no other crime in which a victim is so widely disbelieved as rape
Glance regularly at a newspaper and you encounter horrific stories - from the abduction of Madeleine McCann, to the man who, earlier this month, killed two of his children, set their house on fire and then killed himself. But for a story that sums up the full rainbow horror of human nature - the sadness and nastiness and bad faith that human beings can inflict on one another - the less widely reported tale of Sara Clark is as strong as any.
Last month, this 18-year-old woman was brutally raped as she walked home from a night out with friends in Southampton. She reported the attack to the police, but when they failed to get in contact over the following days, she began to suspect they weren't taking the case seriously. For its part, Hampshire Police has said that it recognised that her injuries were consistent with rape, that it had been taking the case seriously, but had had trouble contacting her.
Clark also read a series of disparaging remarks that had been posted by members of the public on a local newspaper website, including the comment that she had probably just had "an argument with a boyfriend and cried rape". Her parents knew that all this had upset her, but not how much. In the early hours of the first Saturday in June she walked to a motorway footbridge, scaled a high fence and threw herself off. The resulting head injuries killed her.
Given that rape victims experience higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder than war veterans, Clark might well have been suicidal even without the spectres that arose between her attack and her death. It seems likely, though, that the responses she encountered (the casual intimations that she had "cried rape") were a distinct contributory factor.
In feeling disbelieved, Clark was far from alone. Recent research on this subject puts the number of false allegations in rape cases at 3 per cent - the same proportion you would expect to find in any crime - yet there is no other situation in which the victim is so widely disbelieved. No one talks of people "crying burglary" or "crying mugging" and yet the term "cry rape" is firmly established and featured in countless tabloid headlines last year. When it comes to rape, the perspective that "women lie" is ingrained in our culture. When police officers were asked how many reports of rape they thought were invented, they estimated 23 per cent of the total.
All of which leaves women adrift in the criminal justice system. Of an estimated 50,000 rapes each year in the UK, just over a fifth are reported to police and, of these reported cases, 5.3 per cent result in a conviction. If we take all those estimated cases into account, a rapist has about a 1 per cent chance of being convicted. Those cases that do end in justice for the victim tend to be the most cut and dried - incidents in which a woman has been pulled off the streets by a stranger and threatened with a knife, for instance. If a woman has been out drinking with the man who decides to rape her, the chances of a conviction plummet. And the most innocuous things can count against her. If she happened to have been carrying condoms at the time of the attack, for instance, this can be used in the defendant's favour.
Over the past few years, yet another horror has raised its head: the chance that, when a rape case falls through or results in an acquittal (as in almost every case it will) the complainant will be charged with perverting the course of justice.
In recent months, we've seen more and more of these cases reported in the press and, while some are the result of that 3 per cent of false allegations, others have seemed much less clear cut. One young woman I met received a caution from the police after they suggested her claim to have been gang-raped was invented. The police were forced to wipe the caution when the victim brought a legal challenge. Those who work with rape victims suggest darkly that charging the complainant is a way for police to improve the rape conviction rate, since the allegation becomes "no crimed". Officially, it didn't happen.
It also seems a sure way to stop women reporting rape. Who would not be put off by the prospect of finding themselves in the dock?
Accepted wisdom states that we are living in a post-feminist, post-sexist era, in which women have never had it so good. And yet, when it comes to a crime that affects tens of thousands of women each year, we've seen the conviction rate plummet from 33 per cent in the 1970s, to 24 per cent in 1985, to a negligible 5.3 per cent today.
This whole situation seems proof of an institutionalised misogyny that cuts to the heart of British society, a national disgrace magnified by the apparent lack of public or political will to really tackle the issue. Until we do, we will undoubtedly see more cases such as that of Sara Clark, as well as quieter cases of women trapped for years in a private hell, having been bludgeoned emotionally, first by their attacker and then by those they trusted to believe them.
Kira Cochrane is women's editor of the Guardian
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