If you are raped in London today, and you are one of the tiny minority of people with enough confidence in the system to report the attack, the trial for this horrible crime might not take place until 2030. That is unless it is postponed to even later… This unbearable wait for justice has been getting worse and worse. When I was selected as the Labour candidate for Bolsover, the first person to contact me was a woman who had waited four years and five months from rape to trial.
Her case was postponed for a third time, and she was distraught. The prolonged agony triggered multiple suicide attempts. I love Bolsover’s small villages and their strong community bonds, but walking around seeing the perpetrator and his family every day made that wait even harder.
Her rapist is now in prison and her little boy still has his mummy. I’m so grateful that she’s here to tell her story. Not every story ends this way. “Wait it out, and she’ll drop out.” I have no doubt this is what the perpetrator was hoping for, and who can blame him? 60 per cent of rape victims drop their cases while waiting for them to go to trial. This means that if you rape a woman, you’re probably going to get away with it.
Firstly, women think it is all their fault they have been raped, because society tells them it is. I had no idea this was so endemic, until I started speaking out. I speak to women all the time about my passion for changing the way we talk about rape, and how we have to be more open if shame is ever to change sides. Far too often during these conversations, women suddenly disclose, for the first time, that they have been raped. It is often the first time they have ever admitted it to themselves too.
Secondly, and understandably, barely anyone reports their attack. Rape Crisis estimates 1 in 6 women go to the police, though this could be the tip of the iceberg. The trauma of having your integrity, clothing and call history publicly questioned, combined with lengthy delays, means that less than half of women make it report to trial. Women are being retraumatised for far too long, in a system that lets them down so badly.
This is the Conservative legacy. Prisons full to bursting, victims abandoned, women scarred by rape, then failed by the State. A broken court system that means the wait for a trial is longer than Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s premierships combined.
Unpicking the damage is a mammoth task, but this government has hit the ground running and has already made progress on our commitment to halving violence against women and girls in a decade. We’re making sure that reports of rape are handled by specialist 999 call handlers, establishing taskforces in every police force to properly investigate offences, spending £550m on specialist services over the next three years, providing agencies with the multi-year funding they need to be able to plan for the future. I am thrilled to see us accept the recommendations of the Law Commission banning the use of victims’ sexual history to undermine their evidence. We’re making sure it is defendants, not victims, on trial.
The State is beginning to wrap its arms around women as we make sure they are believed and supported by our institutions, but we have to harness the nation’s sense of urgency to do more. There are 78,000 cases waiting to be heard in the Crown Court, and almost half of these are for violent and sexual offences. We must slash the half-a-decade wait for justice; if we don’t tackle this, everything else is just tinkering around the edges.
I see reforming our court system as integral to helping sexual violence victims get justice. Let’s create quicker, more predictable and efficient routes for dealing with lower-level cases and free up Crown Court time, so that the most serious crimes are heard quickly and fairly. We must give our esteemed judges more control over how cases progress; if we don’t, we continue with a system that denies timely justice, and fails to deter crime.
This is why David Lammy’s criminal court reform agenda will be so transformative for victims and avoid a complete breakdown in their trust in the courts.
I got into politics because I feel so strongly about the difference it can make. I do not want rape to be part of my story, but rape is a part of our story as women; a part we don’t tell. It is why I will keep speaking out about my experience, even when I wish I didn’t have to: it is the only way to shine alight on what is happening and make change possible.
We all can play our part, but only the government has the power to update our institutions. There will always be fierce opposition to change and those who shout “what about false allegations” as they do every time I use my voice to encourage women to speak up. To be clear, this is not about denying anybody justice – this is about enabling victims and innocent parties to have a more efficient path to getting that justice.
So, courage calls to courage everywhere. The government must replicate the courage of victims and use it to get our justice system moving. Show that we can be bold disruptors, smashing the status quo and taking the difficult choices to deliver. Victims across the land need leadership and decisive action. I am so happy to see that it’s time for us to pick a side. Are we on the side of victims or perpetrators? I know which side I choose.
[Read more: Can we afford jury trials?]
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