Today’s Guardian has an account from a juror who was part of the 1996 trial that acquitted a perpetrator of sexual assault. He went on to rape 70 other women. Although Contempt of Court laws mean that the juror, Kathy Lette, cannot reveal the exact details of the jury’s decision, she strongly implies that 11 jurors voted the defendant innocent, with only herself considering him to be guilty. As she puts it, the jury was comprised of “One Angry Woman and 11 Irritated People Who Want Lunch”. Not only was the makeup of the jury highly unrepresentative (2 woman and 10 men), the jury was falsely led to believe that they could not convict on the women’s testimony alone, while the defence lawyer was permitted to make evidence-free insinuations about the woman’s mental health and label her a man-hater.
The sexual assault victim had never met the man before: there was not a credible reason in the world why she would lie about the assault, and yet 11 irritated jurors decided that she had done just that. Why? Because we live in a society infected with the myth that lonely, angry or jilted women like to cry rape. Take a quick look at The Guardian article’s comments if you think I’ve lost the plot. In the words of one particularly incisive commenter: “A significant proportion of rape and sexual assault allegations are false. Significant in that they are sufficient to force police, courts, juries and the rest of us to treat all such allegations with extreme caution and scepticism. Juries know this.”
The percentage of false allegations for rape and sexual assault is no higher than it is for any other crime. It is statistically no more likely that a person will falsely accuse someone of rape than it is that they will falsely accuse someone of burglary. Yet can you imagine anyone writing “a significant proportion of burglary allegations are false. Significant in that they are sufficient to force police, courts, juries and the rest of us to treat all such allegations with extreme caution and scepticism”? Replace the words “rape and sexual assault” with theft, GBH, murder, fraud, treason, dealing drugs, manslaughter or any crime you can think of. No other victims are treated with such outright scepticism- such scepticism in fact, that even the Crown Prosecution Service acknowledges the problem:
“In no other crime is the victim subject to so much scrutiny during an investigation or at trial; nor is the potential for victims to be re-traumatised during these processes as high in any other crime”.
Even though false reporting is not high, whenever a rape case goes to trial acquittal is by far the most likely outcome. But is it really any wonder that clueless jurors acquit rapists – and in the case mentioned above, let 70 other women become victims – when there exists this myth that it’s likely the victim is lying? In the 70s, conviction rates for rape were over 30%. Now they’re not even a sixth of that.
Not content with the obvious fact that the justice system is failing the victims of rape and sexual assault, the Con-Dem government is moving forwards with plans to grant anonymity not to all those accused of crimes, but just to those accused of rape. Why? Because of that tired old assumption that rape victims are likely to be telling lies. The only thing this will achieve is further convicing already biased juries that they know the trial’s outcome before the defence lawyer so much as begins the wild assertions about the victim’s moral character, provocative dress and past promiscuity. It could be worse though: The Daily Mail‘s vile pundit Melanie Phillips could get her way.
