Someone, please, tell me what planet David Camoron is on because it certainly isn’t the same one that I’m on.
Camoron is actually fucking retarded enough to complain that England and Wales has the lowest conviction rate – 5.7% – amongst “leading” European states and suggests tightening laws to ensure more prosecutions. But the conviction rate isn’t the problem – three quarters of rapes are apparently not reported in the first place. Is the 5.7% conviction rate 5.7% of the rapes reported or 5.7% of this hypothetical figure of unreported rapes? Does this mean that, actually, 22.8% of reported rapes result in conviction? Is that a good rate of conviction?
What next? Will targets be introduced for convictions? Will judges be told to convict more suspects if they’re missing their targets? Can we expect innocent men to be locked up in the name of hitting a government target?
There is something seriously wrong with that man.
Technorati Tags: David Cameron, Rape
Sky Isnt News were repeating this line this afternoon:
“England and Wales have the lowest rates of rape conviction of ‘any nation’ in the EUssr”.
Sorry, but this is the weakest post I’ve seen yet on this blog.
Having two different friends who’ve been raped, the situation is far more complicated than just introducing more abhorrent targets, as you seem to be suggesting.
Firstly, the statistic that, apparently, only a quarter of rapes are actually even reported, shows a clear problem with the victims. Whether they’re not reporting because they’re embarrassed, don’t think that they’ll be believed, are scared, don’t want the stigma of the case, or something else entirely, it’s at the base of the problem. There’s a whole set of interweaving layers which start here, going right up to failed convictions.
Alcohol is all too often involved in one way or another, and particularly if the victim is drunk, there’s a good chance that their memory, for example, won’t stand up to particularly close scrutinisation by the defence team. It’s a classic his-word-against-mine type situation, and that’s if the attacker can be identified in the first place. Even supposing that a trial has got past all of that, I actually can’t count how many times I’ve read of rape cases collapsing because of tiny technicalities and mistakes made by the police during investigation.
Then there’s the issue of why it happens at all. As has been pointed out, far too many men think that they can get away with it, that they have some kind of right to receive sex, and so on and so forth. I’m not sure of the best way to try and target this, but the idea of addressing the subject in sex education classes seems to me to be a good place to start.
This general issue of why it happens in the first place is, from what I’ve read, what Cameron seems to be wanting to address.
In short, the issue of only a 5.7% conviction rate (out of 25% reported) – and how to improve it – has many factors. Some can be affected by the right action (attitudes, investigation, etc), and some can’t (identification, for example). But targets are nothing to do with it.
Fair point about the England and Wales thing though.
You must have mis-read what I wrote Aaron, I’m not suggesting targets – that would be ridiculous. I’m questioning the statistics and the real problem that needs to be addressed which is not conviction rates but the number of rapes reported. Is the 5.7% conviction rate 5.7% of reported rapes or is the real rate 22.8% but only one quarter of that figure is being quoted because they estimate that three quarters aren’t reported?
Going by the BBC here (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7090065.stm), 5.7% of reported.
“The Tory leader said some statistics suggested one in 20 women had been raped, yet three-quarters of them never report the crime. And of those that are reported, just 5.7% result in a conviction, he said.”
Admittedly I’ve not actually bothered to look anywhere else, and haven’t heard the speech myself, but that article actually makes no mention of laws other than in the title. Unless they’re referring to tougher sentencing, which I think was mentioned. But with the average rape conviction being of (apparently) three years, I personally certainly wouldn’t discourage much higher terms. Rape, IMO, is a more serious crime than murder in many ways; at least when you kill someone, they’ve not got the horrific ordeal of having to relive the attack.
Back to the article however, if you cut out all the speculative filler, it sounds like Cameron’s aiming to combat the causes and motives of rape, whilst improving support for victims. I think, really, it’s all interlinked and closely linked in such a way that to combat one will be pretty directly effective to the other. If there’s more, better support then more cases are likely to be reported, and investigated etc better, leading to more convictions. Combatting why people think rape is ok in the first place, can only lower the number of rapes which are happening TO be able to be reported.
Of course, a good question at this point is how the statistics of unreported rapes are calculated. Asking someone, for the purposes of such a survey, if they’ve been raped will probably result in a more ‘liberal’ definition of rape in their mind than if they were actually more in a position of doing something about it. If that makes sense.
Rape is a terrible crime but the problem is in getting women to report the crime if three quarters of them aren’t reported. What would you do to increase the conviction rate? Is it worth the risk of convicting innocent men of rape to increase the conviction rate? If you concentrate entirely on tightening up laws then the only way you will increase the conviction rate as I see it is to lower the quality of evidence required to secure a conviction and then you’ll get more mis-carriages of justice.
Camoron is, sadly, another one of those idiot politicians who thinks that the answer to every problem is more money and more legislation. It’s not. I don’t think that men particularly think that rape is acceptable, I think that they just think that the risk of getting into trouble for doing it is acceptable. If only 25% of rapes are reported then there’s less chance of getting done for it.
Re your last point, I understand where you’re coming from.
For the record I don’t know what the answer is to this problem but I know that more laws or tightening existing laws is not the solution. You can’t legislate to change how people think.