.png)
17 hours ago
3
Eighty-three per cent of women who are raped in England and Wales do not report it to the police, which is partly why universities have a student resolution procedure – so that students who don’t want to press charges can still have redress. But at the University of Bristol, says Katie White, co-founder of Enough, the campaign to stop violence against women: “Fewer than five people report to the university each year.” She continues: “There are estimates that 8% of female students are raped while they are at university, so just calculating the student body at Bristol, that’s 500 students a year. It’s staggering. That’s about 99% of students not reporting officially.”
That’s the background to Enough, a not-for-profit that has handed out 4,500 self-swab “rape kits” in Bristol. You send them to a lab, and they will pass the results on to the police if that’s what you decide you want. You can also write a time-stamped testimony of what happened, on its website. Rather than a searchable database, this is a locked portal that only the victim can access. The point is twofold: it can be referenced for future criminal proceedings if there are any, and it is an accepted waypoint in trauma recovery, to record rather than try to forget what happened. It is estimated that 94% of rape survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in the first two weeks following an attack. Enough says it has received 100 reports to the portal in its first six weeks alone.
It’s not, at first glance, a feel-good initiative; it’s like a hologram of justice, all the apparatus but no consequence. Plus, it is hard to say whether the self-tested swabs would be admissible in court. Sarah Crewe, chief constable at Avon and Somerset police, suggested in an interview with BBC Radio Bristol that they might be, but still urged victims of rape to go instead to a sexual assault referral centre (Sarc), which doesn’t necessitate reporting to the police, and where you will get more support, as well as STI tests and emergency contraception.
It was only when I was speaking to White, that I began to comprehend the reality of why rape victims don’t go to the police, or in the case of students, the university. Only 5% of cases given an outcome by police result in a charge, which is what led the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, Dame Vera Baird, famously, to describe rape as having been “decriminalised”. This situation is only getting worse: Yesterday’s Guardian analysis showed that in the year to June 2024, 89% of violent and sexual crimes reported in England and Wales were closed without a suspect being caught or charged.
Every stage of that road to probably nothing is arduous. The process at a Sarc takes six hours, the swab results don’t even get analysed until a charge is brought, and, even then, only if the defendant denies having had sex; the defence is much more often that the sex was consensual. Victims have their computer and phone taken away, often for years. The backlogs in the system mean that these cases are spanning five years of a victim’s life, and, in the best case scenario, that it ends in a court date, that could be called off at the 11th hour because of a lack of barristers. In London, 65% of victims drop out of this draining Kafka-esque process before the trial.
The university student resolution process carries no obligation to involve the police, and against that backdrop you can understand why; but it can’t really replicate a judicial process, except in the sense that it is also grindingly slow. The maximum possible sanction is to suspend the perpetrator, but they can appeal the decision while the victim cannot.
As understandable as it is, then, that student victims of sexual violence have lost faith in the police and the universities, this creates a culture of silence and impunity. So, just having rape kits on campus is a sea change. It may turn into the deterrent that the law no longer provides. It also forces the question, when do we stop using “state failure” and start using “failing state”?
