Tackling Sexual Violence
1:00 pm - July 2nd 2008
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I mentioned this yesterday, in amongst a bunch of other stuff, but having done a little more research and in light of this story on the BBC…
Three AMs claim they were raped
Three members of the Welsh assembly have disclosed in a questionnaire they were sent by one of their colleagues that they have been raped.
Nerys Evans sent it to all 60 Assembly Members (AMs) and eight responded.
None of the three reported the rape, and neither did another AM who was a victim of domestic abuse.
… there’s an issue here that bears much more careful examination.
In addition to surveying her fellow AMs, Evans (Plaid Cymru) will, today. be launching the results of a survey of 700 students at Welsh Universities, conducted jointly by Amnesty International and the National Union of Students, which will show (according to the BBC) that:
…64% of respondents knew women whose partners had hit them, and 41% knew women who had been pressurised or coerced into sex.
A third also believed a woman was totally or partially responsible for being raped or sexually assaulted if she was drunk or had been flirtatious, and a quarter thought she was in some way to blame if she walked alone in a deserted area.
As yet, there’s nothing on either Amnesty’s site or that of the NUS (and a search on the Assembly website for ‘rape’ currently turns up a bunch of stuff about farming as in ‘oilseed rape’) but as soon as something concrete turns up, I’ll get a link to the report and maybe a bit of analysis of the findings, particularly on the findings on attitudes, which too often generate good headlines but do that bit too little to illuminate the issues in ways that suggest how best to try and tackle some of these attitudes – which matters as the campaign is arguing for more awareness raising and public education – but that’s a subject for another debate.
For now what I want to return to is the issue of local authority floor targets, which I noted yesterday, and the priorities that councils have agreed with the government for the next three years, priorities that will have a considerable influence on the allocation of resources provided by the DCLG to Local Authorities under a range of programmes including what are called ‘local area agreements’.
Let’s get a bit of context to start with.
Some of the headline statistics on rape and sexual violence are pretty well, even if some parts of the story can be difficult to quantify.
We know, for example, that the conviction rate in reported cases of rape is desperately low, if you compare convictions to the number of reports filed with the police and recorded on official crime statistics. Currently its about 6% of reported cases that result in a conviction at trial or guilty plea.
We also know, although this is less widely reported, that conviction rates at trial are about 49-50%, which is some way short of conviction rates for most other offences, which tend to get up into the 80-90% bracket, but a somewhat more promising figure than than the bare 6% rate from reported cases.
So, based on that, we also know that the most pressing problem in the system is not so much the trial process, despite the unique complications that the consent defence introduces, problems that are absent in most other criminal proceedings, but the whole business of getting cases to court in the first place, all of which is confirmed by Home Office research which shows that the two main reasons why rape cases fail to get to court are either that the complaint is withdrawn or because of what the system sees as ‘problems’ with the reliability of witnesses. Both of these are, again, detailed debates in their own right which, for brevity, I need to skip over, but do feel free to get into in comments if you wish.
And finally, for the purposes of this article, we know that the officially recorded incidence of rape and sexual violence in primary crime statistics is nothing like the reality due to large scale under-reporting of these offences.
How badly are these figures out?
Well in 2005/6, there were around 13,300 rapes reported in England and Wales and recorded on the official police statistics.
For the previous year (2004/5), the British Crime Survey recorded that 0.2% of female respondents reported having been raped at some point during the year, and if that figure is statistically valid – and the BCS survey is generally considered to be the more reliable measure of actual crime, then with a female population of 15.6 million, the estimated number of rapes using survey data would be around 31,000, a figure that doubles to 62-63,000 when you include attempted rape.
Overall, 2.8% of women reported to that BCS survey that, in the year it covered, they had been subjected to sexual violence of some description (included attempted assaults), which gives an extrapolated ‘raw’ figure of just over 435,000 women.
And add to that, the BCS survey also takes in the question of prevalence (i.e. lifetime experience) in addition to incidence (annual figures) giving a top-line figure of 23.8% of women aged between 16 and 59 who reported having been subjected to sexual violence at some point between the 16 and whatever age they were when the completed the survey – that’s 3,720,000 women as a raw figure.
Now, as I noted yesterday, the new set of local authority floor targets includes one, NI 026, which covers the provision of ‘specialist support to victims of a serious sexual offence’ and, after a fair bit of searching I did eventually turn up some councils that have chosen to make this a priority over the next three years.
Which ones?
Well here’s the list… Bristol, Cornwall (Country Council), Plymouth, Thurrock…
And that’s your lot.
The BCS estimates that in any given year in recent times, something like 400-450,000 women will be subjected to either attempted or actual sexual violence and that, on a lifetime basis, its getting on for 1 in 4 who will have experienced at least one such incident, and yet provision of rape and sexual violence support services are, seemingly, a priority for only four councils in England.
Wow, are our councils confident that they’re on top of this issue, or what?
Of course not, even without digging into specific areas and questioning the process by which these targets have been agreed and set, the problem is pretty obvious – when it comes to looking at the evidence to justify these targets, what many councils will have looked at are the woefully inadequate recorded crime statistics and not the BCS evidence and, on that basis, some will have concluded that the incidence of sexual violence in their area is ‘too low’ to justify prioritising rape support services, even though the BCS data says otherwise and its common knowledge, both rape support and domestic violence services, where they are provided at all, tend to be hopelessly underfunded and overstretched.
So what do we do about this?
Well let me throw a couple of ideas in the pot for consideration and we’ll see if any of them float.
The obvious one is to start posing councils a few awkward questions about their priorities and asking them to justify their decision not to prioritise these services. Some will certainly come back with some positive answers; they may already fund and support such a service in their area or, as is increasingly becoming common, it may be that a rape support service is provide by a local Women’s Aid organisation, again with funding from the Local Authority and, sometimes, the local Primary Care Trust.
Which is all well and good, as long as you also ask about the kind of funding provided and whether this given under stable commissioned contract – which is best – or still on an insecure year-on-year grant basis, which is still far too common.
However, there’s another, somewhat more strategic target we could be looking at.
Often, debates around specialist rape support and domestic violence services are dominated by the issue of funding – is it available? how much and is it enough? is it stable and given over a period of year or are these organisations living on a more or less hand-to-mouth basis?
These are important arguments, certainly, but arguments that often fail to hit the right target because they fail to focus on the one thing that council cannot ignore – their statutory duties.
We will have, in the next Queen’s Speech, a new Equalities Bill, one that, for all that last week’s announcement was dominated by employment and the gender pay gap, should be carrying forward a couple of very important agendas. One is the much needed and long overdue consolidation of our current piecemeal array of equalities legislation into a single, and hopefully, cohesive framework of law, while the second is the effective completion of the main strand of anti-discrimination law, which will extend provisions on age discrimination to cover the provision of good and services.
The general principle of the Bill is a good one, even if there’s likely to much detail to be discussed over the next year or so.
There is also an opportunity here to address the core issue of specialist service provision for women who are victims of domestic and/or sexual violence in a very simple, clear and straightforward manner, one that cuts right through the issue of funding and responsibility (i.e. who foots the bill, local or central government) and that is simply to bring the provision of these support service under an explicit statutory duty.
If councils will not voluntarily make these services a priority against the background of such a weight of evidence for their need – and I haven’t even touched on domestic violence services – then aren’t we justified in taking the issue out of their hands. The evidence to support such a move is certainly compelling enough for government to be saying to them, ‘look, this isn’t optional’ – and for us to be saying to government ‘look, you can do this – its the right thing to do’.
One clause, properly drafted, in one proposed Bill that is absolutely suited to carry such a measure could make a massive difference – that’s got to be worth a shot.
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'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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Julie Bindel on the same subject at Comment is Free
That’s actually quite restrained for Julie, even if she doesn’t seem to quite understand the difference between incidence and prevalence.
The BCS incidence figures for England and Wales for all interpersonal violence against women, which includes DV, family violence, sexual violence and stalking weigh in at around 6% per annum – around a million women in total – and prevalence is around 1 in 3.
She may well be adding the DV and sexual violence figures together when the reality is that the two figures significantly overlap but, to be fair, we’re up a level where the exact figure start to blur and its really the scale of the issue and not the exact numbers that matters to the general debate.
She’s also way off with the morbidity claim – if we accept her figures (10 suicides, 2 murders per week) that gives a death rate in women under 45 of 4 per 100,000. For cancer its 15-18 per 100,000, which circulatory diseases come in at 8-10 per 100,000.
It is on a par with deaths from respiratory disease (4 per 100,000) which is pretty alarming but not the leading cause of morbidity by quite a distance.
Again, I wonder if the error is a simple misreading of the numbers – death by injury and poisoning are the largest recorded cause of death in women under 30, but this is rapidly overtaken by the death rate for cancer in the 30-44 age group, which is 30 per 100,000.
“She’s also way off with the morbidity claim – if we accept her figures (10 suicides, 2 murders per week) that gives a death rate in women under 45 of 4 per 100,000.”
This error has appeared on the thread a few times but I’m surprised to see you make it. Morbidity does not mean the same thing as mortality (i.e. death rate). Morbidity means illness – in this case, probably hospital admissions.
This is not to say Bindel’s rather outlandish claim is statistically correct (I doubt it), but death rate figures aren’t what you need in order to counter it.
(of course, the other possibility that I hadn’t considered is that it’s her that has got morbidity and mortality confused. In the context it’s a possibility).
It would be nice to know what her source for these numbers is.
To be honest, I did think ‘surely she means mortality’ then got sidetracked by the numbers.
The context of her comments clearly seems to imply mortality…
Let’s look at the other statistics. One in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives and 10 kill themselves because of it every week. Two are murdered each week. For women under 44, it is the most common cause of morbidity – above both cancer and road accidents.
Which makes the sudden shift to morbidity a little odd and somewhat disingenuous, although whether that’s conscious thing or she’s simply cherry-picking to suit her argument is less than clear..
I should add that if we’re talking morbidity then the number one recorded cause is alcohol, although how you unpick that is another matter…
@Unity, that’s what I would have thought (without having seen any stats) also. I’d be very surprised if the #1 direct cause of hospital admissions for under 44s (either male or female) is anything other than alcohol.
True, but I guess you have to drill down into ‘alcohol related’ for the fine detail…
it’s not impossible that if you segment the data for ‘alcohol-related’ you could come up with figures showing that the number one alcohol-related cause of admission for women is ‘got the shit kicked out of me by my pissed up boyfriend/partner/husband’, closely followed by ‘drank a half bottle of gin on top of a few sleepers because my arsehole of a partner treats me like shit and batters me’.
Clinical categories can very often hide as much as they reveal.
Can I take you to task on the title of this piece? The actions you are suggesting can be summarised as “better counselling services”. This isn’t the same as tackling sexual violence.
From what I’ve read, according to the Council of Europe, and various other sources which I can’t off the top of my head remember, but will try and find for you, so as to be more precise, male violence (excluding war) is the single biggest cause of death in females (I’m not sure of the exact age range), above war, cancer and RTAs combined. The pattern changes somewhat depending on whether you’re looking at global figures or just at Europe, but the message is the same. Men are killing women on rather a large scale. That much is not in doubt. Do we want to quibble over it, or do we want to do something about it? Just wondering.
Also, do we have to actually die before someone sits up and takes notice? All this is rather a bit late for all the poor sods who go into making these types of statistics…
As a woman, I do find all this nit-picking over the details rather offensive. It feels like people are looking for a way out of making a big deal about this. I know that’s not what you’re doing, it’s just what it feels like from where I’m sitting.
Whether male violence is the first second third or fourth biggest killer or harmer of women in whatever age-group you care to mention – what actual difference does it make in terms of how you feel about it, or what you want to do about it?
Oop, forgot to mention that that the evidence from some cities in the US, where conviction rates are hitting 80%, indicates that rape support services play a significant role in improving conviction rates.
Getting support to women helps to cut the attrition rate due to witness withdrawals,
Well said, Bishop Hill.
I read the title as meaning “tackling the subject of domestic violence in the medium of blog”, in which case it’s very apt.
But you’re right, in terms of what can be done about it, while support services to help clean up the mess are definitely needed, what would be even more brilliant would be an ounce of prevention, and some joined up thinking in government and elsewhere. It’s a bit like telling people they shouldn’t smoke, while at the same time happily collecting the tax revenue…
What Bishop Hill said at number 9. Counselling is mopping up afterwards. Stopping sexual violence is a whole nother board game.
Also, sorry to flood you with comments, but I’d like to say a little word about the CPS. In order for the CPS to decide whether to prosecute a case which is sent to it by the police for decision-making (and I don’t think these are “summary” offences, but I could be wrong), the case has to pass three tests:
1. A >51% chance of conviction (in rape, that’s tricky, for the reasons you mention)
2. Being in the public interest to prosecute
3. Prosecution through the court being the most appropriate way of dealing.
I suspect it’s the first one of those that presents the greatest hurdle, and I suspect this hurdle is rather greater than that of witness withdrawal.
There’s also scope for a rather vicious circle going on here, which is that if the CPS know that the conviction rate in rape trials is 6% or whatever, then any rape case that comes to them is going to have a hard time meeting the first criterion for them to justify proceding to trial. Isn’t it?
@Clarice: Do you think it is not important to dispute dubious factual claims?
Jennie/BH:
If you think that then you’ve not taken a good look at California’s Rape Crisis programme, which funds 84 centres covering all 58 counties.
The program has had non competitive statutory funding since 1992, running to over $16 million in 2007 and is linked into the State’s specialist rape prosecution programmes, providing specialist victim/witness support alongside crisis and recovery counselling.
In California, as a whole, 44% of reported rapes result in an arrest and 64% of those cases are prosecuted, with some cities recording 80-90% conviction rates, all of which puts our pathetic prosecution rates into perspective, especially when you consider that the US criminal justice system is much more stringent than our own on things like pre-charge detention, right to silence, warrant requirements for searches, DNA evidence, etc. and presumptions of innocence and the burden of proof.
The US constitution precludes efforts to rig the criminal justice system to (unsuccessfully) increase prosecution and conviction rates for the sake of cheap newspaper headlines, which has meant that states like California have had to invest, instead, in specialist prosecutors and forensic teams and in rape support services, which support women as cases move through the criminal justice system – and California outperforms the UK on every significant indicator.
It ain’t perfect but it works about five times better than piecemeal system we have here and rape support services play a big part in that.
Unity
I hadn’t even heard of the Californian experience, which sounds interesting, and it appears to be better than what we have here.
I’ve crunched the numbers, and even in California, it looks as though 80% of rapes are going unpunished so, as you say, it ain’t perfect.
I was interested to see the comparative figures for prevalence of rape in the US and UK. Assuming that the Californian system is not universal, the US appears to have something else that we don’t, since their victimisation rate is less than half ours.
“Men are killing women on rather a large scale. That much is not in doubt. Do we want to quibble over it, or do we want to do something about it? Just wondering.”
Men are also killing men on a large scale. In fact the large majority of murder victims, assault victims, mugging victims, etc. are male. See e.g. here
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20292/47178
I don’t think it’s useful to focus on the gender of the victims*. It would be nice if violent men would stop being violent, period. Now does anyone know how to make them?
* Obviously except when this is of practical relevance – clearly preventing rape might requires different strategies to preventing organized crime.
‘the US appears to have something else that we don’t,’
Yes, carry-concealed handguns. I lived in Alaska, Missouri and Texas where guns are common place, carry-concealed permits a formaility and use of lethal force in self-defence (in MI &TX even for property defence) legal and seen as a civil right.
Results
Good – Crimes like stranger rape, stalking, flashing etc were extremely rare and women were happy to walk alone anywhere (seedy downtown, parks etc) at any time (potential perps were put off by the fact that a purse could hold a dainty but deadly .22).
Likewise car theft, break-ins etc – almost unheard of.
Bad – High murder rates. In Houston, Dallas etc each week the Sunday night news started with a body-count of people (usually men) killed locally because a drink or drug fuelled dispute in a bar or at a BBQ or party lead to shootings from a carry-concealed or glove-box gun. State of 14 Million people had over 2000 murders per year while even with the current knife crime epidemic England has around 700 per year.
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