Home Office cuts study on how police handle rape cases
by Jess McCabe // 17 September 2010, 19:41
An investigation into how the police treat rape cases has been abandoned, after the Home Office withdrew funding, reports The Guardian.
The review was announced in response to the John Worboys case, and other incidents that raised worrying questions about how rape cases are handled.
Following the cases, HMIC announced it would carry out a full audit of how victims were treated.The study - financed with £441,000 from the Home Office - was to scrutinise rape investigations from beginning to end, including how police built their cases and dealt with those accused.
But, The Guardian reports, the study has been ditched because the government says it risked "duplicating the work of the reviews by Baroness Stern and Sara Payne which extensively examined the experience of victims of rape".
Photo of police vans by Metropolitan Police, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
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Jennifer Drew // Posted 18 September 2010 at 11:18
For once the coalition government is correct in not undertaking yet another study concerning how the police investigate the crime of rape. A Gap or A Chasm was a in depth study into police methods of (not) investigating rape and its findings included a very long list of recommendations/changes.
This report was not complied decades ago but of course commissioning new studies only serves to delay actually having to 'take on board' recommendations concerning the hotly contested issue of whether or not male sexual violence against women is widespread or whether it is just a few abberant males committing these crimes against women.
What the coalition government needs to do and which they will not - is to implement the recommendations recommended in the report A Gap or A Chasm but such changes would go right to the heart of the issue - namely how our adversarial male-centric legal system continues to deny women survivors of men's violence justice.
Next we will hear claims from the coalition that their priority is the UK's economic situation, because male violence against women is not as important as resolving an economic created by men. What the coalition government fails to recognise is that male violence against women is simultaneously a social and an economic issue which has very serious long-term negative effects on all women's and girls' rights to fulfil their economic potential and live lives free from male violence and male control.
Sarah // Posted 18 September 2010 at 21:52
what's the point of doing another study? would they actually implement the findings of it and help the conviction rate to rise/improve the lives of survivors brave enough to face the police? Hmmmmm