Rape Crisis Scotland Blog
Damned if she does - and damned if she doesn't
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, a story comes along and blows away any wild ideas you might have about justice being served in rape cases or some hope that the system itself might be in possession of a wider understanding of the complex pressures faced by complainers. Last week, a woman in Powys, North Wales was jailed for eight months for perverting the course of justice following a series of events which reveal nothing more criminal than an entirely natural desperation to stop a prosecution she felt she could not pursue.
Having been pressurized to withdraw an allegation of (six incidences) of rape she had made against her husband by the man she accused and his sister, she decided she could not proceed with the case, and would not be persuaded by police and prosecutors to go on with it. Her initial attempt to stop proceedings cut no ice with police and prosecutors who insisted they would go on with the case, leaving the woman feeling the only option she had left to her was to claim the allegations had been false. The woman was then charged with perverting the course of justice and in her subsequent desperation to avoid prosecution herself admitted this retraction had been false and that the original rape allegations were true.
As a consequence, the tables were turned, and with a perverseness unique to the justice system, it was decreed that a crime had indeed been committed – and that she was its perpetrator. In place of the justice she sought and all rape survivors deserve, this woman received a jail sentence, with criticism and punishment taking the place of the support and respect she should have had.
Rape crisis centres meet and receive calls from many women who face just this difficulty – the feeling that they just cannot go on with a court case, but feeling also that the only way out of the prosecution is to say they made it up . For many women the prospect of the ordeal of the rape case – or their uncertainty about being able for what ever reason to see it through – pose a risk not worth taking – so they do not report rape at all.
And who can wonder? The trajectory of a rape trial is so often an arrow fired off with the faintest hope of really reaching its elusive target – justice for one of the most damaging crimes of all – but every chance of trailing in its wake a woman’s privacy and dignity or any hope of justice for the crime committed against her. The removal of autonomy and control is one of the defining features of rape, and what makes it so uniquely damaging. And what could reinforce that more decisively than the decision to prosecute a woman who was left with no way out?
Changing your mind is not a crime or any kind of justification for prosecution in a case like this. In rape cases in particular, which many women have described as feeling as though they have been assaulted all over again, uncertainty or the decision not to pursue the case is completely understandable. When a woman knows that the details of the most intimate parts of her life will be discussed in public, that her ‘character’, behaviour, dress, habits, relationships, sexual history and and even her medical records may be scrutinized as part of a process which may still (and in so many cases does) see her attacker walk free, the least she can expect (surely?) is the right to decide whether or not she pursues that case?
And when this prospect is reinforced with pressure from elsewhere to abandon the case, as it sometimes is, the incentive to withdraw and desperation felt at the thought of proceeding can have a far stronger pull than the hope that the case might be one of the small percentage that result in a conviction.
The case of the woman in Powys demonstrates a complete inability to comprehend the complexities needs of women facing rape trials and is itself a perversion of what constitutes justice.
Women have as much right to autonomy and respect within the justice system as they do within relationships. Unfortunately all this case has served to demonstrate is that they sometimes meet with neither.
Comments: 1
Published: 9th November 2010
lam
19 Dec 10, 6:08pm