Unjust Justice: Rape Victims Forced To Give Up Their Right To Privacy
Victims of rape who report the crime to the police are being told to disclose excessive amounts of personal information in exchange for receiving help. The Information Commissioner has published a report condemning this practice, calling out the police for treating victims as suspects. Currently, victims are made to sign a “Stafford statement”, which allows access to medical records, school reports, mobile phone data and even notes from counselling services. This poses an unjustified and serious violation of the complainants’ right to privacy. Claire Waxman, the London Victims’ Commissioner, stated that “ I am yet to see a case where primary school records or counselling notes hold any relevant information, yet these requests are regularly made.” The report has demanded that police stop using “Stafford statements” and to stricter standards on how complainants’ information should be handled. The police have guidelines that tell them to use the minimum amount of data necessary and to balance public interests with the victims’ privacy. However, a review by solicitor-general Alex Chalk MP has found that such guidelines are not followed well, with disclosure requests being done “haphazardly”. Other reviews have suggested that the Crown Prosecution Service may be asking the police to provide all the data they can, conducting broad enquiries akin to “fishing expeditions”.
This practices has been criticised as one of the many ways that the justice process revictimises and retraumatises. Revictimisation is used to describe the distress, alienation and blame that rape victims experience after the initial crime (Madigan and Gamble, 1991). Williams (1993) asserts that victims of no other crimes face such negative treatment. Excessive investigation into the victims’ personal lives demonstrates the great suspicion and scrutiny that they face, often expected to be perfect victims with complete credibility. Rebecca Hitchen, the Head of Policy and Campaigns at the End Violence Against Women Coalition explained that “victims’ past experiences – whether that is a history of engaging in therapeutic support, incidents at school or medical treatment they have received – are not relevant in establishing whether or not a perpetrator has assaulted them. These practices reflect and reinforce cultural attitudes that victims are in some way to blame for what happened to them.” Victims should not be subjected to such high levels of scrutiny just to be believed. The suspicion towards rape victims is an attribute of the underlying victim- blaming culture.
The result of the troubling phenomenon of revictimisation is that victims are reluctant to continue seeking help from the police. Rape is notorious for having extremely low conviction and prosecution rates, allowing perpetrators to face no consequences and leaving victims with no justice. The London Rape Review found that only 3% of rape reports led to convictions - and that in 58% of the cases investigated, victims withdrew their allegations. The Victims’ Commissioner also reported that the proportion of rape complainants dropping out increased from 25% in 2016 to 43% in 2020. This is largely due to complainants losing trust in the system after being subjected to revictimisation. Dame Vera Baird QC, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, asserted that the excessive data access played “a crucial role in the collapse of rape prosecutions”. It is understandable why victims would drop out after being asked “to effectively give up your right to privacy” (Jayne Butler, CEO of Rape Crisis England and Wales). It also poses a great barrier to access to justice, a fundamental component of the rule of law. It is unfair to ask victims to give up their privacy in exchange for getting the help they should be entitled to.
It is clear that the police must start giving more consideration to victims’ right to privacy when considering whether to access their personal information. However, Hitchen claims that the recent CPS decision to “lower the bar for disclosure and the sharing of counselling notes” completely contradicts this aim. If the justice system does not adopt a more trauma-aware understanding of victims’ needs and vulnerabilities, rape convictions will continue to plummet. The “culture of skepticism” among police and prosecutors (Press Association, 2005) must be dismantled for victims to reasonably be able to trust the people who are supposed to be helping them.
Sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15564880903048529?scroll=top&needAccess=true