Handbook on Sexual Violence (92 page)

Zapf, D., Escartin, J., Einarsen, S., Hoel, H. and Vartia, M. (2011) ‘Empirical findings on prevalence and risk groups of bullying in the workplace’,
Harassment in the Workplace. Development in Theory, Research and Practice
, pp. 75–105. London/Atlanta, GA: CRC Press.

Chapter 19
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Public sector and voluntary sector responses: supporting survivors

Kate Cook

Meet Kate Cook

Kate Cook is a feminist and a teacher, activist and writer. She has been involved in the struggle against rape since 1990, when she joined Manchester Rape Crisis as a volunteer collective member. Since then she has worked in campaigning groups (Justice for Women, Campaign to End Rape and Truth About Rape Campaign) and has completed a degree and PhD in law, all inspired by that original involvement with rape crisis. Kate is now deeply honoured to be a patron of Manchester Rape Crisis and teaches about the law on rape to students studying law at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also a member of the group Safety4Sisters (North-west), which she writes about here.

Introduction

Rape is a crime against women. Rape is a deadly insult against you as a person. Rape is the deprivation of sexual self-determination. Rape is a man’s fantasy, a woman’s nightmare. Rape is all the hatred, contempt, and oppression of women in this society concentrated in one act.

(Medea and Thompson 1974: 11)

Rape is unique as it is an inherently lawful activity made illegal because of lack of consent.

(Stern Review 2010: 7)

This
chapter examines the state of official and non-official responses to rape in England and Wales and begins with two strikingly different views on rape. The language of the first quotation, from Medea and Thompson, is a woman- centred definition of rape from 1974 and is based on women’s lived

experience. Contrast this approach with the remark below it, which a ‘lawyer’ reportedly made to Baroness Vivien Stern’s review of rape published in March 2010. Right at the outset, the executive summary of this review considers a legal nicety worth commenting upon, in favour of women’s experience. The argument the lawyer makes is that sexual intercourse is legal unless consent is withdrawn, when it becomes a crime. This phallocentric view favours the male version of sexuality as penile penetration and is starkly at odds with the woman-centred approach. For women, rape is not difficult to define, but it is proving difficult to convince public authorities of this.

The chapter explores these variations in meaning and links them to differing aims, within public and voluntary responses. It suggests that the topic of ‘domestic abuse’ has received more attention than ‘rape’ typically does. The focus on rape here is a deliberate attempt to redraw this bias, whilst also allowing for a reconsideration of the value of the concept of the continuum of sexual violence in the field of responses. The chapter aims to compare public and voluntary responses and, in doing so, is bound to draw some rather sweeping generalisations simply in order to allow space for a range of discussion. It is worth saying, at the outset, that within these general trends there are also exceptions. There are, for example, women who are very angry with responses from the women’s voluntary sector, perhaps because the service was not open when they wanted to use it. Equally, there are women who feel that individuals within the statutory agencies have provided them with a first-class service. In general, however, as Sara Payne’s recent review of rape victim experience (2009) shows, the public sector is lagging behind the women’s voluntary sector in terms of women’s levels of satisfaction.

In looking forward, the chapter considers some of the threats faced by the women’s voluntary sector as well as examining the suggestions raised by the Stern Review. Having examined these differences the chapter concludes that it is vital that the women’s voluntary sector continues to try to find ways of creating responses based on women’s experience, rather than being led by public sector response models.

Rape and domestic violence responses

Although the ideas from Kelly’s continuum have undoubtedly had an impact in British policy and practice, it can be seen that responses to violence against women tend to be split into two strands. One of these considers ‘rape’, while the other concentrates on ‘domestic violence’ or, to use the currently favoured term, ‘domestic abuse’. Keeping these two separate tends to undermine a central truth of the continuum, that all violence against women is interlinked. The women’s voluntary sector is dominated by the women’s refuge movement, with the (far poorer and geographically less evenly spread) rape crisis movement having a lesser public status (Jones and Cook 2008). Where government attempts to respond to ‘violence against women’ (for example in the recent
Together We Can End Violence Against Women And Girls: A Strategy
document, published 2009) the result has tended to be that rape is sidelined, while domestic abuse is given centre stage. On the face of it, then, the

argument that these forms of violence are strongly interconnected has failed to make a strong impact. As Kelly noted, the connections within the continuum created a challenge for women’s services (1988: 236–38) but also for other responses to sexual violence.

Public responses now appear to pay attention to the connections between rape, domestic abuse, sexual harassment, stalking and other forms of sexual violence. Under New Labour there have been many attempts to improve laws and services for abused women. To work in practice, these need to consider the linkages between fear, truthfulness and violation and also between poverty, immigration status and violation. In practice though, service provision still tends to blame women for being weak or unconvincing victims, rather than consider the effects and reality of their victimisation. There is still a tendency to think of sexual violence last, after considering a range of woman- blaming explanations first. Women remain aware of these issues and abusers play on this knowledge, to increase their leverage over women. Consider these comments from survivors of familial abuse:

V: I was not able to say anything because he said, ‘If you tell anyone they won’t believe you, even the police will not believe you – they listen to their citizens not to you, they will arrest you for complaining and deport you’.

A: He told me several times that he had told everyone I was mad ... no one would listen to me. If I contacted the police, they could consider me mad and arrest me.

(participants quoted in: Anitha 2008: 42.)

Powerlessness is only increased by women’s knowledge of the failures of public service responses to violence. The gap between the rhetoric of care for victims and the reality of service response remains problematic. In contrast, rape crisis and the other services which women run tend to focus on whatever forms of violence they are able to respond to. Each group, within their own local environment, may provide specialist services to different groups of women and may be more or less able to work along an inclusive, continuum- led definition of sexual violence. This means that rape crisis and others are capable of understanding and listening, but that their stretched resources impact severely on whom they are able to respond to, and in what settings. Rape crisis tends to be painfully aware of these failings:

Because we are so busy trying to keep the services going we don’t look at older women, we don’t look at disabled women. We try to be proactive, we have a healthy lesbian and bi group going in the agency but we have done no proactive work around disability ...I hold my head in shame about some of this.

(worker from the Cornwall centre quoted in Jones and Cook 2008: 44)

Whatever their current capacity, these groups have tended to be strongly influenced by the idea of a continuum of sexual violence. Their central philosophy is to believe what women tell them and to be part of a movement

which aims to end rape. The Cornwall-based Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre, for example, combines rape crisis work with work on domestic abuse, including work with men who are perpetrators (
ibid
.: 24–6). The wish to retain the divide between domestic abuse and rape is still something led by the public sector, for reasons which are explored below.

What do we want to achieve?

Before trying to evaluate responses from the public and private sector any further, it is worth considering what these constitute. This discussion outlines the contrasting aims of public and private responses before examining which services make up these key responses. Feminist activist responses to rape are part of a movement which wants to change the world. This movement views rape as a socially constructed tool used to protect and further male interests (Jones and Cook 2008 ch. 1; Brownmiller 1999) and hopes to be part of change which will eventually eliminate rape. Hence one of the leading English lobbying groups on rape in recent years is the Campaign to End Rape. The name of the campaign is, in itself, a challenge to patriarchal norms and assumptions that rape is unavoidable. This idea remains so dominant that Andrea Dworkin spoke of wanting to achieve just one day off, in which there would be no rape (speech from 1983, printed in Buchwald
et al
. 1993). However, the feminist anti-rape movement still believes that the world can be transformed so that all days become rape-free.

In contrast to this aim of transformation, the focus of public sector responses tends to be on regulation through the criminal justice system. Public response to rape can be characterised as being driven by the following aims: justice; to lessen victim dissatisfaction; and to dampen feminist claims of unfairness. All of these can be illustrated by the Stern Review’s wish to move away from the conviction rate debate, regarding rape (Stern 2010: 42–6). The focus on a weak conviction rate is said to be a poor strategy, as it discourages reporting. In fact, the focus on low conviction rates and high attrition also provides a focus for victim dissatisfaction and for feminist activism. Consequently, the Stern report prefers to use a different measure of success. The figure usually quoted is the percentage of reported cases which achieve a conviction (usually stated to be around 6 per cent:
ibid
.). The review prefers to focus on the cases which get as far as trial, of which 58 per cent result in a conviction. This, the Baroness concludes, is a much more useful statistic. The feminist anti-rape movement is bound to disagree and the reasons for this are explored next.

The high attrition and low conviction rate for rape has been a major feminist anti-rape campaigning tool for around 15 years now. Perhaps the first person to write about this was the late Sue Lees, in the first edition of her volume
Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial
(1996), where she broke down the numbers of cases achieving various key stages in the criminal justice process. This showed that each year the initial number of reported cases was gradually worn away by the action of disbelief and inefficiency within the criminal justice system, so that the number reaching court was only a small proportion

of those initially recorded as crimes. Little has changed here. Recent figures published by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS 2009) suggest that there is still considerable case wastage between police recording and referral to prosecutors. The same publication shows that the CPS only lays charges in around 40 per cent of the cases referred to them for a decision (
ibid
.: 34–41). The number of recorded cases of ‘rape of a female’ for 2008–9 is 12,165 (Home Office 2009a: 31). The figure for ‘rape of a male’ is 968 (
ibid
.). CPS figures for that year show that 2,018 convictions for rape (or lesser offences) were achieved (CPS 2009: 35). This represents 16.6 per cent and is calculated differently from the more widely publicised and lower conviction rates which focus on convictions for rape, ignoring offences downgraded during the criminal justice process.
1

Of the 3,495 cases that the CPS reports prosecuting (
ibid
.), 57.7 per cent did achieve a conviction and this is the figure on which the Stern Review suggests we should concentrate. Indeed, it is clear that this is a powerful figure for women to know, when their case gets as far as Crown Court.
2
However, an aim of feminist campaigning has always been to highlight that there are problems across the range of criminal justice responses to rape and it is clear that this remains valid today. Cases which are dropped before court become invisible, if the focus is only on the 58 per cent success rate achieved at trial. Women such as this participant in Sara Payne’s research become disenfranchised.

Mine didn’t get to court; my emotions are all over the place . . . the police were crap. They sent me a letter to tell me the case was not going to court. ... If somebody had talked to me and explained to me why this wasn’t going to court ... it would have been so much better ... that letter made me feel so small and demeaned.

(Payne 2009: 19)

The figures discussed above are summarised in Table
19.1 to make it clear that the Stern recommendation would involve acknowledging the loss of only 1,477 cases from the system, which did not result in a conviction. The 9,638 cases lost earlier in the process, as a result of complainant withdrawal or police or CPS failure to proceed, are simply written out of public notice.

A gap evidently remains between the agenda of public response and the feminist activists’ wish to end rape. Following concerted efforts from feminists, there have been shifts in the public perception of women who experience violence. Where the rape claim is taken seriously, public policy now sees these women as ‘victims of crime’. However, the group allowed within that label

remains limited. A liberal democracy perceives its primary role in relation to such victims as being to prosecute wrongdoers and ultimately protect victims (including other innocents who are not yet victimised by this wrongdoer). The government directs victims towards the police, in order to achieve justice (as though this will resolve their victimisation). Public responses then come initially from the police, from hospitals and medical staff, where they become involved in a particular case, and in some instances, from social or care workers. Farther down the line, victims can encounter public support services (led by Victim Support, the Witness Service, and sexual assault referral centres) and these are also linked in to the criminal justice system. Women may also have contact with specialist workers called ‘independent sexual violence advisers’ (ISVAs).

Victim Support is a charitable organisation (
www.victimsupport.org.uk) which accesses victims via police records of crime and also provides support within the court system, via the Witness Service. It is a quasi-official body which makes claim to independence, but clearly works alongside the Home Office, police, court service, and others within the system. So, whilst Victim Support is a part of the ‘voluntary sector’ in its use of volunteers, it is viewed as a public sector response, for the purposes of this discussion.