Molly Kay: Born into a racing dynasty of winners. Won her first race. Last in every other race she ran. A refusenik. Came to live with us, thin, with cigarette burns, bitten by other dogs, gang-raped. We loved her.
Here is what I have written about this cruel industry’s abuse of these beautiful beings — and its necessary correlation between surplus value and surplus greyhounds:
FOR A DAY in July 2014, the advocates of children in care institutions who have been sexually abused by adults — including suspects shielded from scrutiny by the Establishment — tasted triumph: their campaign for an inquiry into historic abuse and cover-up had finally been rewarded, there was to be a public inquiry.
Then the government appointed a retired judge, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, to lead the inquiry. The campaigners tasted defeat.
A woman of integrity, said her supporters. Yes, a member of the Establishment, but an honourable woman, well-placed because of her judicial inquiry into a child abuse in the county of Cleveland in the north east of England in 1987.
I wrote a book about the Cleveland crisis, the Butler-Sloss judicial inquiry and the consequences. My only encounter with her was when I asked her permission allowed to interview witnesses to her tribunal. After I’d submitted to her the stories written for the New Statesman, she agreed, on condition, of course, that my book would follow publication of her report.
Day by day after her appointment to head up a new inquiry, worrying evidence billowed around her — and not just because she is a quintessential Establishment figure charged with investigating the Establishment’s cover up of sexual crimes against children, but because her brother, Sir Michael Havers, was Attorney General in the 1980s, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and allegedly implicated in cover-ups.
Oh no, nothing to do with me, she protested.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (Photo: PA)
Then, on 11th July 2014, the BBC Radio 4 Today programme broadcast a report on Butler-Sloss, including a recording of a marvellous moment: a speech she made in 2003 at Gresham College in the City of London.
She gave a light-hearted insight into the Establishment modus operandi when Gresham Professor of Law, Richard Susskind, asked her: “Who instigated the inquiry? How does such an inquiry get set up?”
“I think it was my brother actually as Lord Chancellor,” she said.
“So the Prime Minister wanted somebody and my brother said it probably would be politic because there was some Marxist Leninist feminine…feminism area on there. The social worker had some strong views and there was a certain element of women against men.
“And so I think my brother said ‘well I think you’d better have a woman judge’ and there were only three women judges and by a process, I have to tell you, of elimination — because the other two were not available — I found myself doing it.”
This was simultaneously a laugh-out-loud moment — her exquisite difficulty with the f-word — and a bomb.
The Establishment recruited a woman to do in women in the child health and welfare professions at a radical moment in the history of childhood and protection from adversity and abuse. Thereafter, Butler-Sloss reserved her ire for the women in this case — seemingly impossible women, fortified with authority and knowledge; women who just would not yield, witches; women who mesmerised and discombobulated men, women who created professional alliances with men, women who weren’t afraid of men, of staring abuse in the face…’feminine’ and ‘feminist’ women, whatever…
Now we know.
That crisis was, of course, thoroughly gendered — but not for the reasons proposed by Butler-Sloss, not because there was a ‘women against men element…’
The crisis was something to do with men: men who buggered little children; physical signs on the bodies of children whose average age was six, suggested penetrative abuse; And a police force that refused to investigate suspected crimes against children.
By 12th July 2014, neither the government nor Butler-Sloss could cling on. She withdrew. Her demise takes our gaze beyond the horizon of the elite gene pool: it was not just her dynastic connection to the Establishment that offended people; it was her brother’s role in alleged cover-ups that went all the way to the top; that involved not only the elite but the security services.
And the problem was her way of doing business: Her Cleveland report, published in 1988, was a defining moment: it framed the terms of engagement thereafter between the state, professionals and children suffering sexual oppression. It set the template for how those who are not victims or abusers may come to some understanding: it isn’t possible unless you open your eyes and ears to survivors, or those who work with them.
Her report was compromised by Establishment guile and bad faith. This doesn’t mean she was a bad woman, or a corrupt woman, it merely means she was unavailable to challenge the status quo, to learn or to listen to people with less power — always very hard for an Establishment person.
Ultimately what was more important than anything else, it appeared, was to have and to hold a myth.
In the millions of words published in her Cleveland report, two stand out: she accused doctors seeing signs of abuse of refusing to ‘suspend belief’.
Ever since then, health, welfare and criminal justice professionals — together with society in general — have been obliged to suspend belief.
Meanwhile, here is an extract from the 1997 edition:
ONE MORNING early in the summer of 1987 a story appeared on the front page of a national newspaper, which didn’t make sense. The story ran and ran and ran, measuring more column inches than any other single saga that year – and yet the story went on not making sense. Nevertheless, it became a defining moment in the British state’s response to childhood adversity.
This was the Cleveland case, the story of 121 ‘innocent’ children being snatched from their ‘innocent’ parents by practitioners perceived as witchdoctors so suspicious of sexual abuse that they saw signs of it everywhere – including in children’s bottoms. ‘Innocence’ itself became an actor in this drama, an impersonator, disturbing the safe categories of victim and culprit, which had shaped the statutory services in the image of Freudian fantasy: after all, sex doesn’t happen to children – unless they incite it. And sex doesn’t happen in bottoms. Unless you’re queer.
These fundamental principles of sexual ideology were confounded in the Cleveland case: the ghost of budding Lolitas inciting incontinent men was undermined by the average age of the Cleveland cohort: six. And the orthodoxy of the orifice was shaken by the evidence that a baby in a buggy, with a very sore bottom, was being buggered by her father.
The Cleveland case challenged our world view about sex. It also became a crisis of knowing, of what is known and how it may become knowable. As the months and then the years went by, we were not allowed to know what had happened in Cleveland.
Just as there was a determined not-knowing in 1987, there was equal resistance to any attempt to follow up those 121 children, and reluctance to co-ordinate referrals. Some children did return to the attention of the statutory services. Some children did go on enduring abuse by adults who – having been acquitted by the public debate – had permission to carry on…
The government, suddenly that summer, announced a judicial inquiry, not into the phenomenon but into the response to it…
The inquiry conspicuously evaded the questions on everyone’s lips: ‘what has happened to these children? What brought them to the attention of the statutory services? What do the signs scripted across their bodies mean?
The government guaranteed that these questions would not be asked or answered.
In cases of alleged sexual abuse there has always been something more important than knowing – and that is not knowing.
I am abashed at what we thought was controversial.
For example, the first edition of this book contains an interview with a man and a woman whose children all showed worrying symptoms. The father was already a convicted sex offender. He was candid: yes, he had ‘previous’; yes, he’d confessed and then retracted. His explanation for anal and vaginal medical signs? He didn’t have one. I didn’t believe his protestations, but I faithfully reported his story. And I didn’t ask why his career as a sex offender and his absurd alibis weren’t relevant.
If this case was deemed controversial, it was not because a convicted sex offender was given custody of his children. It was because Dr. Marietta Higgs’ diagnosis had ignited an investigation. If this case was controversial, it was not because the convicted sex offender made a confession — like his previous record, that didn’t matter.
It was as if Dr Higgs, not the man with convictions and a confession, had to be found guilty. Revisiting his case was a revelation: what would now be interpreted as a significant — convictions and a confession — were then irrelevant; they were put to one side and made to not matter. Since then, he has been the subject of a new investigation – based, this time, not on signs but on a story of sexual abuse.
During 1987 the civil courts were pre-empting the outcome of the judicial inquiry by throwing out many of the local authority’s applications. The Butler Sloss inquiry’s report did not criticise the dismissal of these applications.
So, although the government acted as though nothing had happened, it read her report knowing that something had indeed happened to many, if not most, of the children.
What did they know? That the signs scrolled on the bodies of children suggested serious sexual abuse. They also knew that, if the children had indeed been abused, then the signs were telling us something more – that the children were so marooned in their abusers’ needs and pressure and point of view that silence was itself a survival strategy. A tactic of accommodation was revealed by the signs: the architecture of the body suggested the anatomy of adaptation, of small bodies adapting to overwhelming intrusion, orifices scarred and altered by incoming objects, orifices speaking into the silence of their young subjects.
Not all the children were silent. Some spoke loudly and clearly. Some spoke obliquely and hesitantly. But the adult community chose to interpret the silence — rather than the signs — as the relief of suspicion, rather than as a clue to the difficulty of disclosure. Instead of interpreting the matrix of signs and silence as a dynamic, as a drama of physical suffering and survival shrouded by secrecy, it chose an interpretation of this eerie scenario that reinstated the ideologies and institutions that were so stiffly challenged by these children.
Thereafter, a determination to act as if it did not know what had happened to the Cleveland children defined the disposition of the government. The ‘top men’, the medical and legal establishment gossiped over cocktails and confided to each other that well, yes, those doctors probably got it right…
When the judicial panel inquired into the response by professionals it never investigated perpetrators — the absent presence in the whole debate. Experts who worked with perpetrators were shunned. The only evidence the inquiry heard about alleged abusers came from an American advocate for the accused, Ralph Underwager, an itinerant ‘expert witness’ who specialised in giving evidence on behalf of defendants, whose confidence in the campaign to discredit children’s evidence of abuse prompted him to pronounce only five years later that paedophiles should proudly proclaim their sexual desire for children as the will of God.
The government and the inquiry report never asked or answered the question: What do we do to protect endangered children when the children themselves do not, or cannot, protest? Just as silence as a strategy, as a source of agency amid calamities that did not originate with the child, was not assimilated, neither was the weight of children’s fear, nor their dissociation as another survival strategy to protect themselves from chronic, extreme pain. Far from learning from the children’s difficulties, the government’s procedures actually relied upon them, regulating even more intensely the limits upon the space and time available to children to begin to speak. That is the scandal.
In 1987 the Department of Health was already well aware of all this and more. When it set up the judicial inquiry, the Department, social services staff and the police were themselves already addressing a different difficulty: how to help children who had a complaint to make. All over the country statutory services were struggling with the same things; how to help children who were speaking, protesting, to get justice; how to listen, gather evidence, consolidate a case, and protect children in danger; how to help doctors become definite instead of defensive; how to help the child psychiatric services embrace the possibility of an external event.
The typical difficulty for child protection workers was the absence of medical signs to corroborate strong stories that rarely survived the rough journey to the criminal courts. Here were physical signs that had been regarded as forensic gold. If the revelation of Cleveland was the closed circuit of strong signs and silence (although we must never forget that some of the Cleveland children did speak), then the inquiry’s shift from the signs to the silence was an intimation of collusive cynicism – once the argument about the signs was settled, the inquiry turned its mind not to the question of silence, but to how to patrol the possibility that children might speak.
Procedures, according to one child protection specialist, were designed to police the professionals and to control the conditions in which children might speak.
Those with an investment in silence, accused adults — sometimes parents — appeared as the victims of a new contagion: system abuse. And the arrangements created in the aftermath gave even convicted sex offenders the right to participate in planning the futures of the very children they had oppressed. ‘The fact that they were parents was more important than anything,’ said the specialist. ‘When I saw the list of participants at a case conference and read that minutes were to be sent to the father in prison, and that the Governor was to be approached to invite him to the next meeting, I knew it was all finished, particularly for his children who were terrified every night they went to bed that he’d come and get them again. Of course, they were right. The procedures ensured that he would.’ That is the codicil to Cleveland’s bequest to British children.
The first edition of this book was written during the controversy, when anger was directed not at alleged abusers but at children’s advocates.
Now, I wonder why. And I wonder why, like most other people, I reserved my restless discomfort for the people who had decided to do something about the evidence before their eyes. That disposition did not mute a critique of the outrageous mutiny by the police, the most masculinised public serve, who seemed to abandon their duty to investigate and to co-operate with their colleagues. They were the detonators, but their behaviour never aroused anger. Was that because Britain was already pessimistic about the police, the one agency that cannot be called to account? The report’s criticism of the police didn’t matter: no one noticed; no one was disciplined. But, nevertheless, that discomfort still lies like permafrost across the enduring controversies about child abuse. We still think nothing happened. We’re still angry with the wrong people.
I talked to child protection professionals and members of survivors’ movements elsewhere in Britain and in Ireland. They weren’t surprised by the signs that were so contested in this case – they’d already encountered them. They weren’t surprised by the combustion, either, because professional conflicts and political panic were endemic to sexual crime.
Now I understand the meaning of the meeting in 1987 initiated by child protection workers in Nottingham, West Yorkshire and the West Midlands, who were trying to tell politicians that the scale and seriousness of the problem were straining their resources, too. They were also asking: ‘What are we supposed to do about this?’ Why weren’t people like this invited to the inquiry?
When Elizabeth Butler-Sloss reported that she had no reason to doubt the medical signs, professionals and the public could reasonably infer that the doctors might have been right. But that would have been wrong, because the message inferred by some from that report was that it didn’t matter. Those doctors had – with the arrogance of innocence – blown the whistle. They thought their suspicions of abuse that imperiled the well being of their patients might have mattered.
They were wrong. What mattered more was that the sovereignty of services built on an acceptable level of abuse was retrieved. I did not understand that then.
Confidential documents (never acknowledged by the Department of Health) confirm what was only coded at the time: that the government and the health authorities had reason to believe that the doctors were probably right, but that no one would be allowed to know. That is the scandal.
And I’ve had a sporting ding dong with the catholic former MP Ann Widdecombe on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show, during which she berated the ‘sheer number’ of abortions and women ‘putting their careers ahead’ of a ‘life in the womb.’
What is a lifestyle abortion? This is an example of bad language; of what the great Doreen Massey calls ‘vocabularies of neoliberal economy’ — the way the very language we speak has been skewed by the Right.
‘Lifestyle’ is associated with conspicuous consumption; it is associated with IKEA identity — we are what we consume, we are our kitchen cabinets and our build-it-yourself beds, we are endlessly re-making ourselves by endlessly discarding cushion covers. Lifestyle is anything from gardening to diet; from sex to sexual orientation. Lifestyle connotes pleasure.
However, this coupling is about ‘style’ rather than ‘life’.
So, abortion trends are being set up as consumption rather than self-determination; women’s control over their own bodies becomes caprice. That, in the misogynist mind is the cause for concern. The Daily Telegraph, it seems, is on a mission.
But what does the evidence tell us about who is having abortions, and when? And what, in any case, is a cause for concern?
Something significant is happening, however, but it isn’t about either ‘shopping’ or ‘surges’.
According to the 2013 statistics recently published by the Department of Health, abortion is declining, including among teenagers; the ratio of early abortions is rising, and the rate of medical (pill) rather than surgical abortions is rising, too:
If there has been a surge it is in early abortions: under 13 weeks — now 91 per cent.
Under 10 weeks: 58 per cent in 2003, 80 per cent in 2013.
The proportion of medical (a pill) — as against surgical — abortions has reached almost half, at 49%. A decade earlier it was only 17 per cent.
The implications for women themselves and for the National Health Service (the provider for the overwhelming majority of women) are palpable: abortion is less costly to the health and the funds of both women and the NHS.
There is another story — the numbers are falling: at 16 per 1000 women, this is the lowest since 1997.
Teenage abortions are also declining:
Under 16
2013: 2.6 per 1000
2003: 4 per 1000
Under 18
2013: 11.7 per 1000
2003: 13 per 1000
The number of women who have had more than one abortion has risen to 37 per cent, compared to 33 per cent.
And the number of women having abortions who already had a child rose from 47 per cent in 2003, 53 per cent in 2013.
The Daily Telegraph and Ann Widdecombe have a new target: not the ‘not bovvered’ teenagers, but mature women making choices.
They interpret these figures as indicative of women having serial abortions, ‘a casual attitude to multiple abortions’, says Widdecombe.
Women don’t have casual attitudes to abortion. We don’t know how to explain these figures.
Unsurprisingly the age at which most abortions happen is 21-22 years. What is these women’s experience? Why aren’t their male partners using condoms? Are they having an abortion in their 40s — having had one in their 20s? Do they think they are past getting pregnant? Do the men they have sex with use contraception, and if not why not?
There isn’t a surge of serial abortion but there is evidence that, among older women, having a child doesn’t necessarily mean they feel able or willing, or safe, to have another.
What used to be called ‘family planning’ and reproductive choice is now traduced as ‘surges’ in ‘casual attitudes’ among women who ought to know better. The moral right always needs to blame some woman or other.
Odd, isn’t it, that sexism is indulged as just silly? That’s how it seemed in my conversation on Radio 5 Live this week Richard Scudamore’s sexist correspondence with colleagues who run the elite pantheon of football. Scudamore’s Premier League mates decided against any further disciplinary action. Scudamore himself said he would do his utmost to support women in the game. And we will await with interest news about just what he, and the league, propose to do to kick sexism out of the league — and, in particular, out of Scudamore’s conversations with his colleagues.
The worry is that the Premier League and Scudamore will ride the row, feel furious, appear contrite, and do nothing. They will enjoy the indulgence of those who reckon the row itself is silly, like sexism is, well, just silly.
His friends — including senior women in the game, have rallied: he’s not sexist, they say. So why did he not only tolerate but participate in sexist talk? They seem to live in a capsule sequestered from the great changes shaking the world. They need to get out more and see what the rest of us see. How else will they help Scudamore as a person and as a professional sort out the institutionalized sexism in football?
The usually witty, cuddly and clever journalist Matthew Norman reckoned the row about sexism in football prompted by the exposure of Scudamore’s horrible correspondence was concerned with stuff that was just ‘witless’ and ‘silly’. He wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Scudamore was just being a Neanderthal pillock. Oh, we are obliged to reply, that’s all right then. Furthermore, this was ‘private’ correspondence.
This notion of the ‘private’ is a dodgy alibi: What’s private about writing this stuff at work, in work time? On the Premier League’s email? To colleagues concerned with the business of the Premier League? About female colleagues in that business? In emails that his PA — another colleague — is required to read as part of her duties?
The former PA, Rani Abraham, who revealed this sexist stream of unconconsciousness to the Daily Mirror – and risked her own professional life – reminds us, however, that there is no such thing as private when you are in your professional/public function, when you are Richard Scudamore, the boss of a business at the heart of national culture, when the stream of sexism runs through your public/professional function.
Scudamore, after all, runs the corporate elite of British football. There are 20 top clubs in his business. He and they have some responsibility for the ethos of an industry from which they profit, and which they have pitched at the heart of popular culture.
Football culture has been a notorious proponent of prejudices of which UKIP would be proud. But it is not a homogenous blob – there are football fans that don’t want the beautiful game to be associated with sexist, racist, capitalist crap. They’ve launched campaigns for cultural revolution that are about more than being nice to women or black people, that are about a different ethos of masculinities being made in the football universe.
But the recidivists profit from reform whilst laying hold of any old excuse to do nothing. At first the FA whimpered that this was a Premier League row, beyond the remit of the FA. Well, maybe this is the time for the FA to find a voice and a brain, and rediscover its power in the game.
Matthew Norman suggested in our conversation of Radio 5 Live that the row needed a ‘bit of nuance’. Well, what would be more nuanced than the clarifications that emerged in the week after the revelations?
At the beginning, commentaries circulated around misconceptions: the idea of ‘private’, the problem of FA or Premier League jurisdiction and responsibility. Now the debate has aired the relation between public and private: there was nothing private about Scudamore’s correspondence, it was professional, conducted in his professional milieu, about other professionals. It wasn’t even secret — Scudamore’s PA was required to read his correspondence so that she could manage his life for him.
We’ve learned something about sexism, too: it is no longer the zeitgeist: from Sports ministers, to football bosses, to campaigners trying to reform its culture – from Kick it Out to Women in Football – to the commentariat and you and me, we’ve learned that a lot of people think sexism isn’t silly.
Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t think it was silly — he told Radio 5 Live on Monday that such correspondence among ministerial colleagues would be a sacking offence. Matthew Norman agreed that ‘the sooner they change the better’ but he didn’t offer any suggestions about how; and — as a football fan — didn’t take responsibility for making that happen. All these big, powerful men, just being silly, eh? But the silly alibi doesn’t address just how these men might stop being silly (and sexist and racist); it doesn’t take responsibility for change. We used to send children down the mines. Now we don’t. Change happened — but it didn’t just happen. People made it happen. And that’s why the response to Ms Abraham’s revelations is a contribution to change: she showed us what these men really think of women. She has, therefore, given the people who have some power in football a gift to effect change.
Vogue Italia finds itself in an imbroglio about violence against women.
Every year editor Franca Sozzani attempts a ‘political’ spread. She is alert to the ambiguities of the fashion industry and tries to lend her resources of her 100,000-circulation magazine to a progressive theme.
So far, so noble. She tells The Independent:
I think about not what could make the magazine different, but what could make a good issue, that people will remember. Anyway, I’m using fashion! I’m using what everybody else is using. I’m more or less using the same girls that everybody’s using. I’m very politically correct in this way, but in the other way, I feel that we can use fashion in a different way.
The controversy is less to do with the fact of Vogue doing violence against women, more to do with whether it can do it, whether the magazine has pulled it off.
Sozzani has explained her commitment to the project, it is ‘our civic duty’ she writes, ‘to convey a message against barbarism.’ She has expressed her alarm at the statistics showing that two women are killed every week in Italy — the same statistic as the UK.
Her photographer Steven Meisel captures exquisite corpses, horror scenarios evoking The Shining, and of course, the frocks.
Photography by Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia
Sozzani herself has said that when she considered the concept, ‘the idea was cinematic’. This, then, was a genre shoot.
But did she pull it off? Could women who, she writes, are suffering, ‘feel our nearness’?
Having registered how young people relish the horror movie genre, she writes that the death rate from domestic violence ‘is really a horror show.’
But of course it isn’t a show. And that’s a clue to the problem with the spread: it is defined by form, by cinematic allusion and the codes genre, but not the content of violence against — the cultures that sponsor men’s domination and defeat of women.
The spread doesn’t show the relationship so much as it rehearses the mis en scene that saturates popular cultures of violence. It doesn’t rupture them, it repeats them.
That’s why Vogue Italia’s domestic violence spread is controversial: its message is overwhelmed by the medium — the pleasures of seeing the bodies of women, dead or alive, are repeated, again and again.
Liberals and civil libertarians were routinely muddled or utterly wrong about personal power and oppression — often unable to detect the problem of power in intimate relationships.
It was feminism that strengthened the will of those who resisted PIE’s sly overtures.
There were always men and women on the left who were opposed to PIE. But some men were soft on it — both gay and straight.
Some gay men promoted the ‘love of boys’. Like some straight men — notoriously Roman Polanski — promote, as he puts it, the wish to ‘fuck young girls.’
I recall ferocious arguments among some comrades on the left in the 1970s and 1980s about PIE. It seemed inconceivable that it should have been tolerated within the NCCL community. But as civil libertarians the NCCL was as muddled as liberals and libertarians on both right and left.
Ultimately, people who advocated sex with children were kicked out of the gay movement, and Britain’s civil liberties movements, and they never had any traction at all in the Women’s Liberation Movement.
In the aftermath of yet another woman’s death, following yet another rape trial acquittal, The Independent reported yet another scandal — hapless investigation and prosecution of sexual crime.
It is this impoverished process that gives men who want to rape women virtual impunity — individual immunity from prosecution; and that and thus a society that hardly knows or cares what happens to women.
It is not as if the police and criminal justice system don’t understand the politics of sexual crime and justice: In Britain we have emerged from three decades of dramatic discovery about the prevalence and meaning of rape, three decades of professional reviews and legal reform.
Until now, more and more women every year have come forward to report rape. But they have not been reciprocated by reformed policing or criminal justice systems.
In the 1980s, society was shocked by Roger Graef’s documentary on Thames Valley’s response to a woman reporting rape. In the 1990s the law and police processes were reformed. In the 2000s, Liz Kelly and her specialist scholars at London Met University reported that the rate of detection had slumped to the lowest ever; Betsy Stanko’s research into the Met’s files revealed shocking disdain for women reporting rape — and cases of known suspects who were never traced or investigated; the law was reformed, and it is as good as law on sexual crime anywhere.
To no avail.
I and others have been writing about this scandal for nearly a decade — here’s some of it:
“Observations on criminal justice — the shocking failure
when it comes to rape prosecutions.”
Shocking evidence is circling the desks of the police and the Home Office showing that many men reported to the police for rape are not investigated, and their crimes do not appear in police records – even though they have previous records of violent offences and sexual attacks on women. Men rape with impunity and immunity, and they can do it again and again. Furthermore, as long as men target women who have been drinking or young women under 18, there is a good chance that the police won’t bother to interview or investigate, and the allegations won’t appear “on the books”.
New research commissioned by the Metropolitan Police delved into the Met’s own case files: it not only analysed the victims’ fates in the criminal justice system, but for the first time checked out the histories of the suspects. No one had carried out an offender profile of alleged rapists before. No one had correlated the victims’ stories with the records of the accused. The results are shattering.
Researchers reviewed the files on 677 rapes reported to the London Metropolitan Police in two months in 2005, and followed up by tracing the suspects. A third of the reported rapes were “not crimed” – that is, they were not investigated or recorded as crimes, because they were not thought to involve an offence. But many of the suspects had “previous”. More than half of the men accused of raping women who had been drinking, where the cases were “not crimed”, had a history of sexual offences against women.
A third of suspects whose victims were under 18 were not investigated, but had histories of violent offending. Among those cases that were crimed, but didn’t get past the police investigation stage, were some with known histories of offending who were not prosecuted, “in the public interest”.
This is sorely embarrassing for the macho (and besieged) Home Office. The evidence shows that the police directed their gaze at the wrong people. “We concentrated on services for victims,” comments Richard Sumray, a magistrate member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, “but we did not concentrate on offender profiles.”
One of the country’s pre-eminent researchers into sexual crimes against women, Professor Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University, says the new findings are unprecedented. “This is unadulterated data that we’ve never had access to before.” It was Kelly’s research – based on the experiences of 3,500 victims – that in 2005 exposed the alarming collapse of the conviction rate. What was not apparent earlier (because it had not been correlated) was that men who like raping women do it over and over; they target their quarry.
It is the not-crimed category that is particularly sinister, officers giving up on cases without even checking up on the suspect. This is evidence that officials will want to keep out of the public domain, but which also vindicates reformers in the police service. The Met’s review — the largest of its kind — vindicates Kelly’s celebrated study that showed an unbroken increase in the numbers of women (and a few men) reporting rape in the past 20 years but a static number of convictions.
“The attrition rate [the rate of cases being not-crimed, not detected, or not pursued by the victim] is abominable,” comments Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who, as well as heading the Met’s cash-for-peerages inquiry, is also lead spokesman on rape for the Association of Chief Police Officers. “Rape is regarded as second only to murder, because of the violence and the violation, but most attrition takes place with us in the police,” he says. “My aim is to take best practice in scene management and forensics in cases like murder, and apply it to rape.”
The crisis comes from what Kelly calls a “culture of scepticism”. “The police are often quite willing to interview people who don’t support an account,” she says, “and they seldom follow up what supports it.”
If the not-crimed and attrition findings weren’t bad enough, the picture becomes even more disturbing when correlated with patterns of vulnerability among victims. The overwhelming majority of rape reports on the Met’s files – 87 per cent – are made by women whose characteristics make them vulnerable. Most are known to the perpetrators: acquaintances, partners and ex-partners; they are young; they consume alcohol or drugs; they suffer from mental illness. These categories attract police pessimism and a preoccupation with the virtues or vulnerabilities of the victim rather than the propensities of the perpetrators. This correlation appears to be decisive.
Pioneering research by Vanessa Munro at King’s College London transcended the ban on talking to British jury members by assembling jurors from the electoral register for mock trials. She found that although the law on consent was radically reformed by the Sexual Offences Act 2003 – requiring defendants to show that they had taken steps to ascertain consent, and requiring that the alleged victims had the capacity, choice and freedom to give consent – it still didn’t help them greatly. Some jurors felt that, however intoxicated, “as long as a woman was conscious she’d have the capacity to consent or resist”.
Sumray reckons that the crisis is multidimensional: cultural and political, as well as a policing problem. The political arena, he says, has “to begin to influence how people think about this”.
There is good news: the promotion of specialists in the Met’s dedicated Project Sapphire, and greater respect and care extended to victims by sexual assault referral centres. The Met’s response to research is already palpable; it reduced the number of rape reports dismissed as false allegations from 10 per cent in 2005 to 4 per cent in 2006, in line with Kelly’s estimate.
According to Kelly, however, given the sexism of the culture and British institutions: “Yes, a woman can get better care, but she still can’t get justice.”
“In exploiting the rape crisis for political capital,
Cameron has ignored a wealth of new research.”
David Cameron is right to talk about rape. Its prevalence and prosecution are a crisis. And it is full of complexity. But politicians, especially Tories, don’t do complicated. Cameron has done a typical Tory thing: invoke the disaster of rape for a moralistic, collapse-of-civilisation-as-we know-it populist agenda that has nothing to do with contemporary culture or policing. It ignores his own party’s history: Tory law-and-order debates have been animated by women’s laments about the beastliness of men since the 1930s; and it ignores the remarkable discoveries emerging from research into policing.
When Cameron talks about the rape crisis as a sign of “moral collapse” and sexualisation of the culture he is being lazy. Rape rates are not new: rape is nothing to do with “permissiveness”; it is a crime of dominion, as old as patriarchy itself. To pledge tougher laws exemplifies the Tory tradition: exploiting women’s humiliation and harm to promote populist – authoritarian – politics.
But explosive evidence from Scotland Yard – hitherto unpublished – shows the problem is not the law. The problem is still canteen culture, and it is still sexism that muddles the judgment of juries.
The reformed Sexual Offences Act, heavily influenced by women’s experience of sexual crime and by scrupulous (often feminist) research, is not to blame. The Association of Chief Police Officers agrees: the problem is what happens when a woman makes that first call to the police. And what happens at every step thereafter – right up to the appeal court. It is the “demonisation of women as a set of victims”, says the Acpo rape spokesman, Dave Gee.
Buried in those processes is sinister evidence that a significant proportion of perpetrators are simply not investigated. Policing has got better at treating victims humanely. But it has been mesmerised by the worth of the victim, and averted its gaze from many of the suspects. The Met has been contemplating this evidence for nearly a year. It should have made it public. It should have seen it not as a source of more shame but as a resource for reform.
The story starts with a 2005 survey of rape victims, conducted by Liz Kelly, Jo Lovett and Linda Regan from London Metropolitan University. Their study, A Gap or a Chasm?, found that more women than ever had the confidence and courage to report rape, but fewer than ever achieved justice, not least because their cases entered a “culture of scepticism” and investigative inertia.
Acpo and the HMI inspectorate set out to find out why. Their report was published earlier this year, followed by a Home Office study of eight forces last July. All confirmed the study’s findings.
Next came some remarkable research at the Met. An independent team looked into all 677 rapes reported to the Met in two months of 2005. What they discovered challenged conventional wisdoms about victims and perpetrators. It found that men who like raping women target their victims and that these women cluster into the very groups least likely to attract police attention: those under 18; in present or past relationships with the perpetrators; living in domestically violent environments; under the influence of alcohol; suffering mental ill health. These groups constitute nearly 90% of reported rapes. Between half and a third of these reported rapes were not “crimed” – they don’t appear in the books. It gets worse. In half of the not-crimed cases involving alcohol, for example, the suspects had not been investigated, despite having a history of sex offences.
“Those in most need of caring and sympathy in the criminal justice system get smacked even more,” says Professor Betsy Stanko, who conducted the Met study. There is, then, a scandalous synergy between men who like raping women and police pessimism.
If the police haven’t made their evidence public it is because they don’t want to discourage women from reporting rape, and they can’t rely on politicians to get the story right. As Liz Kelly has pointed out, Cameron could have done something useful: he could have said the culture is hard to change, that appeal court judges’ prejudices are ricocheting through the criminal justice system, but that the Home Office and senior police officers are having a go. He could have said the huge investment in terrorism should be spent on “ordinary domestic and sexual terrorism”.
Tories – usually to great effect – have enlisted the experience of women as the victims of men, but never to empower women, and never to challenge the masculine cultures that sponsor crimes against women.
“The rape review does a disservice to women from whom
police and courts have averted their gaze.”
Will more women be encouraged to report rape if they’re told that Britain’s conviction for rape isn’t 6% but 58%? Undoubtedly the police would be able to feel proud, rather than ashamed, and the government could proclaim it had made a difference. But will this statistical manoeuvre empower women? Or will it avert our gaze from the failures of policing culture?
The Stern Review, published this week, argues that burying the bad news will encourage women to report, yield more convictions in the courts, and raise the level of optimism about policing. But why would it? The problem isn’t women: while only 2,800 reported rape in 1988, this was up to 13,093 by 2008; their courage and confidence grows year by year. Yet the police response has not raised conviction rates, and institutional scepticism rewards men who like raping women with impunity.
It was this paradox – more women reporting rape, reciprocated by the lowest conviction rate yet in the courts and, therefore, the dismal knowledge that society was averting its gaze from the most violent sexism– that prompted solicitor general Vera Baird and leader of the house Harriet Harman last summer to commission this review by Vivien Stern. She has done a disservice to the ministers. This could have been a great moment, says sexual violence expert Professor Liz Kelly – a moment to match Sir William Macpherson’s critique of institutional racism in the police. It has been squandered. During the last decade there has been a revolution in what is known about rape – to whom, and how it happens, and what happens next.
In 2005 the Home Office published research by Kelly and her colleagues at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit. In it, victims disclosed widespread scepticism among police officers. Rape is unique: women tend to know their assailants. But 15% of reported rapes are not even recorded as crimes. A further 20% of complaints are withdrawn – many women told researchers they had been encouraged to quit by police officers. A further 23% fall through; about a quarter of suspects are charged. Some 12% reach court, and finally only about 6% attract conviction for rape.
Instead of confronting that forlorn process head-on, Stern morphs into Pollyanna. Justice isn’t everything, she says, reassuring us anyway that half of the minority of cases that get to court result in a conviction for something or other. Worse, she suggests that we should now investigate the problem of false allegations. The police have already researched that, and in any case decent detection should deal with it.
Senior police officers were not so awed by the evidence. The Association of Chief Police Officers, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Home Office and the Met itself all looked into what was going on. They found some excellent practice but also routine, endemic failure to properly investigate rape.
The Met’s research was dynamite. It focused on more than 700 rapes reported over two months in 2005. Victims were clustered in groups of “vulnerability” – women who didn’t attract police interest or investigation. The Met took another look. A significant proportion of the men had never been checked out or tracked down. And a significant proportion, it emerged, already had records of violence and sex offences.
This is the dangerous matrix that alarmed ministers: men who like raping women target those who won’t engage police attention or confidence. That’s what Stern should have exposed: this toxic correlation, the institutional sexism that disarms rape investigation.
And, finally…
Check out this chilling review by scholars, into decades of troubled inquiry, reportage, research and reform of the dismal outcomes for women reporting rape and other sexual crimes to the police:
2011 – The Journal of Criminal Justice Research (JCJR) – Volume 1, Number 2
RESEARCH ARTICLE
CRITICAL ISSUES IN RAPE INVESTIGATION: AN OVERVIEW OF REFORM IN ENGLAND AND WALES
Miranda A.H. Horvath, University of Surrey
Stephen Tong, Canterbury Christ Church University
Emma Williams, Metropolitan Police Service
Rubbish
….Criminal investigation is …based on discretionary decisions made by detectives. Reiner (2000: 93-94) points to “police property” as a category of crime left to the police to deal with by the “dominant powers of society?. Within this category are a group identified as ”rubbish”, reflecting “messy”, “unworthy” offences that maybe be perceived as the “complainants fault”. Crimes that can fall within this category include rape, domestic violence or hate crime…
…“messy” investigations (long protracted cases where the officer may have some doubts regarding the integrity of the complaint), or unworthy of attention (the officer believes the event is not an offence but a private matter, or a trivial event) or finally the complainants fault (the officer believes the complainant contributed to their own victimisation) …
….The belief that investigative work simply required “common sense” with low levels of education, the lack of research aimed at improving investigative practice, the slow pace of change to past and current criticisms and evidence of a continued presence of negative attitudes towards marginalised groups remain barriers to improving investigative standards in England and Wales.
…Although some progress has been made especially in the care of victims and some re-shaping of the law to reflect modern notions of sexual autonomy many of the reforms have failed to be effective or have not been fully implemented.
Key criminal justice reforms in the last thirty years in England and Wales.
…In the 1980’s criminal justice reform was spurred on initially by Roger Graef’s documentary “A complaint of rape”, which showed oppressive interviewing of a rape victim by Thames Valley police officers and subsequently by a joint publication from the Women’s Aid Federation and Women Against Rape that suggested detailed requirements in police procedures in the investigation of rape. This resulted in the Home Office issuing a number of circulars (25/83 and 69/86) requiring police to revise their procedures.
The nineties began with significant changes in the law…The nineties ended with a Sex Offences Review, which began in 1999. The review aimed to achieve “protection, fairness and justice? within the Home Office’s overall aim of creating a “safe, just and tolerant society” (Home Office, 2000b). It sought to review sex offences in England and Wales and make recommendations to provide much more coherent and clear sex offences, ensure perpetrators are punished appropriately and abide by the ECHR and Human Rights Act so as not to be discriminatory.
The Sexual Offences Act (SOA) 2003 came into effect from May 2004: Amongst the many changes it Act introduced are the meaning of rape to include oral penetration as well as vaginal and anal with the penis; a legal definition of consent; children under thirteen years old can never now legally consent to sexual activity.
…Crown Prosecutors took over deciding if the defendant should be charged in serious cases including rape. This is just one of many moves in England and Wales which seem to be developing best practice towards a more American style approach to dealing with rape where investigators and prosecutors work closely on cases, continually consulting and advising one another.
….The 2007 HMCPSI report assessed the progress against the recommendations in the 2002 inspections:
…despite the many efforts directed at improving and making more consistent responses to victims the picture does not appear to have changed substantially over the last decade.
The review of the Metropolitan police rape cases by Prof Elizabeth Stanko discovered four categories of vulnerability – victims appeared to be targeted:
In 87% of the cases analysed victims displayed more than one of these vulnerabilities, this was confirmed in a subsequent study using data from the same force but from a different time period (Horvath & Kelly, 2009), and patterns of attrition differed depending on the type of vulnerability involved.
Police work has been hindered by performance regimes influenced by efficiency savings and private sector principles of measurement that do not necessarily recognise the complexities or duties of public sector practitioners particular in the context of the investigation of sexual offences.
Black Bodies, Women’s Bodies: Spectres Haunting the Police
Representatives of the Police Federation are called to explain themselves to a Parliamentary committee in November 2013.
After being accused of trying to discredit a government minister, they themselves are suffering a credibility deficit.
Their problem is larger, however, than the odd row about what the minister, Andrew Mitchell, did or did not say to police officers on his way out of Downing Street. He had been forced to resign after swearing at police officers at the Downing Street gate.
Mitchell admits swearing at the police officers, but denies calling them plebs (why would ‘pleb’ be more or less offensive than other four-letter words?) .
The Parliamentary encounter with the Police Federation synchronises with trouble rumbling along many flanks for the police, from illegal phone hacking to failure to protect children from neglect and murder and a new low in the rate of rape prosecutions.
Despite intense scrutiny of responses to rape — accelerated by the Savile scandal — the Met are reporting fewer rape cases to the Crown Prosecution Service. This is a crisis.
Let’s focus on race: in two cases black bodies return to haunt the Metropolitan Police service and its history of institutional racism. Azelle Rodney and Mark Duggan would be alive today had they not been shot and killed by the police.
Azelle Rodney:
Sir Christopher Holland’s report, The Azelle Rodney Inquiry, published on 5 April 2013, describes what happened when the police, alerted by customs (who believed that Rodney and two other men were on their way to commit robbery) organized a chase.
The police did not know the identity of the men’s targets, nor did they know the identities of two of the three suspects.
The Metropolitan Police mobilized surveillance and firearms officers from SCD11 and CO19, together with detectives, in accordance with a strategy known as Mobile Armed Support to Surveillance (MASTS), to keep the suspects in sight until they had enough evidence for an arrest.
They would stop the suspects and the detectives would arrest them, using the ‘hard stop’ by boxing in the men’s VW Golf, and shock them into compliance with a display of overwhelming force.
That was the plan. It was also the plan that E7 would remain inside his vehicle, with his weapon covering other officers as they got into position during the hard stop.
But when the police cars brought the suspects to a halt, ‘almost instantaneously’ E7, instead of providing cover, began firing a burst of shots at Azelle Rodney. Holland’s report said that he did so with such speed that witnesses, ‘believed it to have been an automatic weapon firing. He fired six shots in one burst. He then paused and fired two more shots.’
The weapon still lying beside Rodney, hidden by a yellow cover, unused, was a de-activated automatic pistol that ‘would not fire even if loaded.’
Azelle Rodney was not arrested. He was shot dead. The Independent Police Complaints Commission found nothing in this operation to criticise.
The European Convention on Human Rights Article 2 requires the government to properly inquire into such an event, to bring full facts to light and to allay fears — if possible — of wrongdoing.
No inquest was held because of ‘sensitive intelligence’. Indeed, ‘a great deal of time’ was spent fruitlessly in Parliament to find a way ‘to permit a thorough and sufficiently open inquest’.
Finally, belatedly, the Lord Chancellor in 2010 established Holland’s inquiry.
Holland expended considerable effort to ensure that evidence could be heard in public about that sensitive intelligence. His report criticized the operational management of the killing:
The officers involved in the surveillance — two surveillance cars were parked near the men when they picked up the weapons — should have stopped them much earlier.
They should have stopped in a road more suitable for a hard stop, rather than the final destination: a pub where customers were sitting outside.
There they — wrongly — rammed the car.
Officers didn’t wear caps indicating that they were police.
Shots supposed — according to the MASTS protocol — to deflate tyres of a fleeing car, were fired into the rammed, hemmed in and stationary Golf.
Although E7’s view of Rodney was poor, he first fired into the car ‘only 1.11 seconds’ after his vehicle stopped alongside him.
Rodney was slumped forward, still wearing his seat belt, when the final shots were fired into his head as he slumped forward. It was the three final shots that were fatal. The first burst took 1.11 seconds. The second burst 0.21 seconds.
Was it plausible for E7 to believe, ‘for good reason’, that Rodney threatened his life? ‘The answer is that he did not,’ said the report. And even if it had been proportionate to fire at all, ‘there would have been no basis’ for firing those final fatal shots.
Once Azelle Rodney was pulled out of the car he was left on the pavement for 16 hours. No one with ‘sufficient seniority or common sense’ to manage the situation was put in charge of this bloody scene. His death attracted neither discipline nor decorum.
When Rodney’s relatives were brought to his body, his blood was still on the pavement. Press reports were freely circulating without proper authorization, there was no proper debriefing, and when the Met then got itself legal representation, it failed to distinguish, said Holland, between its responsibility as an employer, and its responsibility for operations.
Mark Duggan:
In September 2013, the inquest began in court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London’s Strand into the death of Mark Duggan, shot to death by armed police at Tottenham Hale in August 2011.
When they killed Duggan, the Met was already mired in the Rodney co disaster. Was the Met chastened?
The characters were different, but the issues were the same: a police operation involving surveillance of a man whilst he acquired a weapon and travelled in a car; a hard stop, followed by the fatal shooting.
Mark Duggan’s family had difficulty ascertaining how and why he had died. The Met lost its manners: Relatives waited for an appropriate officer to talk to them whilst the death swirled in public misinformation — not least by the IPCC. But it was fire this time: the Met’s behavior provoked a vigil and later riots in which another four people lost their lives.
In November an expert witness told the inquest that the police were wrong to claim that the first shot fired into Duggan struck his chest. This was supposedly the fatal shot. But pathologist, Professor Derrick Pounder, told the inquest that Duggan was first shot in his arm. Evidence on the order of the fatal wound is decisive.
The inquest is concerned with the cause of Duggan’s death — he was killed after he collected a gun from a man known to the police: Duggan met with Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, toward the end of the afternoon of 4th August 2011 and received a shoebox containing a pistol wrapped in a sock.
He got into a Toyota mini-cab. On his way to Tottenham he was kept under surveillance by Operation Trident.
Within 15 minutes Duggan knew he was being followed, the car was hard-stopped by a team of officers at Tottenham Hale, and within a mere 2 seconds he is shot twice: first in the arm then, fatally, in the chest.
At first the public was led to infer that Duggan had shot a police officer who had been saved — the bullet hit his car radio. But the IPCC was forced admit a few days later that it may have led journalists to believe that ‘shots were exchanged’.
In fact, two shots were fired, neither of them from the gun in the sock, both by a police firearms specialist, known as W70.
Professor Pounder explained that the first shot hit Duggan’s arm while he was sitting upright, and the second shot hit him when he was ‘significantly bent forward’. Had Duggan been standing upright – as police witness V53 had claimed – then it would not have been possible for the bullet to follow a 46-degree trajectory inside his body.
The supervision of the inquiry into the killing by the IPCC also became the subject of grave concern. Before the year was out, Stafford Scott, chair of the Tottenham Defence Campaign (a veteran human rights campaigner in Tottenham) and John Noblemunn, chair of the Haringey Black Independent Advisory Group resigned from the community panel monitoring the investigation.
Stafford Scott, chair of the Tottenham Defence Campaign
The IPCC had denied and then admitted that it sanctioned the removal of the taxi carrying Duggan from the crime scene — and then its return.
The community reference group had been given outstanding information, indicative of an IPCC in a mess:
“We were told that at least three officers had given a statement that they had witnessed another officer, a sergeant, throwing away the gun that was later found several feet from Duggan’s body. When we sought to identify the officers involved, we were told there was no evidence to support the allegation – that this statement was in fact never given. Yet we were informed by the commissioner that it had been.”
In a statement immediately after the incident, one of the officers nearest to Duggan, known as W70, did not refer to any gun held by Duggan.
But in a further statement written four days later, he said he saw Duggan get out of the car with his hand inside his jacket, as if concealing something, he pivoted, drew his hand from his waistband ‘he was holding a self-loading pistol or handgun.’
That was his evidence to the criminal case against Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, the man who had given Duggan ‘the shoe box with the gun in a sock.’
But by the time Duggan had been shot, he was falling and W70 said he grabbed him by the wrists. There was no gun.
Officer W70 told the inquest into Duggan’s death in October 2013 that his legal advice had been to include no details in his notes. In his evidence to the inquest he insisted that Duggan had not dropped the gun or thrown it away.
The gun in the sock was actually found by firearms expert R31, during a search after the shooting, about 5 metres away from the body, behind a fence. Forensic examination confirmed that the gun had not been used — more than that, Mark Duggan had not touched it. There were none of his fingerprints on the sock or the gun.
A military surgeon, Professor Jonathan Clasper, gave evidence to the inquest in November. He said that it was ‘very unlikely’ that Duggan could have hurled the gun the 7.5 metres where it was found after the shooting.
In a sequence of events similar to the shooting of Azelle Rodney, Duggan’s death was being broadcast on the television before his family had been informed. Years of investment in community consultation and good manners were squandered.
The trial of Kevin Hutchinson-Foster was a used as a proxy to put Duggan himself on trial. What it actually confirmed was a crisis in Operation Trident. According to Stafford Scott, a notorious young man with a history of violence using firearms had been allowed to stay on the streets.
Operation Trident had been set up on the initiative of black campaigners in response to what Claudia Webbe — one of the founders — describes as ‘woeful’ policing of gun crime that disproportionately assailed black neighbourhoods in the early ‘90s.
“Back then, while the culture of gun crime affected whole communities and neighbourhoods, 90% of homicide victims were black, mainly black men. The police response was woeful, using criminal “informants” who were themselves allowed to get away with so-called lesser crimes. Delroy Denton, for example, was left free to brutally rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl and murder Marcia Lawes, slashing her throat 18 times; and Eaton Green was allowed to continue dealing crack cocaine and committing armed robbery.”
Operation Trident was finally established as a dedicated police unit with 200 officers and a remit to not only make London safer for black people but also to communicate with and consult black people.
The killings of Azelle Rodney and Mark Duggan, and the response to them, were a portent of things to come.
The police inspectorate, HMIC, reports that almost a third of stop and search exercises by the police lack reasonable grounds; the national arrest rate is a meager 9 per cent, in London it is 21 per cent — but black people are seven times more likely to be stopped than whites. Plus ça change.
Claudia Webbe protests that, without community consultation, London mayor Boris Johnson changed the remit and locus of Operation Trident. It has not only lost its specialist black focus, but also inevitably its commitment to consultation — the very essence of ‘community policing’.
The deaths of Azelle Rodney and Mark Duggan — and the deaths of four others in the riots — are the price paid not only for problematic policing, but hapless oversight by the IPCC. Its days are surely numbered.
Yvette Cooper, shadow Home Secretary, has warned that it may be replaced. There is talk of a Policing Ombudsman.
But let’s turn our gaze to Northern Ireland: there the first Policing Ombudsman appointed as part of the peace treaty that ended 30 years of armed conflict was the reserved but robust lawyer, Nuala O’Loan.
Her tenure proved to be one of the most radical in the new Northern Ireland. More than anyone before or since she uncovered scorching evidence of collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries in the killing of British citizens. The British government chose not to retain her brave services. Since then the office of the Policing Ombudsman has been degraded to the point of collapse.
Bodies like the IPCC and the Ombudsman only work if they are allowed to, and if their professional resources are amplified by the wisdoms of the people they are supposed to serve.
Reports of the horrendous death of Bijan Ebrahimi — a disabled man living in Bristol — seem doomed to point in all the wrong directions. He was murdered — beaten and torched to death — by neighbours who spread the rumour that he was a paedophile.
Bijan Ebrahimi, a ‘caring loving and unselfish’ man according to The Independent (Photo by Nicholas Razzell)
But the rumour could have been staunched by the police who investigated the allegation and found no basis for it. And police could have talked down Mr Ebrahimi’s assailants had they done their primary duty to the public: to keep the peace.
There are the inevitable squeals that Britain is obsessed by hunting down paedophiles — my discussion on the Jeremy Vine Show on 29th October 2013 repeated this theme.
But the murder of Mr Ebrahimi exemplifies the toxic mix of muddle, indifference and fury that surrounds the issue.
The story of Mr Ebrahimi’s demise really begins with the authorities’ failure to ensure public safety on his estate in Brislington, Bristol. He’d complained about children damaging the flowers and apparently, in frustration at his failure to engage anyone to stop this, he began taking photographs of the children spoiling his garden.
According to The Independent Mr Ebrahimi had been harassed by ‘youths’ attacking his flower basket. He called the police, he took photographs of the perpetrator, he defied police advice to stay inside his flat — effectively making him a prisoner in his own home — and when police finally arrived on 12th July a crowd gathered around the flat and shouted ‘paedo’.
Police arrested Mr Ebrahimi, checked out the allegations and found no evidence whatsoever, and returned him back to the flat where, by then, he was living amidst vital hostility.
On 14th July Mr Ebrahimi was dead — he had been beaten and torched. Several members of Somerset and Avon police service are the subject of disciplinary action and both the police and the local authority are scrutinizing the sequence of events.
What is apparent already, however, is that a disabled person’s life has been ruined and then taken; the primary duty of the police, public safety and security, was neither contemplated nor implemented.
When he was returned to his home, his angry neighbours were not addressed, they were not disabused of their prejudices, and the ‘youths’ were not called to account.
What is community policing if not this?
Was this case a sign of a society gone mad, obsessed by paedophiles, suspecting abusers of lurking behind every hedge?
Well, no, actually.
Is Rochdale so different from anywhere else? In 2012 a group of men were jailed for abusing at least 47 girls — even though evidence had been available to the authorities about these predators since 1991.
Is Oxford so different from anywhere else? In 2011 the police investigated evidence that a group of girls had been sadistically abused by a group of men — despite the efforts of some of these girls to tell their story to the authorities for eight years. It was the girls, not the men, who had been stigmatized.
In West Yorkshire, a group of men was jailed in 2008 after organizing the abuse of an estimated 50 girls at two schools. Did no one notice?
In the very week that the trial of Mr Ebrahimi’s tormenters was reported, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry announced that the investigation of rape and sex offences had dropped: the number of rapes referred by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2012-13 was 5404 — that is 2700 fewer than in 2010-11.
Thornberry commented that there has been a steady decline in the number of cases being referred to the CPS by the police, despite a steady rise in the number of people feeling confident enough to go to the police.
The current number of referrals to the CPS is the lowest in five years.
