A Question Of Conviction
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/19/myths-about-rape-conviction-rates?INTCMP=SRCH
Yesterday’s Graun had a piece by Amanda Bancroft, aka @_millymoo, about conviction rates in rape cases. She wrote:
‘The conviction rate for rape is 58%. That bears repeating. The conviction rate for rape, is 58%. The conviction rate for reportable crimes of all types is 57%. I know you will have heard the figure of 6%. Everyone has. That figure is actually an attrition rate, not a conviction rate, and even as an attrition rate it is wrong – the attrition rate for rape is in the region of 12%.
…
Why is this important? Because the rhetoric of rape, which largely propounds myths, puts survivors off reporting the crimes committed against them, making them perceive that the system designed to assist them is actually wholly against them.
Last week, Mumsnet released a survey of its users as part of its We Believe You rape awareness campaign. Sixty-eight per cent of respondents said low conviction rates would make them hesitate to report a rape due to low conviction rates – clearly they had heard the 6% figure too.
It isn’t just conviction and attrition rates that are an issue and which impact on rape reporting. The whole discourse about rape is mired in myths and half-truths, which leads survivors to believe the system is against them and that they are unlikely to be believed.’
Here is a response to some of her points by Nat, @TheNatFantastic, who runs the Forty Shades Of Grey blog. Nat says:
‘Bancroft has a good point in this piece – victims of rape are scared of going to the police for many reasons, and we should be doing whatever’s in our capacity to stop this happening. However, that shouldn’t include giving people false hope and potentially putting them in danger in order to raise the number of reports.
My concern with Bancroft’s repeated assertion that ‘the conviction rate for rape is 58%’ is that firstly, it’s wrong. The conviction rate at a trial for <i>any crime</i> when the defendant is charged with rape is 58%. The conviction rate at a trial for rape is 33%.
(source:http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2012/01/09/rape-and-cjscps-performance/)
Secondly, I think it’s a potentially dangerous thing to say. If someone’s in an abusive relationship and is raped, telling them they’ll have a 58% chance to get away if they go to the police could have devastating ramifications if they’re part of the 66% for whom the case doesn’t go to court. Around 85% of victims know their attacker and could therefore be placed in some bad situation (source: http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbName=DocumentViewer&DocumentID=32306),
whether this is the chance of repeated rape, intimate partner violence or even just ostracision from a social group or family.
In an ideal world, I’d like to see the information laid out properly – If you report your rape to the police, there’s a 66% chance no prosecution will take place. If a prosecution does take place, there’s a 66% chance they won’t be convicted for rape, and a 42% chance they won’t be convicted at all. This would allow people to make an informed choice about what is the best route for them to take. If the statistics from the Ministry of Justice look shit, it’s probably because they are shit. The best way to get more victims to go to the police would be to improve them, not present them in a rose-tinted light.’
QRG comments:
I think they both make good points. I wonder if now Bancroft has busted the 6% myth about rape convictions, if the Guardian will stop printing that statistic as fact.
I also wonder how these stats relate to women who are accused of sexual assault. The precise crime of ‘rape’ in the UK can only be committed by someone with a penis. But it is not clear to me if these figures could include women who are accused of ‘rape’ by members of the public, but who have their cases heard as ‘sexual assault’. And how many men do not report sexual assault?
What a load of twallop by Nat. The points about “false hope” and “putting them in danger” are mutually exclusive – either you’re arguing that the figure is too high and is giving false hope or you’re arguing that the figure is too low and is putting them in danger. The point about putting them in danger is bullshit anyway – surely it’s better to tell people there’s a 40% chance to get away with it than a NINETY PERCENT CHANCE.
Nat may want to poo-poo rose-tinting the numbers (it’s not rose-tinting by the way; the figure is deffo 58%. You can’t magically use a different metric for rape than you do for other crimes) but given the Mumsnet poll it’s clear that the 6/12% figures are actually causing people not to report rapes. Using the 58% figure will remove this problem, leading to more reports, leading to more convictions.
This isn’t some apologist rubbish to try and make rape seem like it isn’t a problem because it is, it really fucking is. We have a long way to go before we’re properly dealing with it but we’re doing ourselves a disservice by using this stupid attrition figure.
I will say that I agree with her that I’d like the statistics laid out in full but I disagree with all this “chance of” stuff. Probabilities of trial/conviction are completely case-specific and cannot be applied as an average.
Simply “x% of rapes go to trial, y% get convicted” will suffice.
I will also say that after re-reading I’m wrong and 33% is the right figure to be using.
Hi Matt – thanks for clarifying. You make your points well.
I don’t have a very strong opinion as to who is more right out of the two viewpoints I have featured here.
I DO have a strong opinion that the 6% figure bandied about is wrong, misleading, and dangerous, and is used in propaganda offensives, especially by feminists.
QRG
Thanks QRG – I’m a bit of a hothead but I do try to correct myself if I’m talking rubbish!
I can’t attribute any malice RE: propaganda – until today I myself used this statistic to bash people around the head with out of ignorance but now that fresh information is out the movement should be changing its behaviour especially if it’s causing women (and probably men too) to not report rapes.
I was mainly arguing in favour of making it clear where each percentage comes from. Saying ‘it’s 58%’ on its own is unclear for people who know squat about the law, because you’re making it sound like if you go to the police, there’s more chance of someone being convicted than not. There’s a lot of stages in between those two.
I also think you’re misinterpreting what I see as danger. If, say, I’m raped by a close family member – should I, knowing that it won’t happen again, go to the police and report it, knowing that if the case is dropped or fails at trial, my family will think I’m a liar and disown me? That could be worse than saying nothing not seeing your attacker go to prison ever.
I’d like to see everyone who’s raped or sexually assaulted feel able to go to the police and feel safe, but it’s just not an option for some people. We don’t change that by bandying about potentially misleading statistics (either 6% or 58%) without making it totally clear what part of the CJS they relate to, we do it by improving police attitudes, society’s reactions to victims and stop telling people it was ‘their own fault’. THAT is what would make people more likely to have faith they’d be taken seriously.
Nat
For me the most curious bit was this:
An attrition rate is the amount of convictions resulting from reports of a crime, and is not routinely calculated for any crime other than rape. Therefore without manually undertaking the exercise, it is impossible to compare the (true) attrition figure for rape with other crimes. A conviction rate is the amount of convictions following a trial, and is calculated for all reportable crimes.
So the ’6%’ figure is apparently being used in a vacuum, on top of the matter of how accurate it actually is. The CPS could ‘solve’ the problem tomorrow if it simply allowed all cases to go forward to trial – though what that might do to the conviction are is another matter.
Thanks all for your insightful comments!
QRG
This was never about presenting the flip side of the coin, it was about presenting the whole coin. There are no positives to present about rape. It is wholly abhorrent, and the prosecution system is gladiatorial. I am not about to stand anywhere and tell anyone that it is a great experience.
However, my point is that rape discourse as it is currently presented is preventing survivors reporting their crimes and given that, we have to look at the discourse as it clearly isn’t working for them.
Leaving stats aside for a moment, if we look at the way Sarah’s case was reported last week, it (rightly) focused on her being sent to prison for retracting. However, wrongly, you had to look hard to find any suggestion that although Sarah’s case was appalling, we have moved on, and the DPP took immediate remedial action in 2010 after the first appeal to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
What that means is that survivors now think that not only do they run the risk of not being believed, but they run the risk of being punished for not being believed which is absolutely not the case.
What saddened me further is that campaigners should have been able to look at the actions of the DPP in 2010, and the fact he publicly stated that justice hadn’t been seen to be done as an indicator of how far they have come.
Returning to the stats, I am somewhat bemused that rather than taking the message that there is more to all of this than is currently being presented, several quarters have taken to their calculators in an attempt to ‘prove’ I am wrong in the figures I use. Who, exactly, does that help?
Currently open on my desk are Stern, 2010, Feist et al, 2007, HMIC 2012, and Kelly et al, 2006. We can all pull numbers from them and present them however we want to. But this isn’t about numbers. This is about moving the discussion on to empower those who want to come forward, and ensuring they are armed with the full picture to make that decision in an informed way. Now really, is that so wrong?
Thanks for your comment. I agree the discourse needs to be examined.
I have examined the feminist ‘rape culture’ discourse and found it very problematic:
http://goodmenproject.com/gender-sexuality/rape-culture-and-other-feminist-myths/
I am afraid my view is that feminists overall (not all of them, but activist ones) often don’t want to ‘empower’ women victims/survivors of sexual assault as it serves their dogma well to keep them as ‘victims’.
I think Harriet Harmann similarly misused this statistic, comparing the 6% figure with actual conviction rates for other crimes (in the 60%s). Might have been repeated in the BBC news too…
If feminists are going to use this sort of reasoning, it gives the impression that they don’t care whether what they say is founded on good evidence or not. It seems that the rhetoric is more important. They cannot be surprised that this creates distrust among men.
A man who sees such an alarming misuse of statistics – with a view to changing the law – will wonder if the law will be tampered with, simply to get the rates higher. That way more men may face wrongful conviction – and what do you suppose might happen to them in jail? Have a guess He may also have heard.the quote “Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience.” Catherine Comins.
Feminists seem to be rather arrogant. They don’t often admit to understanding why they have an image problem. The reason is simple. Some men see the extreme claims, the emotive rhetoric, and the misuse of the figures, and some – I think rightly – will think feminists don’t care what happens to men. To say the least.
HI QRG. This is an interesting development. I’ve long been challenging people on the 6% myth since discovering Stern in my research. I have an academic interest in rape from a Darwinian perspective and was looking at the problem of rape prosecution – this was a piece I wrote before discovering Stern (it’s interesting to note that my academic mentors were just as misled about the ‘true’ prosecution rate as me, hence they didn’t flag it) http://dispatchesfromtheclaphamomnibus.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/recent-submission-to-ms-magazine.html
I had to take a long pause after reading Stern. I was struggling to comprehend the motives behind the orthodox feminist dissemination of the 6% myth. It seemed unconscionable. I still find it so. It came down to this for me – a question which I asked in a later blog, “Does feminism serve women or do women serve feminism?” because after a couple of years of viewing the evidence as dispassionately as possible, http://dispatchesfromtheclaphamomnibus.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/woman-is-not-my-slave-name.html
I very much doubted orthodox feminisms’ duty of care to women and not just their ‘fellow travellers’. So much to the degree that I cannot call myself a Darwinian ‘feminist’ anymore, the word sticks in my throat because I find it synonymous with bad scholarship, cynicism and dishonesty. (Not just in this area either). Hence this; http://dispatchesfromtheclaphamomnibus.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/some-cartoons-i-have-been-working-on.html
I kind of agree with Milly B (@_millymoo). Most of us aren’t statisticians. The figures just bamboozle us. Settling on a figure (from objective sources) would be helpful , but what is more important is that people know they have been misled. Rape is often an opportunistic crime. Women do need to know they have a much better chance than 6% of getting a conviction, that juries are not biased. But more importantly, rapists need to know they aren’t 94% sure of getting away with it. Being an opportunistic crime (as seen when rape figures rocket in places of war/natural disaster when social structures break down and chance of being caught is lower than normal) knowing you take near a 50-50 chance with your freedom vs a near dead cert of getting away with it is enough, I would suggest, to make many a would-be rapist take pause.
Been musing some more on this and I really think feminists should be taken to task about this and made to give an explanation. I think its a pretty big deal. I’ve just checked on the Fawcett Societies website and note they have taken down their page on rape stats which, last time I looked (long after Stern) was still spinning the stats. Rape crisis websites – surely targeted at the most in need and yet seemingly more interested in politicising rather than helping – still scaremongering http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/mythsampfacts2.php
I have problems with many of the apparent ‘myths and facts’ on this page. it’s not really clear which is which either. “The majority of women in society fear rape – no woman is allowed to ignore it.” Fact, myth or rhetoric?
very good points. I have a real problem with some of the rhetoric – and I think that’s what it is – coming out of rape crisis centres. The assumption for a start that only women get raped. And NO mention of how the UK law favours women as victims by saying a penis is required by the aggressor for rape to be committed.
That’s not quite true, women can be convicted of rape in the UK though it is rare. Clare March was convicted of rape in 2001 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1225124.stm.
This doesn’t negate the point about male to male rape, which is endemic in prisons – true rape cultures! But women (and children for that matter) in the ‘real’ world are uniquely vulnerable to rape by men in a way that men are not (not including homosexual men). The majority of rapes in the outside world are male to female/child. Men have no risk of pregnancy which is in evolutionary terms a huge fitness cost – a big deal! Men have their own unique vulnerabilites from women – cuckoldry being the biggest.