Rape in Britain

The Guardian had an interesting profile this week of Alice Vachss, a US sex crimes prosecutor (she ran the special victims bureau of the Queens district attorney's office in New York, and brought the sex crimes conviction rate up to an astonishing 80%).

She now educates those within the criminal justice system on how best to investigate and prosecute sex crimes.

In Britain, there are an estimated 47,000 rapes each year, but our conviction rate is 5.6%.

Vachss highlighted the obstacles in bringing successful rape prosecutions:

- female jurors can be judgemental of the complainant -- in order to convince themselves that it could never happen to them. In 2005, a survey for Amnesty International found that 5% of women (compared with 3% of men) believed that a woman was "totally responsible" for being raped if she was drunk.
- the reluctance, both here and in the US, to bring "difficult" cases to court, such as those involving prostitutes, drug and alcohol users, and teenage girls
- the absence, in the UK, for special victims units that work exclusively on sex crimes and receive intensive and ongoing training from experts

Vachss: "What I want is for people to feel horror about what rape really is," she says, "to feel indignation that we tolerate it".