This weekend I sat in a television studio while Nigel Farage to all intents and purposes cast doubt on the women coming forward to say that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted them. He suggested that it was “strange” that they were all coming forward now and not at the time – despite the fact that some did. I wanted to shout across the studio: “Women don’t come forward because idiots like you say stupid stuff like that, that they are making it up for attention. You are part of the problem!” We live in a time when it is still perfectly acceptable for people to belittle experiences of sexual violence and to blame the victim; these throwaway comments trip off the tongue as easily as talking about the weather.
It is incredibly hard for a victim of rape or sexual violence to come forward. They feel shame. They are scared, and in many cases, have been groomed by their abuser to think that “no one will believe you”. I have met hundreds of women and men who said: “What’s the point? It will never come to anything.”
Many victims, especially children, feel that they are somehow responsible for what has happened to them, so with their shame they also feel guilt. In my time working for a charity that supported victims of sexual violence, we assisted thousands of victims who never sought justice for their trauma. Many who had dared to try then faced a “no further action” decision from the Crown Prosecution Service, which felt that their case or they as a credible witness would not stand up in court. Imagine being told: “You are not believable enough for your abuser to be held to account.” Or: “Sorry love, the fact that you have a criminal record means no one will believe you.” We need look no further than the cases of sexual violence in Rotherham and Rochdale to see what happens to young people who are disbelieved or considered the “wrong sort of witness”. This is still the case for the vast majority of rape victims; very few ever get a day in court and even fewer ever see their perpetrators convicted.
I’m worried that the way evidence was admitted in Ched Evans’s successful appeal has made this worse, and that it is now even less likely that victims will come forward. Essentially Evans was allowed a retrial on the basis that he could prove that his accuser had had consensual sex in similar circumstances and in a similar way that he alleges she behaved during his encounter with her. These similarities were, in my opinion, in no way unusual or individual enough to have been considered. This case fills me with dread. What is to stop any defendant in the future simply going on Facebook and crowd-sourcing information from a victim’s previous partners and using it against her in court?
Most people are raped or sexually abused by someone they know. It is very possible, likely even, that a perpetrator will know someone else a victim has had sex with before; they could be friends. Imagine for a second that you were raped by someone in your friendship group, who after you had told the police, went around your mates finding out what you had been up to and exactly what you said during sex, or how you moved. If I thought for a second that this might happen, I know it would make it harder for me to come forward.
With women from the parliamentary Labour party, I have written to the attorney general and the justice secretary to seek action to stop this. We want assurances that the Evans case will not act to make it even harder for victims to come forward. We want to know what the government is going to do to ensure this. Women in the Labour movement have spent decades fighting to improve the rights and treatment of victims of rape and sexual violence. Labour women have a proud history of developing rape crisis organisations, changing how victims give evidence in court and creating specialist independent sexual violence advisers to help victims seek justice. We will not sit back now and allow this case to undo years of slow but steady progress for victims who so often cannot speak for themselves.