Rape victims' battles with CPS: 'I don’t have words for how betrayed I feel'

‘Marie’

Marie was 17 when a relationship turned violent. “We’re talking daily rape, and at least weekly fighting,” she says. At times during their two years together, her boyfriend would also confiscate her clothes, keep her awake at night and hack her phone, she says.

It was only 10 years later that she reported the rapes to police, encouraged by them to do so when she was reporting another crime. She was hesitant at first, but then recorded a four-hour video statement, handed over a 41-page journal written in the aftermath of the relationship ending, and gave officers a list of around 30 people she had told at the time.

“Then they told me that the video had been corrupted. And that they might think about dropping the case because that was my first account,” she says.

Eventually, they took the statement again. “It was really awkward and really upsetting,” she says. “Each time I was telling this story, I was getting retraumatised.”

ITwo years after reporting the rapes, Marie was told no further action would be taken, in a letter that stated there were “difficulties with the evidence”. She asked to speak to the relevant prosecutor, who three months after the initial decision told her the decision was “not based upon us not believing” her account, but on a “forecast” of what a jury would think.

She discovered that police had accidentally sent details of the case to her old address where she had lived with her ex-partner. The CPS said it hadn’t seen medical records Marie says she sent to officers stating that she had bleeding after sex and that her vulval pain was “probably due to an abusive relationship two years ago and concurrent post-traumatic stress disorder”.

She requested a victims’ right to review (VRR) and received a reply days later saying a jury might disregard medical evidence and not believe that she had been raped as she had continued in an abusive relationship.

Responding to a further legal letter the CPS said it was reconsidering the complaint, but eight months later a final decision was made: the case was closed.

“Over the last four years I’ve had to relive an abusive relationship that was only two years long in the first place,” she says. “I don’t have words for how betrayed I feel by the system. I feel like I was so silenced. I was gaslighted, essentially – gaslighted over and over again. It’s left me with more scarring because now he is walking around thinking that he’s won. And this wasn’t even my fight, I didn’t even want to start this fight, I didn’t even want to report it.”

‘Nina’

Nina thought the man in her church wanted to help her. She, then in her 20s, told the senior figure about problems she was having. He, married and in his 50s, said he could heal her. “I was brainwashed,” she says. “I fell for everything he said.”

At first the relationship was platonic, but it progressed until, she says, he was controlling her and watching every move she made. She remembers on one occasion trying to stop him having sex with her, closing her legs and saying it hurt. She says she went into a dissociative state. “When I came around, he was on top of me,” she says. “His face was really evil, like a devil. That’s the only way I can explain it.”

She told no one, too scared to talk to anyone about the relationship and too scared to leave, she says. “He said to me: ‘If you tell anybody, I’ll come after you, I’ll kill you, then I’ll kill myself because my life won’t be worth living.’ So how could I speak out?”

She ended the relationship and when the man was convicted of physically assaulting a woman Nina went to the police and told them what had happened to her. “I was just like, I’m on this, I can do this,” she says.

Around two years later she received a letter saying the CPS had decided not to charge the man because of inconsistencies in her account. She says the prosecutor who made the decision was cold in a meeting, and when Nina provided her with more information the prosecutor ignored it.

She challenged the decision three times, and in the final letter she received she learned that the man had denied the relationship was sexual – a fact the prosecutor agreed was provably false. But the letter said rape “within the context of a relationship” was extremely complex to prove, and added that text messages sent by the man suggested he believed the sex was consensual.

Nina says she still lives in fear, but she supports the case against the CPS because she feels she has been failed and wants to stop others going through the same experience. “But even if the CWJ get the outcome they want, then it’s good for people that come after this but it’s not going to help me in any way,” she says.

The last time she spoke to the police they said there was a possibility they could reopen her case if the man offended again. “I said: so you’re basically telling me that we’ve got to wait until another girl gets her life fucked up like mine? And then you’re going to do something about it? No, fuck off.”

India

When India was 20 and a university student, she went on a date with another student. She found him arrogant and egotistical, but when he walked her to his house instead of walking her home, she reluctantly agreed to go in for a cup of tea, thinking she would leave straight after.

As soon as she walked into his room, he locked the door behind her. Then he told her he had a gun and took it out of a drawer, pointed it at her and asked: “Are you scared?” She said no and asked to hold it. “It sounds a bit strange, but I was thinking of all those hostage situations where they tell you to make friends,” she says. She was, in fact, terrified.

“When he showed me the gun, that was the point at which my options were just gone,” she says. “I basically stayed in that room and just let him do whatever, until eventually he got tired and said that he was going to go to bed.” It lasted hours, she says. “It was violent, it was sustained.”

India left in a daze. Unable to process what had happened, her mental health started deteriorating. She started self-harming, taking drugs, shutting herself away, and at one point she was so sure she was about to take her own life that she went to A&E.

Somehow, she started to piece her life back together. She went back to university, became pregnant, had a daughter and completed her course. She moved to a different town, started a new life and volunteeredfor a local Rape Crisis centre. “I saw the violence that I had experienced wasn’t unusual.”

Years after the incident, she decided to report what had happened to the police. A search for the man on Facebook showed he had sold a fake gun matching the description of the weapon she had given.

But four months later the CPS said the case would not be charged. In a letter, it said that although it was clear that India had not consented, it was not clear her attacker had been aware of her lack of consent. The letter noted that India had not said “no” to her attacker, and said the way she had described the incident with the gun “indicated that it was not a serious threat”.

She pored over the CPS’s code for crown prosecutors, which states that the crown must be able to prove a suspect did not have a “reasonable belief in consent”. “I asked if the law states it is reasonable for a man to place a woman in a threatening situation like this and reasonably believe that anything she goes along with is done out of free choice,” she says.

She asked for a VRR, but the decision was upheld. She asked for another review. In October 2017, a senior prosecutor upheld the decision not to charge, but for a different reason.

The letter said that based on her medical records it was possible that India had been on antidepressants or using recreational drugs at the time of the incident, which could have affected her memory. India was floored, explaining that she had come off the antidepressants a year before the rape and had taken drugs only a couple of times.

She requested a further review, pointing out that the decision was based on inaccurate information, but in November she received a letter that appeared to accept that a mistake had been made about her medical records but maintained that the CPS would not be charging the case.

‘Olivia’

On a beautiful summer afternoon , Olivia met her parents for drinks and food. She went home, had a few more drinks and went back out to the pub, this time on her own. When she left at 11pm, she was, by her own account, very inebriated.

A little after 1am she was found distressed and semi-conscious outside a shop, after a worried friend who had taken a call from her phoned the police. Olivia, who is gay and has chronic pain caused by a bone disease and ME, could only remember the night in snippets, but knew she had been raped. “I don’t remember any conversations with him apart from saying ‘no, I don’t want that’,” she says.

She told police what little she could remember: that the man was white and had an accent; about the grass and twigs under her feet; realising at one point she was naked from the waist down; calling the friend, crying.

Later the same day she was examined at a sexual assault referral centre, and she was told that police had CCTV footage and made an arrest. He was charged and a trial was set for late February. But in December the case was dropped. The CPS offered no evidence at a pre-trial hearing and the case was dismissed.

“I kept wondering if I had done something wrong. It sent me loopy,” she says. Despite the investigating officer telling her it was the strongest case he’d seen in 15 years, the CPS said CCTV footage showed in its view that Olivia wasn’t incapacitated through drink, she “engaged” with the defendant, and there were inconsistencies between her recollection and the CCTV evidence.

Olivia exercised her right to a meeting with the prosecutor. “From the start she made me feel as though it was my fault,” she says. “I said I would never go with a guy even if I’m drunk, and she said it could have been sex with regret and my sexuality was irrelevant.”

Olivia approached the Centre for Women’s Justice, which wrote to the CPS asking for a review of the decision. She only saw the CCTV footage after the process had finished. “It was too late for me to respond to the CPS about their incorrect interpretations,” she says.

A letter to the CPS from her lawyer stated that footage showed the man forcing her hand down his trousers and putting his hand down her shorts; when she removed both hands, he did it again. It stated that the CCTV footage did not include a crucial 40-minute period and argued that Olivia’s medical conditions had prevented her from running away. The letter added: “No weight appears to have been placed on why the defendant had left our client on the floor, outside at night, in a semi-conscious state.”

A few months after the case was initially dropped, the CPS said the decision to discontinue proceedings had been correct.

Olivia now suffers from PTSD, and her flashbacks include moments from her meeting with the CPS. “I don’t think people realise that a public organisation can harm someone to that extent and get away with it,” she says. “Unless you’ve been through the system, you wouldn’t realise just how badly it is going wrong.”

*Names have been changed.