David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong pour cold water on the government’s rape trial myth-busting proposals
There is an air of desperation about the latest effort by the authorities to show they are on the case in responding to demands that “something must be done” in getting more rapists jailed. On 14 January it was widely reported that police and prosecutors are considering use of the “text sting”, a stratagem imported from the US and Canada in which complainants under police management will try to trap their alleged tormentors into making written apologies by sending such heartfelt recriminations as: “How could you have treated me like that?”
On the very same day, The Guardian published extracts from the journal of a woman detailing the obstacles she had faced from police and prosecutors in her vain attempt to get her stepfather tried for rape. An accompanying article dealt with the “justice gap” between reported rapes and convictions and there followed the next day in the same newspaper a further account of the reasons for the very low prosecution rate, featuring
