How do we get sexual predators out of the country’s police forces? It was one of the most urgent questions asked in 2021 when a serving police officer, PC Wayne Couzens, was charged with the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard. In the first report of Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into this dreadful sequence of events, published in February last year, she made the eminently sensible recommendation that any individual with a caution or conviction for a sexual offence should be rejected during police vetting.
It seemed the very least that should happen, yet we’ve learned from Lady Angiolini’s second report this week that the recommendation has yet to be implemented. She reveals that it took 18 months after publication for police chiefs to agree a blanket ban on recruits who have convictions, and even then it wasn’t included in draft Home Office regulations issued in September this year.
The Home Office has now told Angiolini that a ban will be included, but it won’t be retrospective. The delay is all the more astonishing because her first report highlighted a series of “lamentable and repeated” missed opportunities to stop Couzens, who was a heavy user of violent pornography and had a history of exposing himself in public. Couzens should never have been a police officer and neither should David Carrick, who was sent to prison for life in 2023 for committing sexual offences against more than a dozen women while serving in the same force.
Angiolini’s latest report offers an insight into the extent of the problem, revealing that checks against the police national database in 2023-24 led to 461 police officers, staff and volunteers being referred to “an appropriate authority”. Nine cases triggered further criminal investigations and 88 disciplinary investigations.
As Angiolini reminds us, all sorts of promises were made after Everard’s murder. Yet here we are, more than four years later, reading another report that is basically a catalogue of repeated and preventable failures. A quarter of police forces in England and Wales have yet to implement “basic policies for investigating sexual offences”. Neither police nor government ministers know the scale of attacks on women in public spaces by strangers. Efforts to reduce violence against women are “fragmented, underfunded and overly reliant on short-term solutions”. A promise in 2023 to give violence against women and girls (VAWG) the same status in crime prevention as terrorism hasn’t been met.
The truth is that it isn’t a priority at all. “Too often prevention in this space remains just words,” Angiolini says bluntly. Labour won an election almost 18 months ago with an eye-catching promise to cut VAWG by half within a decade, but Angiolini points out that the government’s strategy for delivering on the promise has yet to be revealed.
No one should be surprised. Violence against women is a more reliable producer of reports than measures that might give sexual predators pause. There is a familiar pattern here, beginning with uproar in the media when a particularly egregious offender is finally exposed, followed by the panicked commissioning of yet another report. The conviction in 2009 of John Worboys, the taxi driver who drugged and raped women who got into his cab, was rapidly followed by the Stern review.
The then home secretary, Theresa May, gave the Stern report an effusive welcome. “Our comprehensive and detailed action plan sets out how we are going to tackle these crimes – supporting those at risk, helping victims and ensuring offenders are brought to justice”, she declared. I don’t doubt she was sincere, but by 2021 a sharp drop in the number of rape prosecutions prompted the then government to set up an “end-to-end rape review”. Three years later, things were even worse, leading Labour to describe the number of prosecutions as “shamefully low” in its 2024 election manifesto.
So many reviews, so much hand-wringing, yet impunity remains the norm for the vast majority of rapists. The reason is not hard to find: sexual violence is a crime that prompts more scrutiny of the victim than the offender. Until very recently, traumatised women were told an investigation could not go ahead unless they signed a form giving detectives access to their work and home computers, school and medical records since birth, and handed over their mobile phones. No such demands were made of suspects, even though text messages and habitual use of violent porn might be relevant to building a case.
Disbelief is at the heart of this scandalous situation. Not just disbelief of individual women, although that’s bad enough, but an underlying attitude among some officers that rape doesn’t really exist – and a reluctance by police chiefs and ministers to make it grounds for dismissal. Three years ago, a report for the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Home Office admitted that investigations were being hampered by officers who dismissed rape reports as “regretful sex”.
The claim that rape is uniquely difficult to investigate becomes ever weaker in an era of CCTV and mobile phones. But the quality of investigations is undeniably affected by the calibre of the officers carrying them out, some of whom inhabit a culture (like that alleged at Charing Cross in central London) where misogyny and racism is rife.
That’s why Angiolini’s insistence that “perpetrators must be the focus” could not be more timely or welcome. So is David Lammy’s announcement on Tuesday that rape victims will no longer be portrayed as serial liars in courtrooms. Victim blaming has been allowed to flourish in the criminal justice system for far too long, encouraged by a failure to root out police officers who share the mindset of perpetrators.
Joan Smith was co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board from 2013-2021
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