Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics show a huge rise of close to a third in the number of rapes recorded by the police in the last 12 months. We’ve reached the highest number ever seen in England – 22,116 rapes in a year – part of an overwhelming total of almost 68,000 reported sexual offences. Counterintuitively, this increase has been seen by some as a cause for celebration, clear evidence of the public’s increased confidence in the police and better recording practices. What has been missed in much of the analysis is what each rape means in real terms for the women and men who survive it.
Survivors and workers in charities such as Rape Crisis centres know all too well the realities of rape, and how often they conflict with what people may believe. We know that rape is a crime overwhelmingly perpetrated against women and girls, and that there are particularly gendered barriers to men and boys who have been raped speaking out about what they have experienced. We know that the figures which show an almost 50% rise in the number of rapes involving a knife or sharp instrument will be read by many people as relating to stranger assaults.
We know, and have seen in Judy Finnigan’s comments last week, the myth that there is a hierarchy of rape where those involving weapons or additional physical violence are somehow “worse” than those where sexual violence is the violence used. We know that as a society we seem to focus so readily on what the survivor of rape was doing before, during or after the assault (was she drinking?, did he fight back?, why didn’t she report it?), that the actions and strategic decision-making of perpetrators can become invisible.
However, we also know that most rapes are committed by men whom women trusted, and that these are some of the hardest attacks to report and the ones least likely to secure a conviction. Often the rapes with the highest levels of additional physical violence are perpetrated by partners and ex-partners. This means that the statistics which show an increase in the use of weapons may relate to rapes committed by those men whom women should have been safest with.
Other things we’re sure of? That women are daily factoring in what Liz Kelly, director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, calls safety work, designed to minimise their risk of sexual violence. These are the habitual, almost imperceptible limitations on our freedom, from choosing where to sit on public transport, to planning what kinds of clothes to wear if we know we’re coming home late at night. We’re aware that, counter to what perpetrators try to claim, there are no blurred lines of consent. That actually it’s pretty easy to find out if someone wants to have sex with you, by reading verbal and non-verbal signals, by doing something as simple as asking: “Are you OK with this?” Rape is always a decision made by the perpetrator; a decision to treat another human being as though they aren’t a person, as though they don’t matter.
Behind each and every one of these 22,116 reported rapes there are impacts that shatter our sense of who we are, who we can trust, and what kind of world we live in. The impacts of rape don’t discriminate based on your relationship with the perpetrator, whether or not he used a weapon, whether he punched you, bit you, threatened your family, your friends, your children. What does affect our ability to cope with the aftermath of rape is more about how much we feel to blame for his decision to rape, and by how much we feel supported by society at large.
What we don’t know, however, is what the fact that we now have the highest levels of reported rape means for the experience of survivors. To make sense of this we need more information on the context and relationships of each reported rape, something we hope the government will look into. We also need a concerted effort to challenge the myths of sexual violence, and here we hope broadcasters and journalists will stop choosing the easy stories, and ask more searching questions.
Finally, as a society, we need to remember that if more than 22,000 rapes have been reported in just one year, and that reported rapes are only ever 10%-15% of the total number perpetrated, then we’ve got a long way to go before we reach the world free from sexual violence that would really be cause for celebration.
