| 7 mins read
The storm about the policing of rape and other sexual offences has been brewing for years. The feminist challenge to the police investigation of rape was laid bare in the watershed High Court ruling DSD and NVB v The Commissioner of the Metropolis, outlining a litany of investigative failures over six years before John Worboys was convicted of one count of rape, five sexual assaults and thirteen other charges. Following his conviction, the MPS received a surge of reports about his offending behaviour, with the number of victims now acknowledged to be over 105. The duty on the police to investigate now stands in law.
In March 2019, the government announced that it was carrying out an end-to-end review of the way the criminal justice system manages rape cases in England and Wales. The then charge rate for police-recorded rapes was 2.1 per cent.
How police treat victims of rape and sexual offences has life-changing consequences for victims. Before the government's review was published in March 2021, feminist outrage hit boiling point through the tragedy of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police Officer, Wayne Couzens. Examples of police officers being convicted of rape and other sexual offences remain common in the news.
Louise Casey's report, published in March 2023, was the final blow and a woeful indictment of the state of policing and its failure to get a grip on sexual violence inside the police service and in the service to victims. The storm has by no means been diminished.
The problem
Poor rape investigation is often characterised as a problem of police misogyny, of applying outdated myths and misconceptions about rape as a crime, or of sloppy and incompetent investigative evidence gathering. We led the work commissioned by the Home Office—Operation Soteria Bluestone—a comprehensive research programme and collaboration with the police service which began in January 2021 and found all three problems alive and well in policing. Over eighteen months, the programme examined a wide range of data in the five police forces in England and Wales.
This research took place nearly a decade after the DSD judgment; sadly, few institutional failings named in the legal judgment had been corrected. The critical issues are:
- Policing fails to incorporate specialist knowledge about rape and sexual offending into its front-line and investigative resourcing. We suggest elsewhere this is because the origins of the policing mission never really included relationship violence.
- Investigators lack sufficient knowledge about sexual offending, especially how offending manifests itself in different victim-offender relationship contexts.
- Forces systematically fail to identify repeat sexual offenders who are reported to them.
- Investigating rape and sexual offences takes a human toll on investigators. The research documented very high caseloads, stress, and secondary and vicarious trauma, leading to chronic illness and burnout. Corporate resources for well-being were lacking and, if they did exist, inadequate.
- High and unmanageable caseloads are exacerbated by the complexity of gathering evidence of sexual offending, because the overwhelming context of rape and sexual offending takes place within relationships.
- Data and data analysis capabilities are poor and under-resourced.
- Digital forensics, the ability to search digital devices such as phones, armed with specialist knowledge of offending, needs an uplift and proper resourcing. Police forces have been accused of ‘digital strip searches’ of rape victims.
The problem of rape investigation is a corporate, institutional failing, not a series of isolated individual failings of individual officers. These fundamental corporate problems can only be fixed nationally with the cooperation of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), the Home Office, and the College of Policing. These were all accepted as agreed findings by these three bodies.
The current state of policing is a burning platform. But there is hope. Collaborative solutions, detailed in the next section, address some of the above.
A way forward: an intensive knowledge-to-practice collaboration
Our framework grounded us in the policing cultures we worked in as much as it did the research questions we explored. Embedding the evolution of the research and the in-house solutions to the very heart of the programme enabled ownership throughout the ranks and the police leadership, a key lever in taking on the insight and changing practices based on it.
Working with committed and enthusiastic police officers opens the space for changing practice. Ways of working are different in every one of the forty-three police forces in England and Wales. The high-level learning about sexual offending—a fundamental gap for improvement—was developed first through cooperation with the College of Policing. Case reviews turned into acute learning tools. Detailed analysis of recorded crime by the research team led to corporate considerations about how different force units, such as offender management teams and domestic violence units, could work more closely with rape and sexual offence investigators to link investigation to disruption of offending. The data capture and the application of insight took place hand in hand between academic teams and front-line investigators. We linked together the overall picture through the creation of the first National Operating Model (NOM) for Rape and Serious Sexual Offences (RASSO).11
The NOM is, first and foremost, a model for corporate change. No law has been changed. The model organises the approach to change through different ‘layers’ for improvement, from its vision; guiding KPIs; strategy for senior officers; operational guidance, toolkits and so on; and a comprehensive learning and development strategy.
In the three years since we began our collaboration with the police service, we have seen change, with rape charges doubling and even tripling in some pathfinder forces. This effect is more robust when senior leadership drives the way business decisions are made. The stand-out example in England and Wales is Avon and Somerset Police. Here Chief Constable Sarah Crew, the NPCC lead for adult rape and sexual offences, is committed to demonstrating that policing's remit can morph to meet today's problems.
The ownership of transformation is in the hands of the police service, nationally and locally. It is our hope that we are not asked again to write a commentary on rape investigation that sets out—again—the failings that were so eloquently laid out in DSD.
