21 January 2016
Anonymity Or Spotlight In Rape Cases?
Where is the justice under the current system?
by Lynda Goetz
I have recently discovered a site called accused.me.uk. This is a support and campaigning site for those wrongly accused of rape and their families. It is worth a look. It is reasonable and rational and argues that wrongful convictions are in fact rare. However, the fact that such a site is needed shows how somehow, over the last few years, in our anxiety to support those who have been subjected to sexual crimes, we seem to have lost sight of justice for those who are accused of such crimes. Accused.me.uk believes that the right of anonymity given to complainants in rape cases in the UK under the Sexual Offences Act (Amendment) 1992 should be extended to those against whom the allegations are made. They are not alone in this view and a couple of items in the news recently have lent strength to the argument.
A 21 year-old undergraduate at Durham University, one Louis Richardson, has with his family ‘been put through hell’ since being arrested for rape fifteen months ago. He was found ‘not guilty’ last week. Last Friday, Lord Bramall, a 93 year-old retired field marshal who was a former head of the army and Chief of the Defence Staff, was informed in a letter to his solicitor that the police were dropping a year-long investigation into allegations of historic sex abuse made against him by a single accuser, known only as ‘Nick’. Both these men are, in spite of being in one case found ‘not guilty’ and in the other never having been charged, tainted by publicity and association with extremely unpleasant crimes. Lord Bramall’s house was searched last April by 20 police officers and he was then interviewed under caution at a police station. He has described the police behaviour as ‘heavy-handed’. Richardson, it would seem, had been targeted by a young woman his barrister termed, inter alia, a ‘manipulative liar’ and whilst the epithets applied to her in court do not paint a flattering picture of her character, her name remains unknown to the public, if not to friends and acquaintances at Durham. Mr Richardson on the other hand has not only had his sexual activities and general behaviour plastered all over the press, but he has been suspended from the university and not allowed to pursue his studies. Neither of these situations smacks of fairness. Indeed the injustice in both cases seems so glaringly obvious that it is almost hard to understand how we have got to this point.
Clearly, the Jimmy Savile case and subsequent celebrity historic sex trials have a lot to do with the present situation as far as Lord Bramall is concerned. In these historic cases, police have hoped that by naming the various celebrities before they are even charged they will encourage other victims to come forward – something they may have been reluctant to do earlier if they had thought they were alone in their predicament or if they felt that the status of those they wanted to accuse would make their own claims less believable. Unfortunately this has also laid the way open for the liars, ‘gold-diggers’ and fantasists to get on the band wagon. As for ‘ordinary’ rape cases, the idea of anonymity for men accused is one ‘which keeps coming back’, according to Women Against Rape. Although Lord Justice Rose Heilbron did not recommend it in her committee’s report in 1975 which proposed anonymity for rape victims, it was nevertheless introduced into law by the Labour Party in 1976. It was then repealed in 1988 by the Tories. Anonymity for defendants reared its head again in 2006 when it became Liberal Party policy and in 2010 the Coalition put forward the idea of reintroducing it. This caused an outcry from women in many quarters, including female MPs, leading the government to withdraw the proposals. In 2013, the then leader of the Bar Council, Maura McGowan QC, called for anonymity until conviction of men accused of rape. Fairly unsurprisingly, The Guardian immediately ran an article explaining why this was a bad idea. The Independent did the same a month or so later.
More recently the argument rumbles on. In the autumn of last year, a young man of 17, by the name of Jay Cheshire, committed suicide after being falsely accused of rape by a girl who later withdrew the allegation. Suicide is of course a complicated issue, but being identified in connection with such an accusation might well have been the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’. Why the girl made and then withdrew the allegation was never clear, but if there is any question that she was lying, then she should, as Alison Pearson said in her excellent article in The Telegraph on 6th October, be prosecuted. The charge would be of ‘perverting the course of justice’. As accused.me.uk points out, prosecutions for this offence are in practice far too rare.
At the end of the day, there are probably always going to be those who are unhappy with whatever legislation is currently in place. Rape and sexual abuse are thoroughly unpleasant crimes with connotations absent from most other crimes. In 1975 Lord Justice Rose Heilbron made the point that the correct comparison was not between a rape defendant and his accuser, but between him and those accused of other crimes. If this is the case, then of course no accused is granted anonymity – justice has to be seen to be done. The question is perhaps whether sexual offences really do ‘fall within an entirely different order’ because of the stigma which attaches to them or whether in fact all criminal offences carry stigma and no differences can be made. However, the limited anonymity which was sought by the Home Affairs Committee in 2003 (which would cover suspects like Jay Cheshire or Lord Bramall, not yet charged with a sexual offence) would probably get the support of a very large proportion of the general public. As for those accused of rape and denied the anonymity of their accusers, they should, at the very least, be granted reasonable treatment by the police. This seems to be an area in which the police lack communication skills or any empathy. Surely it should not be impossible to keep the ‘suspects’ informed and updated as to exactly what they are accused of without leaving them in the dark for weeks as Lord Bramall says he was left? Indeed, one of the five campaigns on the site accused.me.uksite is just that -reasonable treatment by the police.
The final point in this very brief look at what is a very wide debate is the question of turning the spotlight on those who can be seen to be making random or malicious accusations. Lord Bramall’s son has suggested that the spotlight should be turned on ‘Nick’, his father’s anonymous accuser, whose sensational claims the police quickly stated to be ‘true and credible’. This suggestion would, I suspect, have equal numbers of supporters and detractors. There are those who would say that to allow him to be named would ‘stop people coming forward with historic child abuse claims’; there are others who would say that if his claims are fictitious then he should certainly be exposed as the liar and fraud that he is. The way forward may well be the threat of more prosecutions for perverting the course of justice should accusers be found to be lying. After all, as justice has to be seen to be done, any accused can be named.
