Rape victims face 'painful' wait of more than a year for attackers to be charged

29 July 2023 , 19:02

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Home Secretary Suella Braverman (Image: PA)

Rape victims are being left in “painful limbo” - waiting more than a year for their attackers to be charged.

The average time a rape victim has to wait for charges to be brought against an offender has increased to 400 days. That’s up from 381 days before the pandemic.

It follows an overall declining trend in charge rates, which have fallen from 16.3 per cent in 2015 to 5.5 percent last year, meaning a total of two million crimes went unresolved.

Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the delays were “an appalling indictment on the Conservatives’ failing record on law and order. Victims have already endured the most terrible of crimes, but these huge long delays before charges are even laid are leaving them in painful limbo that compounds the crime,” she said.

“The result of these shameful delays is that many desperate victims are giving up on the criminal justice system and dangerous rapists are walking free. The Tories have been warned time and again about the long delays and failures in taking criminals to court. These failures are letting criminals off and letting victims down.”

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Keir Starmer has promised Labour would halve violence against women and girls in under a decade by ensuring every police force has a rape and serious sexual offence unit to provide specialist support to victims when they report a crime. The party has also committed to introducing specialist rape courts and tackling misogyny online and in schools.

Dame Vera Baird, the former Victim’s Commissioner, has repeatedly warned that victims of rape are being let down by the criminal justice system, describing the situation as “effectively decriminalising rape”.

She wrote in a 2022 report: “For victims, reporting rape is effectively a lottery and the odds are rarely in your favour. There has been public outrage about this for a long time and improvement is long overdue.”

The Home Office declined to comment.

Joao Santos