Women in rape cases ‘forced to wait four or five years for justice’

Rape case delays are getting worse with increasing numbers of women facing waits of four or five years for justice, London’s Victims’ Commissioner has warned.

Claire Waxman said she was “livid” and “fuming” about the plight of complainants and the failure of promised government reforms to improve the situation.

Instead, she said large court backlogs were forcing some women and men to wait an “incredibly long time” to see their alleged attackers go on trial, adding to the trauma they faced and potentially hindering the chances of conviction.

Ms Waxman added that the hold-ups were also causing others to abandon their attempts to secure justice before the court process began because the prospect of such extensive delays was too daunting.

She said the answers should include a specialist rape case court and maximum gap of no more than three to six months between a defendant being charged and going on trial.

Ms Waxman’s warning, during comments to the Standard, comes amid continuing concern about the plight of rape victims nationwide.

Official statistics show that fewer than 2 per cent of rapes reported to police end in prosecution with many complainants deciding to give up before the case even reaches the charging stage.

But Ms Waxman said the drop out rate was a major concern, but said that she was also dismayed that the minority of cases which do go to trial were also suffering huge delays at the expense of justice.

“We’re seeing an increase of cases being flagged to my office where there’s delays of four, five years from the first time of reporting to getting into court,” she said.

“That’s an incredibly long time for a victim, and particularly a rape victim, to wait for justice. There’s a lot of things they can’t access during that period – therapy for example. Delaying justice has a huge impact.”

Ms Waxman added that the “really serious” problems afflicting rape prosecutions were also adding to the burden on services, such as Victim Support, which she said was “already stretched but now having to hold victims for longer”.

She said the problem was a lack of court capacity and also hit out at the allocation of rape cases as “floaters” which could either be fitted in or postponed at the last minute.

“It is a seriously under-funded system and that’s why it just doesn’t work effectively and it is without doubt struggling to deliver justice.

London is disproportionately affected by the backlogs. We need a lot more Nightingale courts and a specialist rape court so that that rape victims who has been waiting far too long anyway have a dedicated date and nothing will happen to change that date and they will be going into court.

“I can’t see why if you’ve charged a case set it for three months down the line so that you know you’ve got three months dedicated to working on the case and get it to court. Six months maximum. At the moment it’s way off that.”

Ms Waxman, who has written to the justice minister Lord Wolfson to express her dismay, said cases that she was dealing with including one in which a trial date for next year had been set in the case of a complainant who reported a rape in 2018.

Another was a case where the woman reported a 2016 rape three years later with the suspect due to go on trial later this year, three years after the allegation was made and six after the alleged offence.

A further case, which she said had left her “fuming”, involved a particularly vulnerable woman who had been waiting four years to see the person she accused face trial. The support that should have been given to her had not been provided.

“I was livid,” Ms Waxman added. “This particular victim was probably one of the most vulnerable I’ve met and she was four years in the system and it’s heartbreaking - every part of the system that should be working properly.

“If she hadn’t got in touch this very vulnerable victim was going in without special measures, without her victim’s personal statement updated, and without even having visited a court and understood the whole process.

“These are really serious cases that impact really vulnerable people. I was fuming because she was so vulnerable and no one had played their part in supporting her.”

The warning about increasing waits for rape complainants comes despite improvements promised last year by the government following a review of rape cases.

Then then justice secretary, Robert Buckland, said at the time that he was “deeply sorry” that many victims had been denied justice because of “systemic failings”.

He promised reforms, including new performance “scorecards” and better cooperation between police and prosecutors, to boost the number of cases coming to court. Official statistics have, however, failed to show any significant improvement since then despite a rising number of women reporting offences to police.