Dealing with Rape in a New Political Landscape

The President: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this evening's meeting. It gives me very great pleasure to welcome and introduce Baroness Stern, who has been a Crossbench Peer since 1999. She was a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights from 2004 to 2008. From 1999 to 2003 she was a member of the House of Lords European Select Committee. In 2010 she became a member of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments – that must be a tough job – and in September 2009 she was appointed by the UK Government to lead a review on how rape complaints were handled from when a rape was first disclosed until the court reached a verdict. The review was published in March last year and is our principal reason for inviting her to speak to the Society this evening. But, not content with that activity, she Chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Abolition of the Death Penalty and is a Vice-Chair of several other All Party Parliamentary Groups, including Domestic and Sexual Violence and Drug Policy Reform. She is Visiting Professor at the Human Rights Centre in the University of Essex, and we are really very privileged to hear her speak this evening. Can I invite you to welcome her in the usual way? (Applause.)

Baroness Stern: Thank you very much. I really appreciate having been invited to address this learned society, which I had never heard of before. I apologise for that, but I am delighted that I have discovered it, because it seems to me it has a real logic.

Once I had become immersed in the subject of rape and sexual assault it became very clear to me how much the two disciplines of medicine and law have to say to each other. It seems to me that rape is a very medico-legal subject, perhaps the most perfect medico-legal subject, because rape brings these two disciplines together and entwines them, and the more entwined they are and the more one informs the other the better our policies and our practices will be.

Coming to this subject as a blank sheet of paper, as I burrowed more deeply into it, it seemed to me that health, by which I mean forensic examinations, care, counselling, recovery and broader public health issues, and then the law, by which I mean investigations, prosecutions, trials, special measures to make the trial less painful to the complainant, convictions (or not), civil actions (or not), are two indispensable parts of the proper response to rape victims. They are sometimes in conflict. They are sometimes out of balance and sometimes both of them get it terribly wrong, but the contribution of the two parts adds up to whether or not there is what people describe as justice for rape victims.

What is justice for rape victims and how we might get it, taking account of the new political landscape, is my theme this evening.

But I hope you will be patient if I begin with some more general remarks to set the context. I suggest that rape is not the same as other violent acts, and I must just add that I am talking here only about adults, because sexual abuse of children is not what I know about and not what I have studied. I want to suggest why it seems to me that rape is so contentious, why pronouncements about rape are very difficult to make without causing an uproar (and you may remember Kenneth Clarke, our Justice Secretary, and his interview about some rapes being more serious than others), and I want to explore a bit why rape is so newsworthy and so political.

Last year I did a placement as a parliamentary volunteer with Voluntary Service Overseas in Kenya with an organisation that combats violence against women, and in the Sexual Violence Recovery Centre in Kenyatta Hospital I met a middle-aged woman (she was a patient) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a most presentable, articulate and charming woman. She told us how she ended up in the hospital. The troops of a warlord arrived in her village. They killed her husband and children in front of her. Then she was raped by many of them and they left her because they thought she was dead. She was not dead and she walked to Kenya.

Rape is one of the weapons of war, and has been since time immemorial. It is used as a weapon of war because it is a brutal manifestation of power and a deeply destructive way of harming the enemy. Here we have no war, but a report produced last year on gangs suggested that “Rape has become a weapon of choice, and used against sisters, girlfriends and on occasion mothers (of enemy gang members), as it is the only weapon that cannot be detected during a stop and search”.

So the starting point for talking about rape, it seems to me, is the resonance it always carries of belligerent brutality, hatred and a desire to humiliate. In the literature those subject to it are often called survivors to indicate the extreme nature of the experience. Now, we do not normally call people who have been robbed or burgled or assaulted survivors, but rape victims are often called survivors.

Then there is the fierceness of the gender issue. Of course men are also raped, and it seems that between 8% and 10% of a caseload or a statistical table is made up of men, but the issues surrounding rape of men are different. The profile of that is much lower; the amount of specialised help available for them is much less. Most literature on male rape is about prison, where the war illustration is perhaps the most relevant, because rape in prison is used as a weapon to support the hierarchy of power amongst the prisoners, and you may know or you may not that in the United States they have an Act of Congress called the Prison Rape Elimination Act. So there is no denial there that this is what happens in American prisons. The men who have been raped feel very marginalised, as rape is widely seen and very strongly felt to be a women's issue.

I will now add to the complexities by raising the question of false allegations. There seems to lurk in the discourse about rape, an often unexpressed belief that many women are lying. Indeed, there are cases where rape allegations are proven to have been false, and undoubtedly these allegations cause huge damage to the reputation of an accused person. It is a very serious matter and women are charged, and may receive a heavy prison sentence, for making a false allegation. The Lord Chief Justice feels that two years is “well-measured”, by which he means it is about right.

But how common are false allegations? Some of you may remember not so long ago the case of a woman who made an accusation of rape and then withdrew it. It is suggested (and most likely this was the case), because of pressure from her partner, who was the person accused. She was charged with making a false allegation, because she withdrew her original accusation, and she was given a prison sentence, which was subsequently overturned on appeal and replaced by Community Service. Since that case the Director of Public Prosecutions has required that all prosecutions go through head office before they are taken out, and it seems now that there are very few false allegations. When there are such cases, they usually turn out to be cases of mental illness or extremely disadvantaged and damaged young women, often just leaving care. So when we are talking about rape we are in very complex territory.

Now, if we move from rape as a war crime (and rape can indeed be a war crime, as recognised by the International Criminal Court) to rape as a crime in domestic legislation, we find ourselves in a fast-moving scene, and it is clear that the laws on rape anywhere relate very much to the position of women in society. For example, in Afghanistan a woman has no autonomy but is part of the wealth of a family, used to make a beneficial marriage or to be handed over perhaps to settle a dispute about land, and rape laws will reflect that position. In the middle of the spectrum of women having autonomy are countries where rape is certainly unlawful but nobody would understand the idea that there could be rape in marriage, and there are certainly communities living in this country where the view would be that there could not be rape in marriage. That is not so surprising, because we did not have rape in marriage either until the landmark judgment in R v R in the House of Lords, which was subsequently put into the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. So it was actually only in 1991 that our courts decided that you could have rape in marriage. The 1994 Act also amended the definition of rape to cover vaginal and anal intercourse against a man or a woman. So male rape only came into statute in 1994, and you will see that our next law revision brought more of the idea of sexual autonomy onto the statute book. The Sexual Offences Act of 2003 brought in a new definition of consent. The new law says that an “honest but unreasonable belief” in consent will not do. If the belief in consent is unreasonable, then that will be rape.

Now, yesterday I was at a meeting of NHS London about sexual health, giving a little talk, and we were shown the award-winning interactive video, aimed at young men, commissioned by a marvellous organisation in London called The Havens. This video won four prizes at the Advertising Awards. It is called “Where is your line?”. It shows two young people, who met at a party, embracing, and that goes on a bit, and then the young woman is sick and it is clear that she is very drunk. It goes on a bit, and then they are on the bed, and then she protests and pushes him off, and then sex takes place. At each point the young men watching this video are supposed to click when they would go no further; that is, when their line has been reached; and if they only click at the end they discover they have gone too far and what they have done is rape. They should have clicked when it became clear she was drunk, and they certainly should have clicked when it became clear that she was pushing him off.

The police in Manchester have another approach; they distribute pens with a pull-out slip (they distribute them in bars) which says, “Rape: Short word, Long sentence”, which is another approach. I also have a poster from another police force with a very nice picture of a young woman and the wording is, “Let your hair down, not your guard”. That one is widely regarded as not acceptable because it is warning women to be careful, rather than telling men not to rape them. I don't think that poster will be coming out again.

So it is a very complicated arena in which to construct policy. Against that background how should rape be dealt with and what is “justice for rape victims”? It would seem, from what I discovered, that it means a lot more than a day in court or a person convicted. You may have seen a comment made by a woman called Gabrielle Brown. She is a rape victim who went on the radio with Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, when he got himself into trouble for saying some rapes were more serious than others, which is undoubtedly true, but maybe he didn't express it very well. He should have known that talking about rape is full of traps. Gabrielle Brown told Ken Clarke off. She told him: “At the moment, a victim is treated like a piece of evidence in an evidence bag.”

Sara Payne, some of you may remember, was the Victims’ Champion at the Home Office. She did a report for them called Redefining Justice. She said, “We need to reconsider our definition of ‘justice’ so it is not just for punishing a perpetrator and preventing further crimes.” And fundamental to the report that I brought out in 2010 and the point from which all my recommendations flowed was that the balance in dealing with rape between the medical and the legal had become distorted. Pressures were being exerted which led the services that respond to victims to give them the Gabrielle Brown experience; that is, to see them as a piece of evidence in an evidence bag. I am going to do something that I don't think it is very proper to do, which is just give you a little quote from what I said, because I tried to redraft it and I ended up thinking I am never going to do any better than this:

“We need to look at rape victims as people who have been harmed, whom society has a positive responsibility to help and to protect, aside from the operations of the criminal law. Whether the rape is reported or not, whether the case goes forward or not, whether there is a conviction or not, victims still have a right to services that will help them to recover and rebuild their lives. Victims and those who work with them told us that the criminal process is important, but getting support and being believed is as important. Processes should be in place that are about ‘honouring the experience’. Victims need to know that the police and prosecution did their best, and victims need to be respected.”

And I went on to say:

“The conviction rate has taken over the debate.”

Now, in the policy discussions about rape, the reports, the ministerial statements and in the pressures put on the public authorities in dealing with it, it seemed to me that the legal had taken over and the medico-social had been pushed almost off the stage. The debate was out of balance, and so was the response.

Let me run very quickly through a few factual matters. My report was commissioned as an independent review by the Labour Government in September 2009. It was not about sexual abuse of children and it was not about violence against women as such. It was about rape of men and women aged 13 or over. It was done in a very short time, because an election was looming, and it came out in March 2010 just before the Government had to stop doing everything and the period that is called “purdah” began. The Labour Government had about 24 hours to welcome it and then they disappeared, so to speak. The Coalition Government came in, welcomed it broadly and promised a full response, and in March this year they produced a response accepting 21 out of the 23 recommendations and also, particularly important in my view, accepting the major starting point about the victim's entitlement to help in his or her own right.

So how have matters have moved on since March 2010 when it came out?

First, I need to say a very little bit about figures. When I started doing my work I discovered a view that the rape conviction rate was 6%. This did not bear any relation to the official statistics, but it was very widely believed. It was devised by campaigners who used it to show, quite reasonably, that something was very wrong with the police, with the CPS, with the courts and with the way rape victims were treated. It was a great campaigning tool and very effective. But it had a downside, which was that victims thought there was no point in reporting a rape because 6% suggested that only six out of a hundred would have a successful result. Fortunately, since then there have been a number of quite good pieces of work done, one involved studying all jury trials in England and Wales over a two-and-a-half-year period. This produced a jury conviction rate overall of 55% in rape cases, which is not the lowest for serious violent offences. The Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the National Statistician accepted my recommendations that these figures were too confusing, were quite unhelpful and did not assist anyone to make public policy. They did another little piece of research and discovered that of all the cases in 2007, 54% were convicted of rape or another sexual or violent offence. So the conviction rate is definitely not 6%, it is in the middle 50s and it has gone up by quite a number of points in the last few years.

But it is important, when looking at that, to understand how peculiarly complicated this crime is. Most people are raped by someone they know. The case usually hangs on the evidence of the complainant insisting that she or he didn't consent to something. I can think of no other crime, apart from attempted murder, where the jury is deciding basically what one person said to another. In our system the job of the defence is to get it across that the sort of person the victim is, is an untruthful sort of person; that must be part of how our system works. They might well want to get it across that the victim has gone through a few episodes of mental illness and therefore is likely to make things up; they might want to point very much to the victim's drinking habits; and the trial for rape has become an extremely complex and difficult arena, where the victim – and the proper word, of course, is the “complainant”, because the victim is only a victim if the case is then proved – finds it very difficult to understand that she was not proved to be a liar when there is no conviction but an acquittal. However, in the eyes of the victim, that is a vindication of the defendant and a condemnation of her.

So the trial has become a very difficult arena, and as a result of all these complications a system for dealing with rape has been developed in the past decade in England and Wales that is extremely specialised. There are specialist police at all levels, and people trained to a basic level. So someone who has been trained will be on duty 24 hours a day in all the bigger areas, and there are higher levels of training for those who investigate and those who see the case through the system. As it happens, tomorrow morning I am at Scotland Yard, where they are giving away commendations to these specially trained sexual offences officers. The prosecution has completely changed and has specialists in every area. Only specially trained judges are now allowed to hear rape cases. This has greatly improved the experience of most, but not all, complainants who go through the system, and the Government accepts that and fully supports this system, which is greatly admired in other jurisdictions.

But regardless of the possibility of conviction, regardless even of whether the complainant decides in the end to go through the system, there will be a need for care and medical help. This is the other vital part of the system, which is not nearly as well publicised as the legal part, and here I must mention, first of all, the Sexual Assault Referral Centres. I mentioned earlier The Havens in London. These Sexual Assault Referral Centres have transformed the way people reporting rape are dealt with medically, and the centres themselves are a statement about what we feel about the victim, that we care about the victim and that the victim should be respected. They show, in the way they operate, a real concern for the dignity of a distressed person at a very traumatic time; the ones I visited certainly do. We have come a long way from what used to be called the police doctor in a dirty custody suite doing examinations in the police station. Now victims should be taken by the police to a state of the art, well equipped, astoundingly clean, reassuring, comforting place where samples are taken, tests are done, counselling offered. There is no obligation to go further, but the samples can be frozen in case the victim changes his or her mind. In England and Wales there are now 35 of these, and they are still being developed. In some of these places you will also find another very important development, the Independent Sexual Violence Advisors. These are the other side of the fulfilment of the requirement that victims are entitled to help in order to recover. These people are employed by the NHS, sometimes by the police or by the voluntary sector, and they attach themselves to the complainant throughout the process. They support, advise, listen, encourage, explain, organise a visit to the court and walk through what will happen, and I recommended that every victim should have access to one. That was a bit of a Utopian idea, but the Home Office is now funding 86 and supporting and training them. It is not enough.

These two elements, the Sexual Assault Referral Centres and the Independent Sexual Violence Advisors, are the basis of a coherent and relevant response to rape victims, and, of course, in them we see the intertwining of the medical and the legal, because those institutions help the victim to stay with the process; it means more cases will get through to court and it may mean more guilty persons are convicted.

Now, public health is also about violence in society and about patterns of victimisation and exploitation. I would have liked to say more about that but the time I had for my report didn't allow me. But it seemed to me obvious that under the surface there must be whole groups of people for whom sexual abuse and rape were predictable and were likely to happen and where they had little redress; people who would not report, because they didn't trust the police and because they assumed no-one would believe them, all because they were in some way in the power of the abuser. I assumed this and it seems that this was right, and I am glad to say that more and more efforts are being made to deal with it.

At a conference in Northumbria I heard about a case where a middle-aged woman with learning difficulties who lived in a home rang her mum and told her something nasty that had happened to her that had been done to her by the care worker that day, and so her mum rang the police. The police came and asked the care worker what this was about, so he said, “Oh, she always makes things up.” But someone at the police station was uneasy, so the next day they sent someone else to talk to the woman with her mother, and gradually a story emerged. They then spent a lot of money on very sophisticated forensics, in various parts of the room and various parts of people's clothes, and came up with some extremely damning evidence and the care worker pleaded guilty. I don't think that is often done, but maybe it should be.

In Liverpool the National Health Service is funding someone who works with street prostitutes getting them to take care of their health, offering them routes out and particularly helping them when they have been raped to report and stay with the case to the end, and there have been a number of convictions for some extremely nasty offences. One of these people had torture implements in his car which he took when he went out to look for prostitutes.

So this is about public health and is also about access to justice for people who don't usually get it. These are very positive developments. I am very pleased to see these developments, but we have to admit there are worrying times ahead and a number of threats on the horizon. I want to say a bit briefly about this, because my title talks about “a new political landscape” and I thought you might send me back and ask for your money back if I didn't do what it says in the title, and there is something to say about the new political landscape.

Huge areas of the public service and of government are being restructured and re-configured. I think the first important development to mention is the elected Police and Crime Commissioners. Next November there will be elections. Politicians mainly will put themselves forward to be elected and one of them will win and take over being in charge of the police, being the boss of the Chief Constable, in an area. The truth is I voted against it, as did many people, including quite a few people in the governing party. We all expressed concern about what would happen to vulnerable people, children and the poor and the powerless when a politician, who needs votes, is going to decide how policing is done. I think that this will make a lot of work for people who are concerned with these areas.

There is the Localism Bill which became law three weeks ago and moves many decisions down to a local level, so many organisations that used to get their money from the centre will need to try and make the case to get their money locally, which is fine, but there are a lot of groups of people who need help who are not going to be very popular when people are trying to get votes.

The Health and Social Care Bill, currently going through the House of Lords, is going to bring about huge changes and relocate the responsibility for public health and for sexual health.

I want to just end with some sort of conclusion, although this is not a subject on which it is easy to reach conclusions that last, because there is so much more to learn.

First: are we doing well in dealing with rape and could we do better? I think, compared with many other countries, we are doing well. If I look at the literature about what goes on in other Commonwealth countries, in other English-speaking countries, in Europe, I think we look quite good and I think people here get a better deal. I know that German television came to hear me talk about Sexual Assault Referral Centres when they discovered them. They couldn't believe that they didn't have such a thing in Germany and we have such a great thing here. So it does seem that we are doing well in that respect. There is a lot of interest in the Independent Sexual Violence Advisors that we have; we have more of those than any other country, as far as we know, and we should fight to preserve all that. We are the only country that specialises to the extent we do with our police, our prosecutors and our judges and we must continue to try and make sure we can afford that as we can afford less and less.

Second: could the conviction rate be higher? Maybe a bit, but not hugely, I would think.

Third: could we do more to protect the vulnerable, the sort of people who are picked up late at night outside a club, chosen because they look a bit fragile, get separated from their friends and end up getting raped and who end up not doing very well in court? I think we could do much more to protect them.

But I think if we really want to reduce the amount of rape and sexual assault it is probably things like The Havens videos on YouTube that we need to do a lot more of to make it clear where the line is. That is what we really need to do more of to try and show how unacceptable it is to do this sort of thing to another human being. It needs to get into people's heads that it is in the end a war crime.

That is all I wanted to say. I am really looking forward to your questions. I could have talked longer but, to be honest, I think that is quite enough. So thank you very much indeed. (Applause.)

The President: Well, our thanks are due wholeheartedly to you and I think a lot of us would have found it very easy to hear more, because it was so clearly presented. You have kindly said that you would now take questions.

Baroness Stern: Yes.

Discussion

Mrs Brahams: Diana Brahams, barrister. I would be interested to know how many rapes there are per year. You didn't actually give us any figures.

Baroness Stern: No, I didn't.

Mrs Brahams: Rape was about 54%, but I would like to know 54% of what? Would you mind interpreting that for us?

Baroness Stern: I will try. I didn't bring such details with me. First of all, nobody has the faintest idea how many rapes there are, obviously, because presumably all sorts of things happen every day and every night that will cross the line according to the law we now have. It is estimated that a small number actually were reported; about 13,000, I think. I think I am right actually. There is a figure of about 13,000, more or less, that end up in the criminal statistics, and of those we do have a figure of how many go to court; it is around twenty-something per cent of them. A lot of people who report and who have it recorded as a rape decide not to go through with a prosecution, even when we now have very good systems for trying to encourage them to go through with it, and you can't argue with that, because that is a perfectly reasonable decision, and the process of getting a case to trial takes a long time. So if we say that one in ten is reported (but it is really a made up figure), then you can work out a figure for how many there are. But actually we are not going to know how many there are. More are being reported every year. That is not because there are more, that is because going to the police station to report it is no longer so dire, and people are encouraged by all sorts of advertising and so on, that they should report it and it is better for them and for their health, and so on. But it is really a crime that is only going to become a crime when all the parties understand that they are entitled to say no to what is happening to them, if you see what I mean, and there are still a lot people who don't feel that they are entitled to say no. That is one of the areas that is very important – this is really what I mean about the vulnerable – that those sort of people need to know that they do not have to put up with rape, that it is actually a crime and they can report it and it can stop. There would be a lot more then, but that would be a good thing.

Mrs Brahams: And have you looked at whether it is to any extent seasonal or at particular times, whether there are more likely than not to be far more rapes around the Christmas period, and how far is alcohol involved in this? You know, I wonder what percentage of reported rapes have an alcohol input.

Baroness Stern: Loads of them. I can't give you a percentage. I don't think we get a percentage because it is not collected, but, if you go and talk to police, loads of them. But of course being drunk is not a defence. The more drunk someone is, as you will know better than me, the more it becomes without consent. Yes, alcohol has a lot to do with it, but whether if people didn't drink there would be less, who can say. I don't think it is about drink, I think it is about something else, but, yes, a lot of it is connected with the fact that people were drunk.

Mr Gardiner: Bill Gardiner. I am going to ask this question in a clumsy way, but I hope a helpfully clumsy way. Tonight was the first time my attention was drawn to the nature of the honest but unreasonable male – truly, that was the first time – and your illustration of the video clipping.

Baroness Stern: Yes.

Mr Gardiner: Is enough being done to bring it home to people like me (males) that there are these rather easy words, “honest but unreasonable”, but quite difficult to get at? And I would like to link that, again clumsily and awkwardly, with poor old Kenneth Clarke. (Laughter.) Really this is not only a question but an invitation to talk a bit more.

Baroness Stern: Thank you. Well, I hope I am right about “honest but unreasonable”. Some lawyer is going to tell me very nicely if I am not, but I think I got that right, because that was a change in the law which shifted the balance of proof more towards the perpetrator of the act.

Mr Gardiner: Yes.

Baroness Stern: And that is the way rape law reform has gone in common law countries. You can't compare it with non-common law countries because it is just so different. It would be described as trying to balance matters to make the law less weighted against the complainant, and that was produced after a long process. There is a lot of literature which says it is not working, and I am not competent to judge that. There will be lawyers here who will know much better than I, but they say it is not working. But you are right. I imagine it is not well known. It is certainly not well known on the street, but it seems it is also not well known in the Inns of Court either. I mean, it would only get well known when you have to do a case, I imagine. But it should be much better known. I did recommend that it was worth doing a lot of publicising, because it did seem to me that most people had no idea actually. This is something that if, for instance, you had teenage sons you might want them to know, because you might not want them to cross that line; indeed, you certainly wouldn't, because the sentences for rape are extremely severe; and that should help in explaining it to someone; firstly, “Short word, long sentence”; secondly, “This is where the line is”. I do think work is going on to explain it, but it is a long way from people knowing what they should know, I think.

Ms Butler: My name is Bernadette Butler; I work at one of The Havens and a group of my colleagues are here, and I would like to thank you for mentioning where to draw the line. We feel quite strongly that this is going to be a useful tool, particularly for young people because it's they who will be on YouTube, and I think you are absolutely right about perhaps shifting the function of some of those involved in this work to a preventative approach; rather than being the fire brigade perhaps being fire prevention officers. One aspect to that work is young persons’ workers who work with colleges and schools. That is not to say rape and sexual assault is something that only happens in young people; of course it isn't, by virtue of the lady you described in Kenya; but the largest proportion are those in their mid-teens and early twenties, and you are absolutely right alcohol is a major factor, but not the only factor. In all crimes I think one finds that alcohol is a significant associated factor, but I think it is important to say that alcohol isn't the cause. It is a factor, but it is not the cause. I just wondered whether you have any other suggestions about the fire prevention officers as opposed to the fire brigade. Thank you.

Baroness Stern: Thank you very much. You didn't mention that you also have a staff member who works with people who sell sex in East London.

Ms Butler: Yes.

Baroness Stern: And that must be somebody very committed; it is a very difficult and sad job to be doing. I myself have become a very strong advocate of a much more strategic and preventive approach, from what I hear. When I did this report I thought, fine, it will be finished in March and the Labour Government will go and it will go on the shelf and I will go back to what I used to do. I have to tell you I have not been able to go back to what I used to do for more than a couple of days at a time, because this spreads really; there are more and more things to find out and more and more wonderful people to see what they are doing, and then more and more thoughts one has about how this isn't how it ought to be. I did see some very good preventive work – Blackpool, for example, where there is a woman Police Officer who is absolutely dedicated. Blackpool is small enough and she has got everyone together who associates with or knows about people who are at risk and they work to try and protect them, and that also is expensive, but not, I imagine, as expensive as not doing it. If the Police and Crime Commissioners were a good idea, then what they would do is this sort of thing. They would get people together and say, “Tell us what is happening and what is happening in the exploitation of young people, especially young people leaving care, and people whose immigration status isn't good enough and therefore can never report anything”, and we would find a really quite unpleasant underbelly to this great city of London, I have no doubt. The Metropolitan Police (to give them credit) are very aware that they are not just there about cases and they are there to see patterns, to try and break up groups of people that are exploiting others. I went to a wonderful project in Tower Hamlets run by the NSPCC behind a very anonymous door with all these very young women, aged fourteen to fifteen, who had been drawn into what they thought was going to be a glamorous life, with cars and money, and so on, only to discover that they were actually being handed round. There should be more of that sort of work, where these vulnerable young women are weaned off the things that these men give them and start living a more proper, normal teenage life, but it has to be someone devising a strategy, and London is a bit big. I shall keep saying this sort of thing. I don't know if any of you know about The Havens, but if you don't, I think you should, because it is so impressive that this work goes on, and that is what we are doing in London. Thank you.

Ms Butler: We have open days. You can come and visit.

Baroness Stern: Good. People should. People in the law should go and visit The Havens. That is what I think everyone should do. Find out what they do, and then that might help you in what you do. I assume it might: that is my suggestion.

Judge Michael Brooke: Michael Brooke, lawyer. I was intrigued by your statistics that 6% conviction rate was wrong, that it was nearer about fifty.

Baroness Stern: Yes.

Judge Michael Brooke: Is that because 6% is the percentage of complaints that end up with a conviction …

Baroness Stern: Not yet.

Judge Michael Brooke: ….whereas 54% end in a trial?

Baroness Stern: Yes.

Judge Michael Brooke: So 54% doesn't reflect pleas of guilty before trial?

Baroness Stern: Yes. Yes, it does.

Judge Michael Brooke: It does?

Baroness Stern: Yes, it does. Six per cent is looking at the number of reports that were recorded as a crime that end up with a conviction for rape; not a conviction for anything else; not a conviction, but a conviction for rape. Twelve per cent end up with a conviction for rape or another sexual or violent offence and, in terms of attrition, apparently attrition for other offences, the figure is even lower. The proportion of those reported that end up with somebody convicted for the original offence is actually lower than 6% for some other offences, even for one violent one, I think. I always thought it was. I mean, the attrition rate has usually been seen as 2%. The proportion of crimes reported that end up with a conviction, or a caution, was always about 2%. So the 6% ought to be much higher, because it is one of the most serious violent crimes, but it is not surprising that the rate of cases that don't make it is as high as it is.

Judge Michael Brooke: What is the rate for murder?

Baroness Stern: The rate for murder is much smaller, but the rate for manslaughter is around the same, apparently. I'd have to look it up. Don't take what I have said, but I think that is right, and certainly attempted murder and robbery with violence, wounding, GBH, some of those are the same sort of figure. It doesn’t actually help terribly. It was a good campaigning tool at the time and everyone believed it, but it doesn't help once you start trying to make it better. It helps to draw attention to why it is not better. Once you try and make it better it is not so helpful.

The President: Any other questions? (No response.) No. It now remains for me then to thank you very much indeed for an excellent talk this evening. It was so rounded and so well structured, and at the end it gives us some hope, while there are words of caution. We are very grateful and we hope you will come again, perhaps in another capacity, and, in that connection, I have this little gift to give you.

Baroness Stern: Oh, thank you very much.

The President: Thank you very much indeed. (Applause.)