Justice is still weighted against women over rape

This is unjust. A young man goes to bed with a willing young woman and then finds himself accused of a terrible crime. He has to stand by while details of his private life, of how he flirted and how he made love, of what he said to the woman in bed, of how he started having sex with another woman four hours later, are trotted out in court and in the newspapers at home and abroad.

This is unjust. A young man goes to bed with a willing young woman and then finds himself accused of a terrible crime. He has to stand by while details of his private life, of how he flirted and how he made love, of what he said to the woman in bed, of how he started having sex with another woman four hours later, are trotted out in court and in the newspapers at home and abroad.

The snooker player Quinten Hann must indeed have had a vile few months of it, wondering if he would be imprisoned for rape after what seemed to him to be a blameless encounter. However, he was then found to be innocent of the charge. For him, justice has eventually won out.

Immediately the verdict was announced in Hann's case, politicians started to come forward to demand a change in the law that gives anonymity to the woman in rape cases, but not to the accused. Ann Widdecombe said that she thought that a woman should be stripped of her anonymity if the judge felt that her complaint was malicious. While Roger Gale, the MP for North Thanet, said that anonymity should be on offer to both the accused and the accuser, in order "to be fair to both parties".

I am not so blinkered that I can't see that some women may bring rape charges that have no foundation. And I'm not so unsympathetic to men that I can't see that this might involve days of anguish for those who are accused.

But it worries me that influential politicians and journalists are concentrating so heavily on what a man in this situation might suffer, and that they are so uninterested in what many women who bring substantial complaints of rape have to go through.

This obsessive concentration on the occasional unfounded accusation makes it look as though, from the moment the word rape is first uttered in the police station, the men are given the toughest treatment while the women float through the system.

But, as I keep hearing from women who have suffered assaults and from female lawyers and from people who work in support organisations, this is not the case. There are these occasional cases involving prominent people where it seems inconceivable that the police and the prosecution service ever really believed that the man could be found guilty. But in thousands of cases involving people who have never figured in the public eye, women feel that they have been terribly shortchanged by a system that fails to take their experiences seriously.

For instance, take the case of a woman that we can call Elisa. She comes from a small town where her family is well known and where her father has a respected position. She has been abused by her father since the age of five, and she says that this abuse finally culminated in rape. In her twenties, she decided to involve the police, and they felt that she had a good chance of gaining a conviction.

Halfway through the case, Elisa broke down in tears in the witness box. She left the courtroom to calm down and sat in the waiting room, where the policewoman whom she had dealt with over the preceding months was also sitting. The policewoman comforted her briefly and Elisa returned to the courtroom. She was shocked when, the following day, she was informed that the case could not proceed. The judge had decided that, since the policewoman and Elisa had sat and talked together, the policewoman might have coached Elisa about what to say in court.

Elisa's case had failed, due to an absurd glitch on the part of the system, but her own suffering went on. Her touted anonymity does not exist, since she is known in her home town and has to go on every day feeling that her relations and acquaintances – who would naturally need to hear a guilty verdict if they are to believe her father capable of such terrible deeds – see her as a malicious liar. She feels gutted by the fact that she invested so much emotional energy in a case that could be dismissed on a technicality.

This kind of human suffering goes on every day, every week, when cases break down through no fault of the woman involved. Lisa Longstaff, from Women against Rape, tells me that from her experience of hundreds of court cases, she still finds the legal establishment breathtaking in its callousness towards women. And yet in the eyes of the popular press, it is only the men who are the victims in the current system.

If you doubt that many women are being shortchanged, you should take a look at the most basic statistics. Recent figures published by the Home Office show that while the proportion of convictions in rape cases was one in three in 1977, in 1999 it was one in thirteen. Are we expected to believe that 12 out of 13 women who speak out about rape are malicious liars?

There is some political appetite for trying to improve this rate. A couple of politicians, such as Harriet Harman and Vera Baird, have spoken up about the way that the legal establishment should be reformed. Some changes are afoot – a White Paper is to be published this autumn that will look once again at the law on consent and the use of sexual history, and a squad of barristers who can specialise in rape prosecutions is now being set up. In other countries, including Canada and the United States, it has been seen that restrictions on the use of sexual history and the work of expert prosecutors have led to substantial rises in the rates of convictions for rape.

Let's hope that such changes here can bring more justice for women. But one problem is that there is little public pressure for change. Although women who do report their cases are often dissatisfied with their treatment, the media has almost lost interest in these injustices. All the hundreds of nameless women whose substantial cases fail are forgotten when one high-profile, insubstantial case is there to be splashed easily across the tabloids.

The scary thing about the coverage of the Quinten Hann case is not that people are calling for anonymity for the accused. This is an understandable demand, and one that I don't feel strongly about either way. But the really worrying thing is that a case like this seems to be taken as typical of failed rape cases, when it is in fact very peculiar. Indeed, this case was even pressed forward after the woman involved said that she didn't want to proceed. And yet in many cases that fail to reach a conviction, the woman is desperate for a trial that never happens.

For instance, one woman – let's call her Una – who is currently being supported by Women against Rape, told the police that she was raped at knifepoint by her former partner and that the rape resulted in a pregnancy. She even has witnesses to her ex-partner's violence towards her and towards her children in public on other occasions – and yet she cannot persuade the police to interview these witnesses, and she cannot persuade them to try to take her case to court because she delayed before reporting it.

Unfortunately, her feeling that the system is failing her still seems to be only too common among women who report rapes to the police. Unless her case does come to trial we cannot say for sure whether Una is truthful or not – but the fact that she cannot get to court at all is tormenting her.

And that, too, is unjust.

n.walter@btinternet.com