Why do so many victims of sexual violence not report their attackers to the police?

Life After Sexual Violence: There are few areas of crime that the justice system is less well-equipped to deal with than sexual violence. Here, rape and sexual assault survivors discuss the main barriers to getting justice

“A lot of people don’t bother reporting their rape to the police for fear of causing a fuss, or just not being believed, or [that] nothing’s going to come of it,” says Faye White. “And it’s quite stressful to tell people you’re close to, let alone strangers in the police station.”

Faye is just one of the seven people who feature in Life After Sexual Violence, a seven part series which throws a spotlight on the reality of life after a sex attack.

In the video above, Winnie M Li states that 15 per cent of rapes are reported to the police in the UK, while only 6 per cent of those reported end up in a conviction. The 15 per cent figure references a landmark 2013 study by the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics which provided partial statistics on a topic for which complete data is nearly impossible to correlate.

The report is one of the largest of its kind for the UK, based on aggregated data from the ‘Crime Survey for England and Wales’ from 2009 to 2012, as well as police and court records. Given the difficulties in tracking sexual offences that go unreported, 15 per cent is thought to be a conservative figure, with the actual figure of cases reported potentially a lot lower a proportion of the true figure.

The equivalent data in the US, based on the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, finds that around 30 per cent of rape instances are reported to police, while only 2.3 per cent of those will end up in a felony conviction.

The claim that 6 per cent of reported cases result in conviction comes from an older Home Office-commissioned study by Liz Kelly, Jo Lovett and Linda Regan, which found that 5.6 per cent to be the conviction rate for rape cases in 2002 — a figure that was declining year-on-year when the report was published.

Our participants include Emily Jacob, 44, who runs ReConnected Life, a coaching and community program for survivors of sexual violence; Tanaka Mhishi, 24, a writer from London; Imogen Butler-Cole, 40, an actor and performer with a solo stage show ‘Foreign Body’, about life after sexual assault; Sophie Yates Lu, 28, a campaigner from London; Winnie M Li, 38, a writer and film producer, whose new book ‘Dark Chapter' won the Guardian’s “Not the Booker” prize; Faye White, 25, a journalist; Alex Bryce, 34, a political advisor.

If you have been a victim of sexual violence, you can find your local Rape Crisis organisation here if you are a woman seeking support and services, or if you a man or a woman, through The Survivors’ Trust.