Through the Looking Glass: The UK’s Ambivalence on Sexual Violence

CW: Sexual Assault, Rape

Last November, I was raped.

There is a lot I could say about it, not much of it would be useful as anything more than an outpouring of grief, trauma and anger. Really, the only thing I need to say is that it happened, and that living with the experience has changed everything I thought I understood about society. It often feels like I’ve woken up through the looking glass, and I live in a world that seems familiar, but doesn’t make much sense anymore.

I think it can be easy to ignore the epidemic of sexual violence that exists in our world, because so much happens in silence. Our society has this ambivalence towards sexual violence: rape has historically been seen as a violation and a fate worse than death, but the men who commit rape can expect to have the impacts of their crime on their own life considered in sentencing, as was seen when Brock Turner got six years in jail turned into six months because the judge felt ‘a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him’. As a further note, Turner in actuality only spent three months in prison, despite six months already being a shockingly low amount of time.

Before I became a victim, I was able to square that ambivalence with optimism: it was one of many things about our society that had to change. I was aware it was bad, but I was able to see that it was something that could be fixed: one day, we would be able to pass legislation, we could increase the conviction rate, we would change things. In a word: I was hopeful.

But having processed my time as a victim, I’m finding that hope has been overcome with frustration. A frustration that justice should not take this long, and it should not be this hard. In the UK, 2.6% of rapes result in a charge – which meant even less actually ended with a guilty verdict. Not only is the charge rate so low that rape feels, in essence, legal - but there is a massive backlog in cases actually coming to trial. As of September, there were 13,238 sexual offenses waiting to go to trial, and on average survivors were waiting 417 days between charge and conclusion of their case. This delay means that a lot of victims feel trapped in their own homes, afraid of coming into contact with their attacker, or the attacker’s supporters in the community, with their lives essentially on hold while they wait for their day in court.

Even when their cases come to trial, the questions they can expect to be asked are often retraumatising. From the Victims Support ‘Suffering for Justice’ report from 2024, 36% were asked what they did to stop the assault, 33% were asked if they were using the court system as a form of revenge, 27% were asked about their mental health and medications, 15% were asked what they were wearing, and 12% were asked if they were using the case for financial gain. It seems as though defence lawyers can use everything and anything in a victim’s life to justify whatever may have happened to them. It puts so much on the victim to be the most perfect person, someone who is deserving of justice, and it seems to imply unless you have been absolutely perfect, you somehow deserve whatever happened to you. Who the victim is becomes tightly bound up in their case, and what kind of outcome they deserve. This heavily affected my choice in not reporting. I didn’t want to put myself through having my personal life and my mental health dissected in open court, for a lawyer to attack everything about me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it.

The delays don’t just affect the legal system – there is a severe delay in getting any kind of help as well. When I went to my sexual health clinic afterwards, I was given a referral to the Sexual Trauma Recovery Service, and it took seven months for me to get an appointment there. The lack of support can be felt everywhere. The rape crisis line, no matter what time you call, is always busy. That was the time I realised just how bad things were. There’s this wall of silence when it comes to sexual violence – it only seems to be reported when its especially public. You can almost ignore it, if it doesn’t affect you. But here was the evidence that this epidemic was real: the thousands of people trying to access the helpline at every time of day. All people trying to hold it together in the face of an overwhelming lack of support.

I don’t want to frighten anyone out of reporting their attacker when I talk about these statistics. But there seems to be a lot of frustration with people not reporting their rapes, and very little actually talking about why this proportion is so low. The problem doesn’t end with getting more victims to report. The problem is fixing police response, and the way victims are treated by both the prosecution service and the defence lawyers.

What I had anticipated from media portrayals which portrayed rape and sexual violence as a Serious Issue, was that I would get some kind of help afterwards, even if they weren’t able to find my attacker. I pictured authority figures telling me what my next step could be, time away from my responsibilities, where I could come to terms with the reality of what had happened to me, someone else who could take the burden of that experience off me, someone who could tell me how I was supposed to survive it. And instead, I walked out with a referral and a promise that in a few months, someone might be able to help me.

What my expectations boil down to, I think, was the belief that I would be centred in the response to my attack. Really, it felt like my attacker, even unreported, was the centre of the response. When I phoned my mental health out of hours support to try and talk to someone about the thoughts and fears I was living with, I would be interrupted and asked ‘Have you reported it to the police?’ I would literally be interrupted in the middle of talking about what I was actually struggling with. When I answered no, I was asked why. It felt like if there was no case made about him, then there was no action to be done, and they didn’t understand what else I could possibly be wanting to talk about. In one shocking moment, a nurse tried to tell me I could only receive support if I gave a name. My trauma, my pain, still existed, but without me giving a name, it didn’t matter. It only mattered as much as it pertained to him. I want to clarify this is not true at all. You are still entitled to support. There are different kind of therapies and counselling available to you, depending on whether you have a legal case, but the door is never closed to you.

The attacker always seems to be the person at the centre, the person people talk about. Does he have an excuse for what he did? Did he have a lot of potential that might matter more? What if he was falsely accused? There are all these questions that seem to be asked to find a way to justify what has happened. Men seem to be obsessed with the idea of being falsely accused, more than with the idea that they might become a victim themselves, when in actuality, statistics suggest men and boys are 230 times more likely to be raped than to be falsely accused.  Despite the fact everyone is statistically more likely to be a victim than to be a falsely accused perpetrator, there seems to be a lot more personalising of the accused than there is with the victim.

In 2014, Claire Throssell’s abusive ex-husband killed himself and their two sons in a fire, after she was forced to allow him unsupervised visits with the children, despite having a catalogued history of domestic violence complaints against him. Since the death of her sons, she has campaigned for domestic violence survivor’s rights, and in particular the rights of children when it came to escaping abusive home situations. It took over ten years of campaigning for the Victims and Courts bill to be amended this year; one of the amendments states that a parent convicted of sexual violence will automatically lose their parental rights, something that some families have spent over £30k in legal fees trying to challenge before this law change. While this is, undoubtedly, a step forward, coming from a victim’s viewpoint, all I find myself asking was why has this taken so long to change? Why – if we all agree that sexual and domestic violence has no place in our society – did it take the law so long to reflect that? Why has it taken over ten years for Throssell to make meaningful change on behalf of her children who were burned alive? Why has this not mattered more?

I’ve always believed that change takes time. That making these meaningful changes that will ultimately help people is a slow process. But then I see how quickly the government can act, when it came to proscribing Palestine Action, how urgently they push through anti-demonstration laws. How the government responds to these perceived threats – how urgently they can make change happen, if they want to. So why, despite the fact that around 1 in 30 women will be raped in a year, that an estimated 1.1 million British adults will be raped in a year, is this not a priority? Why do victims have to give up their lives to advocate so that the next person is treated better than we were? Why do I have to go without privacy, and tell people about one of the worst experiences of my life, for this to matter?

Almost worse than this lip-service to ending sexual violence, while doing materially, nothing, is those who use sexual violence as a pawn to further political causes. Sexual violence against British women has become a ‘cause’ taken up by anti-immigrant protestors. This becomes especially ironic when it comes out that nearly half of those arrested at anti-immigration riots have histories of domestic violence themselves. The idea of men rioting to ‘protect British women’ does not bear up under the slightest scrutiny, especially considering white British men will make up the majority of offenders. It also ignores the incredibly concerning uptick in sexual violence committed against women of colour, with two Sikh women being attacked in Wolverhampton in September and October.

And this says nothing of the continued crisis of the police being shown to be institutionally sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic, and that the Met Police is currently being sued for reinstating a 999 handler who called a rape victim a slut. It is again this ambivalence – of being so enraged by violence against women to protest, but not angry enough to hold the man standing next to you in the crowd accountable for it.

The reality is our society has a bad problem with sexual violence, as well as an apathy towards victims, and it is very difficult to understand quite how bad the problem is until you find yourself involved. And once you start pulling on the thread, it feels like everything comes undone: How do I continue to believe that I live in a society where my safety is of value when I know it’s not a priority for anyone in charge? How do I put trust in a legal system which is designed to fail victims of sexual violence? How do I reconcile living in a world where I know the rape crisis helpline is always busy?

It becomes easy for people to put the onus of change onto the victims – to tell us to report it, tell us that it’s our responsibility that it doesn’t happen to somebody else. Frankly, it is everyone’s responsibility that it doesn’t happen again. It’s our collective responsibility that we create a society that actually does care about sexual violence, and doesn’t just pay lip service to it. Every day, several times a day, someone has to come to terms with the fact of their assault, and they have to come to terms with the utter lack of any kind of help there is to manage it, and we do it, overwhelmingly, in silence. But as Giséle Pelicot said, ‘Shame must change sides.’ I don’t think the shame applies solely to the perpetrator, but to the society we have created where its acceptable to have a 2.6% charge rate, where it is an acceptable defence to ask a victim why they didn’t stop their own attack, where it is acceptable to be the victim of a crime and to have no answer for it.

The reality is sexual violence has to matter more. Sexual violence happens to everyone: it happens to women, it happens to immigrants, it happens to men, it happens to children, it happens to queer people. It happens to the people you don’t think it happens to, and it has happened to people you know. Sexual violence is imbedded in our society and it does not have to be. We don’t have to accept this treatment of victims, we don’t have to accept a police force that mocks victims, we don’t have to accept victim-blaming, we don’t have to accept predators. It takes everyone to prevent sexual violence, and I think it’s beyond time we start demanding better.