Maria Miller MP welcomes the latest steps to better protect victims of rape while their cases are being investigated.
Maria said, ‘it is already horrendous enough to become a victim of rape, but to then have your most personal records unnecessarily combed through to be potentially used against you and to create doubt as to your good character is enough to cause some victims to drop their cases altogether. Those who do not are often forced to endure having the police and lawyers pick apart distressing aspects of their pasts that are unrelated to the crime.
‘The personal testimonies I have heard from victims who have suffered this have been shocking, and I hugely welcome the steps the Government is taking to protect victims from this psychologically traumatizing investigative method.
‘I am glad that new legislation is forthcoming, but we must ensure it goes far enough to fully provide victims with confidence that they will be treated sensitively and I will be following future developments closely.’
Third party information on victims, such as education, medical, social services and counselling records, can be requested by the police during an investigation. These requests can be time-consuming and have a severe impact on victims’ confidence as an infringement on their privacy.
The government ran a public consultation on these police requests, in which experts across the sector including victims’ groups shared their views.
On 20th January, the Home Office published its response to the consultation, which includes a commitment to introduce new legislation on the way the police can request access to personal data from third parties. This will better protect people’s data by ensuring the police and other parties only request this information where this is absolutely necessary and proportionate.
The Government’s proposed new legislation will put on a statutory footing the police’s duty to only request material that is necessary and proportionate, in addition to a duty to inform people about what type of information is being requested, why, and how it will be used.
More Information
- The Home Office has published the following points of further information:
- The new legislation will help to fulfil a commitment in the government’s End-to-End Rape Review Action Plan to reduce unnecessary and disproportionate requests for personal records, and forms part of the government’s wider commitment to increasing charge and prosecution volumes for adult rape cases and putting the victims’ needs at the centre of investigations.
- This new commitment follows the changes the government has already delivered to address concerns surrounding sensitive information taken from victims’ phones. The new powers introduced in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022), and accompanying code of practice, ensure that all requests for phones and other devices are necessary, proportionate and that victims are given the information they need to make a decision that is right for them before they are asked to volunteer their device. Where victims do agree to share information, the majority of forces are now in the position to ensure they are not without a phone for more than 24 hours, which is another means of improving victim wellbeing in investigations.
- The government is also funding Operation Soteria, a programme which brings together academics and police forces, and aims to radically transform the way police and the Crown Prosecution Service deal with rape – shifting the focus onto the suspect, rather than the victim. With the aim of publishing a new national operating model for the investigation of rape in June 2023, academics were brought into 5 ‘pathfinder’ police forces to work alongside frontline police officers and develop new tools for improvement.
- Operation Soteria is already showing early indicators of change, including stronger collaboration with prosecutors, improved organisational capability and more specialist knowledge of sexual offending being applied to investigations. A further 14 forces are now participating in the programme.
- This is all alongside government action such as offering pre-recorded evidence for rape victims to every Crown Court in England and Wales, sparing them the trauma of testifying during live trial; and committing to quadrupling funding for victim support services by 2025 compared to 2010, including investment to increase the number of independent sexual violence advisors and independent domestic violence advisors to over 1,000 by 2024/25.
- The government will pursue the new legislation on requests for third party material when parliamentary time allows.