Solicitor General: sex crime conviction and attrition rates – what are they and what should they be?
25 February 2010 In a speech to St. Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre Manchester’s Annual conference the Solicitor General Vera Baird QC, examines current practice on treating cases of rape and sexual offences in the criminal justice system and calls for a new way of looking at statistics. The Solicitor voices her concern that the often used rape statistic – that around 6% of those rapes report to police which then go onto a court case and a conviction – can have a damaging effect on public confidence and particularly the confidence of potential or actual rape victims. She says that where convictions are presented as a proportion of all cases prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service the current figure is 58%. The low rate also sometimes conceals very valid reasons why cases drop out of the system, for example a third party report where either no rape or perhaps some lesser offence actually occurred. Also, some victims, for entirely valid reasons, simply do not wish to proceed wi
