the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Why does the entire Russell Branded story remind me so much  of Jimmy Saville? Obviously, there is one major difference; Saville died before he could be tried. But both of them hid in plain sight. Both of them enjoyed a level of protection that allowed their crimes to undetected for so long. In Saville’s case it was his connections that gave him this. If Saville’s power was of a 1970’s kind, Branded’s one was terribly modern; he had commercial power, he was good copy, he sold newspapers. He was an entertainer and he knew how to entertain.

And when the truth finally came out, the media fell over themselves in their desire to blame anyone else but them. Not them the media’s a whole but them the individual newspaper. Newspapers are full of accounts of people claiming to know about his various sexual wrongdoings decades earlier. But for one reason or another they choose to keep quiet about Branded. But with with Saville people did come forward and complain; it was just that they were all the wrong type of people. Often from a poor background, possibly from a care home or other and sometimes known to the police. Chillingly familiar.

I don’t know why, but it does. But what I do know is that rape is such a statically unlikely crime to be convicted of in the first place. Because while police log over 70,000 rape allegations annually, research suggests that 5 out of 6 women who are raped will never actually report it. And of the 70,000 only a small fraction result in a police referral for subsequent prosecution, but of those who are carried forward and heard in court 63.4% result in a guilty verdict. However, because one can’t readily find out what that 63.4% actually means in numbers, one isn’t sure if thats good or bad. Apart from it being absolutely devastating for the other  34.6%.  

Then I remembered about the pledge Labour made ahead of the 2024 general election. ‘Labour will establish 80 new rape courts across and England and Wales to fast-track cases as part of wide-ranging plans to tackle violence against women and girls that will be announced in the party’s general election manifesto this week.’ But these weren’t ‘new’ in the sense that the manifesto hoped we would all understand it to mean. They were ‘new’ in a political way,  ‘new’ in the sense that they were to ‘be set up in unused rooms and spare capacity within every existing crown court.

Labour hoped that by calling it ‘new’, the old issues that had bedevilled the court system for years would make people forget them. Forget the various staffing and pay issues with the solicitors, barristers and judges which I noted days after this new ‘new’ was announced. There was also the funding needed for the people who helped make the whole court system function smoothly. That provided the necessary skills and performed the many unglamorous tasks needed to make the whole court process work smoothly. The stenographers, the clerks, the ushers, the people who oversee jury selection, the legal secretaries and well, you get the gist. Such people have experience, experience of how the system actually works in practice,  of the little workarounds needed and have built up informal networks to facilitate this.

But I may well have been overly pessimistic. Alas, for rape victims, I was right. As soon as they were elected, the Labour government started to water down their pans. Initially, the culprits were a shortage of legal professionals combined with deteriorating court facilities. Then yet more reasons, that had nothing whatsoever to with making up an uncosted, unworkable and therefore unlikely manifest pledge, were found.

That should be the real story. That should be what the media should be focusing on. Not of how one man was convicted of one rape. But of why hundreds more men are not.