Dylan Jones: I was raped and I always wondered why we treat it as a marginal crime?

According to Shadow Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood, outlining the contents of her party’s new manifesto, if Labour wins the election next month, 80 new rape courts will be set up across England and Wales to speed up cases as part of “comprehensive plans to tackle violence against women and girls”.

These special courts are apparently to be set up in unused rooms of the existing crown courts in order to stem the growing backlog that is causing more than 50 percent of rape victims to abandon their cases before they can even begin.

Labour claims that rape has effectively been decriminalised. While I think this is a hysterical election tactic, it is true that cases are taking too long to come to court as the justice system slows down post-lockdown. Shockingly, only 2.6 per cent of rape cases end in a charge. That is not a shocking figure by any means.

Tragically, we probably all know someone who has suffered some form of sexual abuse and while we can have compassion and empathy, it is impossible to understand the psychological damage that can often last forever. Regardless of the political rhetoric, I still believe that rape is trivialised by society and these figures bear that out. It has become a horrific reality that the UK justice system has become even more sluggish since we slowly emerged from lockdown and these figures prove it.

I have often thought that many MPs do not take rape seriously enough because, although there are increasing reports of male rape, most victims are still women. Male rape is just as stigmatised as female rape and is still seen as a kind of embarrassment. I should know because I was raped when I was 17, although I often thought I was lucky to be able to deal with it.

For me, it wasn’t the act itself or the circumstances that were important, but my reaction to it. After it happened, I blocked it out. After telling a friend or two about it, I forgot it had happened and packed it away in a box. Having been severely abused as a child, I had already spent about a decade packing things into boxes that I knew I wouldn’t have to open. The reason I didn’t talk about it was because I didn’t think my way of coping was particularly helpful or useful to other people who had suffered the same thing.

I know enough people who have been raped to know how psychologically devastating it can be, and I’ve seen it increasingly used as a weapon – sexually, politically, racially. And so what I felt – deliberate indifference – seemed oddly insensitive and callous. I never spoke about it, because my indifference would have been demeaning to people who had been in a similar situation and traumatized by it. Although I knew I had successfully made it impossible for the rape to affect my life, I also knew that this would be no comfort to anyone else.

Like most other people I know, I recently watched Baby Reindeer, the TV series that seemed to electrify the nation in various ways for a few weeks. Some found it shocking, others thought it exploitative, annoying, far-fetched, or – at least in my case – too grim to properly process after a day spent poring over the headlines. I had stopped watching it before the now infamous (male) rape scene emerged, although the comment pages of most newspapers seemed to have something to say about it.

After a few days of this – and I was surprised at how many people I knew had something to say about it, even though I knew they didn’t normally watch TV – I had a thought that became even more relevant given the promises in the new Labour manifesto to tackle rape cases. Why can we be so vocal about the use of rape in the entertainment industry, but treat it as an almost marginal form of assault in real life?

It should come as no surprise that some rape victims feel the need to downplay their own reaction when society’s response at large seems so indifferent. My indifference was my own choice, which is something else entirely.

Dylan Jones is editor-in-chief of the Evening Standard