I read this story today concerning Emily Hunt.
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8607701/amp/Emily-woke-naked-stranger-legal-battle-tormentor-owned-truth.html
She went for lunch with her Dad but woke up 5 hours later, naked, in a hotel with a total stranger. It vey hard for her to get a prosecution and eventually it was done via voyeurism laws. He came with a bag full of gear, basically a rape kit. He was organised and confident, it was clearly not the first time he’d done it.
I had an experience at a party where I was drugged and raped by a FOF. He was making cocktails and made a big fuss about giving it to me, I remember nothing after that until the following day. I’m certain it was spiked.
I’m absolutely convinced this was not the first time he’d done it either.
These cases are particularly hard to prosecute, women are put off reporting incidents to the police. Drug rape victims are often stigmatised as being women who had sex drunk and regret it so cry rape after. They don’t want the pain of being called a hopelessly drunk slag who asked for it in court, or put their family through an ordeal with a trial and investigation. You can buy these drugs and find out how to do it extremely easily, from mainstream websites where the drug is sold as a cleaning product and I found the instructions on how to do it on the website of a national newspaper.
The whole thing has made me feel that there are probably men out there doing this regularly up and down the country.
We know reporting of this crime is low and often it’s hard to evidence.
But I’ve been wondering how come there is no central resource that women can access to make reports which fall short of police reports? An organisation like that could hold details of allegations and offences, geographical areas, characteristics of the attacker, possibly even organise rape kits being taken and alerting police to patterns. An organisation where if you didn’t want to go to a full police report, but the information would be there and stored and link to patterns. I feel doing that would rapidly reveal many repeat offenders by the pattern of offending and women would have stronger evidence to take to court if they are one of several woman reporting the same. It would also act as a deterrent.
Reporting a rape to the police turns your life upside down and there is little prospect of conviction so many women just bury it. I really feel there should be some sort of step down from reporting to police. I’ve researched and can’t find anywhere that does this. I’m thinking of potentially setting something up.
What would you think of that? Would you use it? Would it help?