@Felix125
Number Theory - to answer some of the points - and I'm not trying to be annoying or argumentative here, just trying to explain things from a police point of view.
When don't police automatically gather evidence? and when are the victims routinely judged as being responsible? Is this a specific police force in particular?
Bail conditions can only be applied for a specific length of time and not for the duration of the investigation. Usually awaiting the results of forensics or phone downloads can take a long time. Police bail conditions don't really protect the victim in any case as there is nothing we can do with the suspect if police bail is breached and the primary offence is not at the point of charge (ie awaiting a CPS decision). It also runs down the original PACE custody clock if they are arrested for breaching police bail. You can also arrest for witness intimidation in any case which will be stand alone offence. Police bail is a bit of a 'toothless tiger' in my opinion.
The only way to give full protection to the victim during the investigation would be to remand the suspect in custody pre-charge. But I don't think the current law allows for this to happen.
Going through phone records belonging to the victim can occur if its relevant to the case. If this has been raised as part of the inquiry, then its up to the police to investigate this surly. Phones can also be given to the victims either by police or partner agencies as they are now inexpensive. Safeguarding the victim plays a big part of the police initial contact in. We now have technology which can download a phone's text messages within 30 minutes. So we can take a victims phone, download it and give them it straight back; if its simple text messages that are required.
The facts of the case which the CPS/deference agree to in early guilty pleas will include the victims experience. This will be part of the victim's statement and fully disposable to the court during this process. The victim can also add to the statement as the enquiry proceeds - so for example if the victim has suffered a massive mental breakdown months after the rape, this can be added to that victim's statement.
I agree, we should always look for multiple victims - but we need them to come forward. The other way of doing it is to publicise the arrest and ask for other victims to come forward. But then you are effectively assuming the suspect is guilty before charge.
Police don’t automatically gather evidence when the officer taking the complaint doesn’t recognize it as rape (as is too frequently the case when women are drunk, mentally ill or unclear on what happened). Also fairly common when the victim is a sex worker or a vulnerable teenage girl who was groomed or coerced (as was evident with the Rotherham cases). Quite a few police forces have fairly recently been taken to task for not even recording a fair number of sex crimes reported to them, let alone investigating them. Obviously some officers are better than others, but it is a criticism that comes up too often from women’s groups who support rape victims and in cases that reach the public eye because something worse ends up happening (and it obviously isn’t
only happening then).
On the bail conditions - as I said in other posts, it’s the process much more than it is communication. That bail conditions can’t really protect victims and victims feel vulnerable is a major reason why victims of acquaintance or intimate partner rape don’t feel safe reporting.
Some police forces were routinely taking victims phones and refusing to investigate without permission to search them. That it took a newspaper to raise public outrage before the forces involved backed down and retreated to requesting records only when necessary is emblematic of the criminal justice systems attitudes to victims of sexual assault. And even after that, HMCPSI found that over a third of requests by CPS for phone or medical records were not proportionate..
For guilty pleas I’m not talking about the impact on the victim being disregarded. I’m talking about what the prosecution and defense lawyers agree to as what the offender did for the purposes of the court. Like pleading guilty to sexual assault instead of rape, or to rape but without pre-meditated planning, etc. The judge takes the agreed summary as the “truth” and bases their sentencing on that, not the victim’s account or any other evidence that might be available. When these summaries get written into the judge’s ruling victims often feel disbelieved and their experience minimised. (If you’re a police officer as your response implies, you surely know this is how it works. What’s with the disingenuousness?)
There are plenty of ways for looking for other victims that don’t include a broadcast announcing the suspects name to the nation (which would obviously be ineffective if it was done every time anyway) but it would require significant resources to go through a suspect’s contacts and messages or to make enquiries of their friends, family and acquaintances, to track where they’ve been and make enquiries at venues they’ve attended that are similar to the ones where they met the known victim. Plenty there that
could be done. But rape, unless it gets in the news, does not attract significant resources for investigation, despite being a crime that ruins millions of women’s lives currently, is effectively decriminalized