I was raped in the summer of 2014, by a man I met on internet dating after my husband left me. The rape was terrifying and traumatic. Initially, I tried to be strong and pretend I was fine and that it didn't matter. But it did matter, and I reported it to the police 10 months later.
From what I can work out, the specialist police officers who dealt with my case simply didn't believe me, or, couldn't be bothered to do the work involved in the investigation. I'm pretty certain they just didn't believe me. They didn't do the work properly on my case, and I'm devastated and so let down.
I've followed the official police complaints process, and the rape is being reinvestigated - far more successfully this time, by a different team of officers, although I know it may be too late now. The other side though, is that the original police officers are just being given 'words of advice', rather than being looked at for misconduct/disciplinary action.
The main things that went wrong are that I told them that the man confessed and apologised by text message shortly after the rape, and they said they would search for his phone to look for the messages, but they never did. Instead they just phoned him, and arranged to interview him voluntarily at an appointment the following week - giving him plenty of time to destroy any evidence. He might not have still had the phone/messages anyway, but you never know until you look.
Then, they didn't take statements from all the witnesses that I had named, which the investigation into my complaint and the reinvestigation has discovered would have brought lots more relevant information into the picture. They took two statements, but they were not the correct/appropriate statements, and failed to take the statements that were relevant to the investigation. Apparently the officer concerned 'missed an email' which led to that happening, as the email contained the full list of witnesses that should have had statements taken from them. I feel like that is a pretty poor excuse?
And finally, the officer in charge of my case was terrible at contacting me, she would constantly say she would call me and then not do it, left me an answer phone message that cut out half way through but didn't call back, not respond to my requests to speak to her or be updated, that sort of thing. She was really dismissive on the phone, and had a sort of casual attitude as if she was talking about the weather, and I found it really hard to tolerate. She didn't empathise with me, or seem to care about what I said or felt.
All of those things have been identified and accepted as 'failings'. The investigation into the complaint says that they should have arrested him, they should have searched for the phone, they should have taken all the statements properly, the communication should have been better, and the officer should have been better supervised. But, as a result of the failings, a rapist will still be out there to potentially rape another woman, but the police officer in question has not only not been disciplined, but has been promoted. They've excused the failings as being a result of a high workload and the officer being inexperienced. (Yes, inexperienced - yet being promoted to a position where she will supervise other officers? Does this sound strange to anyone else?) If she had done the investigation properly, they might have got a confession in text messages, lots of evidence from other witnesses, and taken it to court. Instead, they made me feel worthless and like what happened to me is unimportant and not worth investigating.
I'm trying to appeal the decision not to pass my complaint onto misconduct proceedings. I'm trying to write the appeal letter now, but I'm so exhausted I can hardly string the words together and feel like I'm fighting a losing battle, like the police are accountable to nobody, so what is the point. Am I being unreasonable? Was this really a genuine error that shouldn't be looked at any more? Should I just let this drop now?