For the past two years, Betsy Stanko has been leading an unprecedented investigation into why the police have been failing so badly to tackle sexual violence. But is there any chance of fixing a system that seems so broken?
In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved. The Home Office had given Stanko a mandate to force the Met to open its files, and now she and her team – 54 academics, 47 of them women, all of them scholars of sexual violence – gained access to everything: tens of thousands of case files covering the previous four years, shift observations, video-recorded interviews, conversations with officers at every rank. “I wanted to rip the heart out of the police, put it on the table and do a bypass,” the 72-year-old American told me last year.
Six months earlier, Stanko had been working with the Avon and Somerset police force on a project to improve its rape investigations, when the news broke that a 33-year-old woman named Sarah Everard had been kidnapped from a London common. The man who was later arrested for Everard’s rape and murder, Wayne Couzens, was a Metropolitan police officer. In the weeks that followed, there were demonstrations, vigils and calls for inquiries – an outpouring of rage that reminded Stanko of her time in the women’s movement of the 1970s. If many people, especially people of colour, had long been distrustful of the police, others were for the first time questioning who they were really for.
