No justice for women from crimes they fear the most - Susan Dalgety

Ask any woman and she will tell you that rape and sexual assault are the crimes she fears the most. They are terrible acts of physical and psychological violence that leave victims emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives.

Lawyer Aamer Anwar said his team would now consider other avenues for justice

Yet here we are in 2023 with reputedly one of the best legal systems in the world, and our lawmakers cannot get their act together to prosecute these heinous crimes effectively.

Witness Sean Hogg smirking when he left Edinburgh’s Criminal Court of Appeal last week. Little wonder he was happy – his conviction of rape, for which he had been originally sentenced to community service because he was under 25, had just been unexpectedly quashed. He walked down the High Street a free man. His teenage accuser and her family were left distraught. Her lawyer, leading solicitor and now star of BBC Scotland’s new reality TV show The Firm, Aamer Anwar, said they would now consider other avenues for justice.

He said: “The family will consider all viable legal options which could include private prosecution as well as civil action. They have urged the Scottish Government to think again on their proposal to abolish rape trials.”

Hogg’s case should become an instant textbook example of how not to prosecute a rape allegation. He first hit the headlines in April when the jury at his original trial found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to 270 hours of unpaid work because new government guidelines say criminals under 25 should be treated more leniently because of their “immaturity”.

The Crown Office appealed the sentence as being “unduly lenient”. Little did prosecutors expect that the appeal judge would throw the case out, not because Hogg’s sentence was too soft, but because she ruled the original guilty verdict was a “miscarriage of justice”.

The trial judge had told the jury to take account of the accuser’s distress when considering their verdict, but under current guidelines that is not allowed. This allowed Judge Lady Dorrian to rule there was “an insufficiency of evidence for conviction,” and Sean Hogg walked free.

The Lord Advocate earlier this year urged the appeal court to bring Scots law into line with England, where evidence of distress is allowed as corroboration. She has also proposed that rape trials should not be decided by a jury but by judges alone, a move that has caused controversy among the legal establishment and women’s rights campaigners.

But something has to be done. Scottish Government figures released last year show that rape and attempted rape had the lowest conviction rate of all crimes for each of the last ten years. The overall conviction rate is 91 per cent, but for rape and attempted rape it plunges to just over half – 51 per cent.

And while there were 2,298 rapes and attempted rapes reported to the police in 2021/22, only 152 resulted in a trial, and just 78 of those trials resulted in a conviction. That means a woman who reports a rape or an attempted rape has only a one in 15 chance of her case going to court, and a one in 29 chance of seeing a guilty verdict. There is no other crime where justice is so badly served.