THE vast majority of rape victims who do not report the incidents to police fail to do so because they do not trust that they could obtain justice, results of a new survey suggests.

Fewer than one in seven alleged victims feel confident they can obtain justice by making a police report, according to the poll carried out by the government’s Victims’ Commissioner Dame Vera Baird.

According to the self-selecting survey of 491 rape survivors, carried out over a six-week period in the summer, more than a quarter (29 per cent) of survivors did not make a police report and, of them, 95 per cent said fears about not being believed were the main reason for that decision.

Eighty-eight per cent said they did not contact people because they believed their “gender, sexuality or lifestyle” would mean the matter would not be investigated or prosecuted successfully.

The vast majority (92 per cent) of the 491 respondents to the survey were female.

Dame Vera said the results “reveal the extent of the crisis within our justice system.”

Police figures in 2019-20 show an increase in the number of rape reports, but the number of convictions has fallen.

Records from the summer show there were 55,130 cases of rape reported to police, but only 2,102 prosecutions and 1,439 convictions in England and Wales in 2019-20.

But three years earlier, there were 44,000 recorded rapes, 5,000 prosecutions and nearly 3,000 convictions.

One survey respondent said: “It’s a waste of time going to the police, and the criminal justice system is biased towards the perpetrator and their rights, while victims have very little rights.

“The CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] also don’t really communicate with the victim well. I emailed them and they never responded.

“It’s an unjust justice system. I’m left by the police to pick up the broken pieces of my life.”

The figures come as the government continues its review into how rape cases are prosecuted. 

Dame Vera said the review “must produce radical cultural transformation across the criminal justice system.”

National spokeswoman for Rape Crisis England and Wales Katie Russell described the survey and accompanying testimonies as “devastating to read” but said that they “chime with what victims and survivors tell us at Rape Crisis centres.”

She said: “Nothing short of cultural and systemic shift will do if we are to deliver the criminal and social justice for victims and survivors of these serious crimes that they so need, want and deserve.”

In a statement, the government said that “victims of rape deserve to know that their cases will be taken seriously and pursued rigorously through the courts” and that it was “reviewing the response to this horrific crime” in consultation with survivors’ groups and the victims’ commissioner.