This is the joint website of  Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

 

 

 

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Anonymity

Women will be the losers if the Government allows anonymity

In the Media

Independent, 10 July 2010

Comment

Anonymity for men accused of rape was introduced in 1976 but reversed in 1988 because it hampered police investigations. The proposal to reintroduce it relies on the sexist myth that women are quick to lie about rape.

Nothing is further from the truth. It is extremely hard for women to report rape, and 90 per cent never do. Those who report often say it was to protect others. But many are disbelieved or dismissed by police and prosecutors and even urged to withdraw – no wonder the conviction rate for reported rape remains 6.5 per cent.

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Women who falsely cry rape could be named and shamed by judges

In the Media

[Women Against Rape is strongly opposed to lifting a complainant’s anonymity. See quote below.]

The Times March 10, 2007, Frances Gibb, Legal Editor

Ministers are looking at giving the Court of Appeal the power to remove the anonymity of serial rape accusers when cases involving them come before judges, The Times has learnt.

The idea of a power to lift a complainant’s anonymity, to be used only in exceptional cases, comes after a case last autumn in which a man’s conviction for sexual assault was quashed as unsafe and his accuser, dubbed a “serial and repeated liar”, was named in the Commons.

But the Solicitor-General, Mike O'Brien, who has been master-minding the proposed reforms, told The Times: “The Government has no plans to remove anonymity for complainants in the vast majority of cases.”

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Press Release: demand the protection of women who report rape and the prosecution of the Daily Mail for breaching their anonymity

WOMEN AGAINST RAPE, other victims’ organisations, doctors, solicitors and barristers* write to the Attorney General to demand the protection of women who report rape and the prosecution of the Daily Mail for breaching their anonymity

The public everywhere are horrified at the shocking murders of five young women in Ipswich, and are demanding that women´s safety is prioritised. Yet women who report rape have been under unprecedented attack from the legal establishment, some have even been imprisoned and our protective legal right to anonymity has been breached by the Daily Mail, which has so far gone unpunished.

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Ending the attack on rape survivors who report to the police

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith

Dear Lord Goldsmith

Re: Ending the attack on rape survivors who report to the police

We write because we are alarmed at the recent breach of a rape survivor’s anonymity, first in Hansard (19 October), then in the Daily Mail (20 October, p.7) followed by the Sunday Times (19 November), and its implications for all rape survivors and all women. This is after decades of women demanding the protection of the law, including protection from media exposure and pornographic treatment if they report having been sexually assaulted.

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PAMPHLET: Rape in the Media - Submission to the National Heritage Committee Inquiry into Privacy and Media Intrusion

Resource
Rape in the media

Rape in the Media: Submission to the National Heritage Committee Inquiry into Privacy and Media Intrusion, 1993
Is the law on anonymity enough to protest rape survivors? Or are we still identified, judges, misrepresented and exploited by the media's sexist and racist stereotypes?

Order from All Women Count website

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