Why Do Police Find It so Difficult to Investigate Rape?

This chapter backgrounds the iterative cycles of concern-review-recommendations that have beset the police’s poor record in rape investigations in England and Wales for many years. It sets out the individual, contextual and organisational barriers that inhibit implementation of the often-repeated recommended reforms. Stereotypic rape schema continues to influence police approaches to complainants and suspects, resulting in the continued attrition of cases, i.e. the failures in reporting in the first place, the dropping of allegations, and not passing cases to the prosecuting authority (the Crown Prosecution Service). Of note is that officers continue to engage in focal concern and downstream thinking which together with the operation of heuristic biases influences decision-making strategies that anticipate the characteristics of a rape that are perceived as more likely to result in a guilty verdict. Officers are also hampered in their investigations by organisational factors including inadequate infrastructural support such as ineffective training, lack of adequate supervision and analytic capability, and their experience of stress reactions to excessive workloads and exposure to traumatic material. The chapter concludes by discussing recent attempts to improve rape investigative practice (Operation Soteria Bluestone) and identifies some necessary conditions for these innovations to land successfully.