Charging Standards and What You Need To Know

We explained in our last blog how s.127 Communications Act applies. Here’s the text of the relevant provision.

This means that someone commits an offence if they either send a message that is ‘grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing, or if they send a message intended to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety if it is false or ‘persistent.’

Dick pics fall into the first category. So do POV (“point of view”) memes in which the person sending it intends the recipient to view themselves as being harmed. Messages calling women nazis, sluts, terfs or other terms of abuse would fall into the second if done persistently.

We know that women online suffer disproportionate numbers of such messages. So does the government, because they note it in their CPS Guidance and also in the “judge’s bible,” the Equal Treatment Bench Book. Yet the extent of abuse which women have to endure before the CPS are willing to prosecute seems vast. Only those who are most publicly and most seriously abused, such as Caroline Criado-Perez, are able to secure prosecutions.

There is a massive problem in charging discrepancies. We published our analysis of the HMCPSI Rape Inspection Report in December 2019 (tl;dr: the CPS exonerated itself of being unwilling to charge in RASSO cases (rape and serious sexual offending), despite both metrics used indicating that they are).

Why could it be, we ask rhetorically, that RASSO offending which most affects women and girls sees so very few offenders charged? Why could it be, we ask, that when a police officer is offended by a teenager drawing a crude picture of a penis on a photo of that officer, the young man is charged and prosecuted, but little seems to have been done about the deluge of abuse sent to Diane Abbott - to pick just one example?

When the CPS make a decision as to whether to charge, they first consider: is there sufficient evidence to create a realistic prospect of conviction? and is it in the public interest to charge? It is worth looking in full at the CPS guidance on when to prosecute.

The astute reader will have spotted a problem. First, that misogyny is not a hate crime, so no matter how disgusting the abuse sent to women, a prosecutor cannot take it into account as having a hate crime context. It must therefore go above and beyond mere unpleasantness as set out in para 27-28 there. Second, that when considering a realistic prospect of conviction, it may be that prosecutors - who exist within a sexist society - unconsciously downgrade women’s credibility as potential witnesses.

The final problem is that women are so accustomed to this that we don’t often report it - and why bother, when no action is ever taken? This will not change until we make it change.

In the next part of this blog we will provide a template letter for women to #ReportIt - report all and any offences committed against us in the last six months (more than six months ago is out of time) and to use the week running up to International Women’s Day to do so. This will form the basis for a short report campaigning for better protections for women.