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Chapter 22
‌

Practitioner commentary: response from South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centres (SERICC) Home Office Women’s Focus Group

Sheila Coates

Meet Sheila Coates

Sheila Coates, BA Women’s Studies (Hons), MBE is the Director of South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre (SERICC) and a member of the Policy and Strategy Group of Rape Crisis England and Wales (RCEW).

Sheila has 27 years of experience and knowledge of providing front-line services and strategic planning with regard to violence against women and girls services. She is a founder member of SERICC and co-founder of Thurrock Women’s Aid; both charities are based in Essex and continue to provide effective services 27 years on from their inception.

Her role in formulating sexual violence policy and strategy on behalf of RCEW is well established and acknowledged by both Rape Crisis member organisations, ministers and officials in various government departments.

Prior to her current role, Sheila worked for a local refuge, undertaking 24- hour emergency call-out duty (1984–88) while also undertaking sexual violence counselling and organisational development work in a voluntary capacity for SERICC. She took up the lead role within SERICC in 1988 where she continued working as a qualified counsellor. In 1998 she successfully completed a women’s studies degree at the University of East London.

In 2008 she was awarded an MBE for her work with women’s issues and she was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from her local authority, and a Black History Month Achievement Award from the local authority Black History Month celebrations.

She has also represented Rape Crisis England and Wales at the United Nations Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women

(CEDAW) in 2008 and has chaired the Women’s National Commission Sexual Violence group from 2008–2010.

Introduction

It is vital that the formulation of women-centred strategy and policy hears and integrates the voices of victims/survivors and draws on the experience of frontline women centred service providers who acknowledge the continuum of violence in the lives of women and girls. All too often the focus of government and academia can be led by political positioning, gender-neutral theory or a misconception that policy initiatives will work in practice at a grass roots level; for example the Labour Government’s continual heavy focus on developing a single-incident criminal justice response in the form of sexual assault referral centres (SARC) and independent sexual violence advisers (ISVA). These criminal justice single incident responses which are often badged as Co-ordinated Community Responses continue to be rolled out at the expense of the front-line specialist sexual violence women’s sector and have created a hierarchy of ‘victimhood’ and need between women and girls who engage with the criminal justice system and those that don’t.

South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre (SERICC) opened as a registered charity in 1984. SERICC has provided sexual violence counselling on over 60,000 occasions and has a history of prioritising organisational activism in parallel with individual support and advocacy for women and girls who have experienced sexual violence at any time in their lives.

On 9 March 2009 the Home Office launched a cross-government consultation on Violence against Women and Girls in England. To inform this consultation the Home Office commissioned the Women’s National Commission (WNC) to negotiate a number of focus groups in partnership with women’s services with the aim of gathering the views of women and girls who have reported sexual violence to the police and of those who have chosen not to report.

The extracts that follow are taken directly from SERICC’s service users’ comments expressed at the SERICC Home Office focus group held in September 2009. The full focus group reports –
A Bitter Pill to Swallow
and
Still We Rise
(January 2010) – are available from the Women’s National Commission website www.thewnc.org.uk

The victims/survivors’ voice and experience

Decisions to report

My dad abused all three of us. My middle sister got the worst of it; he used to kick the shit out of her, like a football. My mam was never in the house, she left us with him. He locked me in the house for 2 years, from when I was 11, until I was 13. He brought us over to my uncle’s house to abuse us. But you get to a point where you think you’re not going to destroy me. I tried to kill myself a couple of times when I was younger,

I’ve had no help to get over this. The kids’ dad nearly destroyed me as well when I got into domestic violence, and I thought no, you’re not going to destroy me this time sweetheart, no way. I’ve got 5 kids, I’m not being destroyed. It was women’s services that helped me get through. I went to a women’s refuge, then got support from SERICC.

I pray to god it doesn’t, but if it happened to me again, I would never, ever report. If it happened to my family or any of my friends I would advise them not to report. I have suffered more as a result of reporting, I wish I had never reported. I would have tried to deal with it on my own.

After reporting I feel I don’t live a lie anymore, I have lived a lie from when I was that high, with a brother that sexually abused me until I left home. Now that I have reported, I’m not living a lie. My partner would tell you that there was something not quite right in our family. One of us self harmed, I did everything for a quiet life. My sister just spent and spent. I have lost a lot because of this; I’ve lost my mum, my sister, my brother, all because I took it to court. But I would still do the same again. It’s a problem when girls are reporting rape at 13, 14, 15, 16 but they’re considered to have given consent, they’re not taken seriously.

Postcode lottery of support

I just think it’s a lottery depending on where you live. I was lucky, my doctor was very supportive, and he referred me to SERICC [South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre]. SERICC were the ones who actually reported it to the police for me, with my permission. But my brother and sister have had no support, just 6 weeks of counselling. They have had nothing. It’s a lottery depending on the service you go to, my doctor’s surgery have been brilliant, so have SERICC, they have supported me, I wouldn’t be who I am today without them. Whereas, my brother and sister and the other victims have had no support. Out of 5 victims, only one of us has had support, and that is because I live in this area and they live in another.

Police response

Good and bad police experiences

I have had some good and bad experiences, I’m sorry if I cry I find it all quite emotional. I was sexually abused by two men from a baby until I was nearly 15 years old. My sister was abused as well, and she was the one who was brave enough to tell my mum. I didn’t live with my mum when I was growing up, I lived with my nan, we didn’t get on and I was quite a problem child, because of what I was experiencing. My mum turned me away. When my sister told her about what was happening, she believed my sister but she didn’t believe me, she told me I was attention seeking. The police and social services were called. I didn’t have to go to court, because my dad admitted what he had done to me and my sister. When the police came, they were really nice, we had to go for medical examinations, they were lovely. Social services were nice as well, but I felt that I was the one to blame, so I discontinued counselling. I wasn’t getting any support from my mum, and my grandparents, who

were like a mum and dad to me, passed away. But I didn’t get any help. Later I tried to commit suicide, they wanted to put me in a mental health ward but I refused to go, and my doctor fought for me. I didn’t get any help when I was raped again when I was 24. The police were quite good on this occasion but I was never offered any kind of help afterwards. It took the police 7–8 months to come and take a statement, then I made a complaint, and then I had to make a complaint about the fucking complaint! He was still walking the streets. If anybody touched my daughter, I wouldn’t go to the police.

Lack of confidence in the police – disparity of police responses

If you could have some confidence that you would get the same treatment wherever you lived, then perhaps more people would come forward. It’s only a week since my daughter was raped, and the disparity, even in the South East, I’m shocked at how different it can be. People who report to the police don’t know what to expect, they are relying on them, they are relying on their integrity, and in our experience integrity is not there in many police forces in this country.

Victim’s feeling of isolation and being judged

The person who went with my daughter when she reported her rape was made to leave the room. She was left on her own at one of the most vulnerable times in her life to deal with loads of questions. If somebody had been with her, perhaps they wouldn’t have told her that nobody would believe her because she had been drinking, and asked whether she really wanted to be poked and prodded for hours on end. Perhaps they would have said, hang on, don’t talk to her like that. There has to be some way of making sure the victim knows that what is happening to them is normal or not. Women need a specialist women’s service to support them when they report. I and my daughter have never had any experience of this, until now, from getting support from rape crisis.

Inappropriate police responses

There is no prioritising of women’s safety by the police. It was the rape trained response officer, a police woman, who knocked my daughter back after she’d been gang raped, she persuaded her not to give evidence, said she had been drinking so no one would believe her. And she was trained! It’s only by going through the Haven and engaging with Sapphire that anything has happened, when the police found out we had gone to the Haven they were furious, tried to sabotage the whole thing. The detective investigating the case said he had spoken to their rape response officer and reminded her that she needs to put the victims needs first, which starts with believing the victim. Why does a rape response officer need to be told they should ‘believe the victim’? We went to the police station the following day, and my daughter shrank back in her chair, and said, that’s the officer who dealt with me. This stroppy little mare was dealing with a member of the public who was deeply distressed, psychotic or something, she was covered in blood. This officer just grabbed her, shoved her into a back room and came out

a few minutes later and she screamed, why do I always end up dealing with these people? In a waiting room full of members of the public. This woman obviously has a bad day every day.

Minimising the seriousness of rape. Compulsory police training

My daughter is a 5 foot 1, she’s size 6, there’s nothing of her. She got away from 3 men, I’ll never know how she did it, she ran through a house, over a fence 8 foot high. She was in a terrible mess. The police did a cursory drive around; they knocked on two doors, and then said they were never going to find them. Their attitude is, it’s a university town, if we worked on all of these things we would never stop working on suspected rape cases. My ex husband travelled to the place it happened – 3 days running around and knocked on every door. He has picked up witnesses, who saw my daughter screaming in the street, who saw the men driving off and picking her back up again, and dragging her back into the car. Other than that there wouldn’t be a case because the police have done nothing. Every police force should have the same procedure and have compulsory training, it should be nationalised so that all women know what to expect from the police if they report rape.

Positive police response

The police where I was living in London were great, couldn’t fault them. I reported in Hackney where my sister lives, 2 PCs came out and they thought it was just domestic violence, and I told them what happened and then they called someone else out from Waltham Forest where it happened. Two policemen came out and they stayed with me the whole time, I reported at 7pm, and they were supposed to finish their shift at 9pm and they stayed with me until 2am. They drove me to the Sapphire unit, they made sure I got in, the lady who met me at the unit was brilliant as well, she asked me some questions and then she drove me back to my sister’s at 4am the next morning. Before I reported my rape I lived with my ex partner, I never reported because police just viewed it as a domestic, they said there was nothing they could do, they told me to sort it out yourself. Slowly things are changing; it used to be that they would just let them out in 2 hours and they would come back to get you. I was told ‘no one would believe you’. You start to believe them.

My mum came with me, and the lady from Sapphire, who was lovely, she sat with my mum to make sure she was ok. Being able to have a shower, and nice toiletries, and they chat to you about your kids, it just makes it less of an ordeal. It should be available for everyone. I think it’s the best thing that has happened for rape victims.