When Ruth walked into a police station to allege she had been raped by her partner, she did not think that she would end up in the dock.<\/p>\n
She would later be accused by police of making a false rape allegation, charged and put on trial. It led to a years-long struggle to clear her name, before she was eventually acquitted. <\/p>\n
Ruth, whose name we have changed to protect her identity, reported the alleged rape in early 2020 – seven months after she and the man, a police officer, had split up. The day of the alleged assault was the last time the pair had seen each other.<\/p>\n
“I felt if I didn’t report it, I couldn’t carry on with my life anymore,” Ruth tells File on 4 Investigates.<\/p>\n
While the accused man was not charged with a crime, Ruth faced an accusation of perverting the course of justice, an offence that carries a maximum life jail term.<\/p>\n
In the UK, only an “extremely small number” of people every year are prosecuted for making false rape claims, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).<\/p>\n
The latest official CPS figures, from more than a decade ago, show there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape in England and Wales over a 17-month period in 2011-12 – compared with 35 prosecutions for making false allegations of rape. Around the same time, CPS guidelines were updated, leading to a drop in false rape prosecutions.<\/p>\n
Someone falsely accused of rape before a trial is likely to spend time in a police cell or even prison. If they are charged, their name will normally be made public. Even those quickly exonerated can face stigma.<\/p>\n
Current CPS guidance says it is important that police acknowledge the damaging impact a false rape allegation can have, and that these cases should be dealt with robustly. <\/p>\n
“The bar for these prosecutions is rightly high,” it told us, and “charging decisions must be approved by lawyers at the highest level of the organisation”.<\/p>\n
In Ruth’s case, the judge said it seemed as though “the whole prosecution was launched on a false basis”. He raised serious questions about the handling of the case – including one key piece of evidence: a secret audio recording made by Ruth’s former partner.<\/p>\n
This report contains explicit and distressing references to alleged sexual assault<\/p>\n
Ruth’s relationship with the man she accused was brief but intense.<\/p>\n
It came to an end in summer 2019, after a painful sexual encounter that she alleged to be a rape.<\/p>\n
Ruth had reluctantly agreed to a particular sex act, but says she had made two conditions – one of which was that her partner should stop if she told him it hurt.<\/p>\n
She says she then explicitly withdrew consent during sex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Ruth walked into a police station to allege she had been raped by her partner, she did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-392810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}