On the day Rebecca Horne was sexually assaulted, she had hosted an event in the Houses of Parliament to celebrate International Women’s Day.<\/p>\n
But on her journey home to Essex, the 39-year-old was cornered by a man in a train carriage.<\/p>\n
“He really invaded my personal space. Then he started to touch and grope me and he was rubbing his genitals against me,” she says. “There wasn’t anywhere for me to go and I just felt terrified. I was too scared to call him out or to ask for help.”<\/p>\n
Later that day Horne reported the incident to the police.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later, she says she received a call from officers to say there was no CCTV footage of the attack.<\/p>\n
“I could hear the frustration in the officer’s voice,” she says. “He was really cross, really empathetic to my situation, but upset that this crucial piece of evidence wasn’t available.”<\/p>\n
Horne says the news was “really heartbreaking”. She had put herself through a “horrible situation”, writing victim impact statements and speaking to multiple officers about the assault – all apparently for nothing.<\/p>\n
Horne’s assailant was later caught by police after she spotted him at a station.<\/p>\n
He pleaded guilty to sexual assault, and was given a community order and required to carry out unpaid work.<\/p>\n
Claire Waxman is concerned that it would not take much for offenders to find out where cameras were not in operation, or where they were broken.<\/p>\n
“Those are the areas that they will go,” she says. “We’re talking about sexual predators – it’s absolutely crucial that the train companies are on top of this.”<\/p>\n
There is also the risk that if sexual offenders are not stopped, their crimes will escalate, according to Prof Katrin Hohl, an independent government adviser on criminal justice responses to sexual violence.<\/p>\n
“If someone exposes themselves indecently, they might also be committing other types of sexual offences,” she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the day Rebecca Horne was sexually assaulted, she had hosted an event in the Houses of Parliament…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-442633","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442633","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=442633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}