In September 2021, the criminologist Betsy Stanko went into the Metropolitan police force to work out why they weren’t catching rapists. The previous year, less than 3% of rapes reported to the Met had resulted in charges being brought; in 2021, that percentage almost halved. The Home Office had given Stanko a mandate to force the Met to open its files, and now she and her team – 54 academics, 47 of them women, all of them scholars of sexual violence – gained access to everything: tens of thousands of case files covering the previous four years, shift observations, video-recorded interviews, conversations with officers at every rank. “I wanted to rip the heart out of the police, put it on the table and do a bypass,” the 72-year-old American told me last year.
Six months earlier, Stanko had been working with the Avon and Somerset police force on a project to improve its rape investigations, when the news broke that a 33-year-old woman named Sarah Everard had been kidnapped from a London common. The man who was later arrested for Everard’s rape and murder, Wayne Couzens, was a Metropolitan police officer. In the weeks that followed, there were demonstrations, vigils and calls for inquiries – an outpouring of rage that reminded Stanko of her time in the women’s movement of the 1970s. If many people, especially people of colour, had long been distrustful of the police, others were for the first time questioning who they were really for.
Before Everard’s murder, the government had taken a cautious interest in Stanko’s work at Avon and Somerset; afterwards, preventing violence against women became an urgent political priority. “We were courted left and right,” Stanko told me. The Home Office awarded her a budget of £6.6m to work out what was going wrong with the policing of rape. The project would take two years, and investigate 19 of the 43 forces in England and Wales. By the end, Stanko and her team would need to come up with a way of fixing a system that seemed impossibly broken.
Stanko’s project was named Operation Soteria Bluestone – Soteria after the Greek goddess of safety. Her team would spend its first year focused on just five forces, including the Met, analysing how their rape investigations actually worked, before collaborating with each force to produce a set of specially tailored recommendations. Then, Stanko’s team would move more swiftly between the remaining forces, identifying problems and developing a new approach to investigating rape and serious sexual offences – one that would, in theory, be rolled out nationally in the autumn of 2023. One of the academics working on Operation Soteria described the project to me as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”. The police had never opened their doors like this; the country’s leading criminologists had never collaborated like this; the government, and the public, had never needed results like this.
Between September and December 2021, Stanko’s researchers spent 120 hours observing Met officers on shifts and analysed 37,000 recorded rape cases. They watched video interviews with complainants and suspects, convened 15 focus groups, observed three training courses and conducted their own interviews with victim-survivors and investigators. At the end of this period, the team’s findings were shared in separate and often deeply uncomfortable meetings with the Met’s senior leaders and members of the mayor’s office.
What Stanko’s team found was alarming: investigations that focused on the victim (Was she drunk? Was she lying?); impossible workloads; inadequate training. The austerity years had seen an exodus of senior officers, and the new officers, most of them hired since 2020, had little understanding of how to investigate rape cases. In an interim report published in December 2022, Stanko’s team shared anonymised conversations with officers from four forces, including the Met. One recalled the junior colleague who asked a woman to swab herself vaginally, something that should be done by a forensic specialist; another said: “When a sexual offence job comes in, there’s almost like this panic of like, ‘Oh my God, what do I do?’”
It wasn’t just inexperienced officers who struggled to understand the crime. When Stanko presented her findings, the Met’s deputy commissioner, Sir Stephen House, allegedly declared to the room that “the problem with rape is it’s mostly regretful sex”. “And if he thinks that,” Stanko told me, outrage in her voice, “then there is no leadership or commitment to change.” House, who Stanko did not identify before a Channel 4 interview this month, and who categorically denies using the phrase “regretful sex”, has since left the Met, as has its then chief commissioner, Cressida Dick, who resigned last February after a fresh series of scandals involving Met officers accused of racism, bullying and misogyny.
If the murder of Sarah Everard had catalysed Operation Soteria, the arrest of PC David Carrick, the month after Stanko began work in the Met, made clear the immensity of the task ahead. Carrick was eventually jailed for life for more than 85 serious offences, including 48 rapes. For years, he had used his position as a police officer to gain the trust of women, to threaten them and hold them against their will. The cases of Couzens and Carrick showed that there were two problems at the heart of the police: a failure to investigate rape, and a failure to police itself. While Stanko’s brief was to address the former, the two were inseparable, produced by the same environment and the same failures. Couzens and Carrick are not anomalies: the Met is currently reviewing reports of domestic and sexual abuse involving close to 1,100 officers and staff.
None of this was a surprise to Stanko. Between 2005 and 2014, she had conducted seven reviews of the force’s rape investigations. Most had not been made public and leaders in the force had shown little interest in her findings. She recalled one meeting of senior Met officers in 2014. “And they put up on the board that nearly 200 officers were under investigation for sexual assault. I thought, What the fuck are you guys doing? But nobody seemed bothered. I looked at that and went, Jesus Christ. So I do know where a lot of the bodies are buried. They’ve known about this stuff a long time.”
To understand why Betsy Stanko has made the study of male aggression her whole life, you have to go back to 1979. She had recently started her first job, as an assistant professor at Clark University, a liberal arts college outside Boston, Massachusetts. At the time, criminology was an overwhelmingly male field, which tended to focus on male perpetrators and victims. Stanko’s research formed part of a new wave of feminist criminology, exploring the impact of gender on every area of policing, crime and the law. Her PhD, at the City University of New York, had explored the myth of the “ideal” victim of crime: the respectable elderly white couple robbed by a teenager in the park; the wholesome young woman a jury would believe. Now here Stanko was, aged 29, teaching criminology and women’s studies, and finding herself in the middle of a sexual harassment case against her head of department, Sidney Peck.
Peck appeared to have form, though few of his colleagues were willing to say so. A prominent figure on the left, he had secured pay rises for Clark staff and been active in the anti-Vietnam war movement, allowing him to frame any complaint as a conservative smear. But in 1980, Prof Ximena Bunster, a 48-year-old Chilean scholar and protege of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, filed a 10-page typewritten complaint against Peck. She alleged that he had tried to kiss her, made repeated sexual comments and promised job security in return for sexual favours. As a recent exile who faced likely imprisonment or worse if she returned to Pinochet’s junta, this threat carried particular weight.
Stanko became Bunster’s co-complainant, and together they brought one of the first cases of sexual harassment in the US. It was national news, covered by Gloria Steinem’s Ms magazine and debated on radio phone-ins. In 1981, Andrea Dworkin and Adrienne Rich, two torchbearers of the newly energised women’s movement, travelled to Boston to give a benefit reading.
Peck fought back with wine-and-cheese fundraisers, then a 104-page denial and finally a defamation suit, in which he sued Stanko, Bunster and three other women for reputational damage, for $23,710,000 – around $77m today. The university filed a motion to dismiss their complaints. Stanko received anonymous late-night calls from his supporters threatening to sexually assault her. She and Bunster were portrayed in letters, leaflets and interviews supporting Peck as vindictive, and as somehow responsible for his behaviour. (Bunster’s “Latin style”, for instance, was deemed too sexy.)
But it was a time of enormous change, when much seemed possible. “I felt propelled,” Stanko told me. “It felt like lots of worlds were being turned upside down. But it was also a world we felt we could turn.” The second child of five, Stanko had grown up in Indiana and Illinois, the daughter of a research pharmacist and a teacher. As a student she had joined the first Take Back the Night marches; as a young professor she helped set up a women’s refuge, baking cupcakes to sell for funds, running up curtains. (The refuge, in Worcester, Massachusetts, is still there.)
In spring 1982, Peck dropped his suit and entered a settlement agreement, admitting that his legal action had been too aggressive. Clark University agreed to pay Bunster and Stanko’s legal fees, and to hire a sexual harassment grievance officer. In a sense, the two women had won, but as Peck’s supporters had promised, they had also lost. Peck returned to Clark (though not as head of department), while Bunster’s teaching contract was not extended. Stanko, exhausted by four years of institutional hostility, lawsuits and countersuits, moved to London. There, she married a fellow academic and had a daughter, Rosa. (Stanko and her husband later separated.)
In England, where Stanko and Bunster’s case against Peck had been the subject of a television documentary, she accepted invitations to speak and offers of work. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had recently been sentenced to life for the murders of 13 women, and Stanko joined researchers in studying the police failures that had allowed him to kill for so long. But gradually, she stopped talking about her experience at Clark. “I got no money, but I did get an extraordinary amount of insight and experience,” she told me. “In terms of what abuse does to you.” I asked whether she had thought at the time it was the end of her career. “I was told it was the end of my career, if I didn’t shut up. But it’s given me a capacity to unpick the bigger picture: that’s what I’m doing now.”
Stanko’s redirected anger is something I recognise in myself. When I was 19 I was raped by a police officer while living in Australia, and there have been times in the past two years when the headlines have made it hard to breathe. The officer used his position of power and trust to get me back to his house, and afterwards, even though I ran to his neighbours for help, there seemed no hope of being believed. For decades, a male uniformed officer arriving on the scene has paralysed me with fear. Part of what shocked me about the protests that followed Sarah Everard’s murder is that so many people clearly had had faith in the police.
I first spoke to Stanko over Zoom in December 2021, as she was wrapping up her work at the Met. She was at home, in Twickenham, west London, and full of energy: tucking her white bob behind one ear, she shooed her cat from the keyboard and gave long, emphatic answers (“and boom! we were on the phone” … “I thought, my God, about bloody time!”). There was a sense of the enormity of the work that still lay before her, the stamina it would take, and an excitement at finally having been given the means to do it. “Why did I have to wait this long? I wish I was younger.”
The previous year, she had been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, and she attributed some of her feeling of urgency to a fear that time was running out. Her very first proposal for Operation Soteria had been written between rounds of chemotherapy. “I went under the knife, a seven-hour operation, my innards gone – and carried on from there,” Stanko later told me. She didn’t want to use the words “in remission”, but she was taking medication that meant there had been no signs of the cancer’s return.
Once the Home Office had confirmed her initial funding, Stanko told me, she had drawn up a wishlist for her team. She called the UK’s leading criminologists, forensic psychologists and data scientists, and every one of them said yes. Dr Emma Williams, director of a research centre at the Open University, told me that, for her, the radical part was how closely the project would work with the police: “That’s where other projects have failed. No one has captured the voice of the officer in trying to understand why reform in rape has not worked.” For some of the academics, this proximity could be uncomfortable. One told me that, as a graduate, she had felt “incredibly hostile” to the police, and sometimes “found it difficult, especially with recent news, being a set of feminist academics who are propping the police up”. But she had come to believe the police had to be part of the solution if it was to last.
As her co-lead, Stanko had appointed Katrin Hohl, a 42-year-old professor of sociology at City, University of London. Hohl, who is German, has worked with Stanko since she was a master’s student, when she was drafted in as an analyst on an early review of the Met. “They [the police] assume I’m going to be the battleaxe,” Stanko told me, “and Katrin’s the nice one, but that’s not always the case.” While working on Operation Soteria, the two women are writing a book about the project. When I spoke to Hohl, she contrasted their prose styles as orderly (hers) and circuitous (Stanko’s): it was her job to bring Stanko’s ideas in to land.
Before she began advising the police and the Home Office, Stanko had a distinguished academic career, holding research posts at University College London, Royal Holloway, University of London and Brunel. In 1996, she received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Criminology. She flew around the world, giving two keynote speeches a week on the costs and causes of domestic violence. Criminology was a small and competitive world, in which Stanko forged strong alliances and some rivalries; in conversation with me she often rolled her eyes at the egos of others in her field. One friend recalled attending a lecture with her in Stockholm, during which Stanko grew so bored that she took out her knitting. “She wasn’t quite Madame Defarge at the guillotine, but the speaker didn’t know what to do – he couldn’t very well ask her to stop knitting – but the lecture petered out.”
In 2005, the Met’s newly appointed commissioner Ian Blair asked Stanko to write an urgent review of the force’s rape investigations. He wanted to tackle the huge discrepancies across London boroughs in the number of allegations that ended in a charge, as well as the Met’s part in a national decline in conviction rates. (At the time, 5.6% of all reported rapes ended in conviction; today the figure is less than 1%.) Two decades earlier, Blair had written a police handbook for the investigation of rape, in which he looked at four US forces transformed by the women’s movement. These forces had created specialist rape teams in response to the movement’s demands, secured grants for the study of rape, and achieved an increase in convictions. Now, newly in charge of England’s biggest force, Blair felt that an American feminist might be just the person to challenge a closed, majority-male institution.
Lord Brian Paddick, then an assistant Met commissioner, was assigned to work with Stanko. As a gay man, Paddick told me, he shared her outsider perspective: “She was even more counter-cultural than I was, very different from the average senior officer. Some of them can’t handle her and some recognise her knowledge and experience. She doesn’t say something unless she has the facts to back it up.”
Together, Stanko and Paddick wrote a highly critical internal report, which revealed, among other things, that cases were routinely dropped if the complainant had been drinking alcohol or had poor mental health. “And then the Met’s public affairs department recommended it be watered down,” said Paddick. “They rewrote it.” Stanko was bitterly disappointed, but continued to believe she could do more good inside the Met than without. She stayed on as a strategist, analysing all crime data and carrying out almost-annual reviews of the force’s rape investigations, whether they were wanted or not. “I don’t think anyone ever championed her recommendations,” a former colleague at the Met, who worked with Stanko during this time, told me. “The senior leadership changes regularly, they had different priorities. It was incredible that she persevered.”
In 2014, Stanko was awarded an OBE for her services to policing and, soon after, took up a position in the mayor of London’s office, where she advised on crime alongside her academic work. When I asked Stanko why she had never taken a more public-facing role, she hesitated. It wasn’t that she had never applied for those jobs; perhaps she was just not enough of a diplomat.
If Stanko’s previous reviews had not shifted the culture at the Met, I asked her what made Operation Soteria different. “I mean, it’s Groundhog Day,” she said. “But this time the wedge is going in so deep they’re not going to be able to pull it out.” Unlike in those earlier reviews, her team would be studying police forces across the country; they would have complete access to every element of an investigation; they would implement the fixes as they went; and they had chief constables’ full attention. “I really feel like this is the best go I’ll ever have at changing things,” Stanko told me.
But she acknowledged that she had encountered resistance, too. At the Met, she had heard that she had been declared a “critical incident” by one senior leader – the name given to a potential threat to the force’s reputation. It was clear that other officers, including at other forces, simply did not consider sexual violence a policing priority. Still, by the time we had our first conversation, Stanko’s stint at the Met was almost over. She would soon be moving on to Durham, and from there to West Midlands police. While the Home Office had insisted on the Met’s participation in Soteria, Durham had volunteered itself, and she was hopeful of a warmer welcome.
The next time I spoke to Stanko was almost six months later, in June 2022, when I visited her at home. It was a warm day of sudden showers and steamy pavements, and Stanko’s front garden was a jumble of enthusiastic planting. The house, her retreat from work that was often gruelling, had the joyful decor of a habitual optimist. In the living room, cushions were piled high on a blue velvet sofa, and the wall was hung with papier-mache animal heads. Chinese money plants stood like green explosions in a corner. Stanko made tea and pointed out the box of chemo medication on the kitchen counter: “Six thousand pounds a month, thank you NHS.”
Stanko and her team were now nine months into Operation Soteria, and I found her impatient with what she called the “bullshitty political back and forth” that surrounded the project. Despite frequent promises of transparency, a cross-parliamentary briefing on their findings so far had been cancelled by the Home Office at the 11th hour, and Stanko had been discouraged from talking to journalists. There were nerves about negative headlines, and the ministerial manoeuvring for credit or blame was driving her nuts. “But as long as they don’t interfere with my work, then OK.”
Two months earlier, Stanko and Hohl had identified six principles for investigating rape and serious sexual offences, based on what they had observed across the three forces they had studied so far. They had presented them to senior police leaders and, in each of the three forces, for each principle, assigned an academic and an officer to take the lead on implementing them. Over the next year, Stanko would develop the principles into a detailed investigative model for use in every police force in England and Wales. The six principles were:
1) Investigate the suspect and not the victim. (Overwhelmingly, the academics found that the victim was the initial focus.)
2) Target repeat offenders. (A new role of “disruption officer” would use tactics similar to those deployed against organised crime, such as going undercover; or they might issue sexual harm prevention orders, to get in the way of the most skilful offenders – those who deliberately target people who won’t report.)
3) Look after victims. (About 50% end up withdrawing their cooperation, in some cases because they no longer want a trial, in others because they have simply given up. This poorly understood area is one that Stanko’s researchers are scrutinising. Does the binary of trial-or-not-trial reflect what most people want? Or is there a greater place for restorative justice, as in New Zealand and Canada, where a victim and offender can agree on an admission of guilt and a mediation process instead?)
4) Train and support more specialist officers.
5) Improve the data stored on investigations, particularly those that did not result in a charge. (The impression the academics got was of an analogue force still stuck in the 20th century.)
6) Improve officers’ skills in examining phone and social media records. (Ditto.)
Importantly, all of the above would need to happen in dialogue with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which decides whether a case is strong enough to go to court. Stanko’s team had identified long delays in communication between the two services, and recommended that conversations about a case start much earlier in the investigative process.
Stanko told me that once she moved on from the Met, there had been a surprising amount of buy-in from officers in other forces – largely, she thought, because “we’re not blaming individuals: the onus is on the corporation.” But there had also been pushback: when police are under daily fire over burglary charge rates, why the focus on sexual violence?
As we were speaking, there was a ping on Stanko’s phone. She read out the news notification: the Met was to be reinvestigated for failures in the case of Stephen Port, who raped and killed four young men between June 2014 and September 2015. An inquest in late 2021 found that the most basic lines of inquiry had not been followed, yet no officer was suspended. What Stanko was arguing for applied to the Port case, too: a greater curiosity, empathy and intelligence.
This would involve transforming the culture of the police, which remains a largely male institution. Founded in London in 1829 by men, to reduce crimes against men – through peaceful prevention rather than arrests – it has proven ill-suited to tackling violence against women, or against minorities. (Brian Paddick recalled being told at the Met in the 2000s that, “It’s OK to be female, or black, or gay – provided you’re not more than one of those, and provided you behave like a straight white man.”) Women were not hired in significant numbers until after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and now make up only 35% of the workforce – though there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women chief constables in the past four years. (Today, 40% of forces in England and Wales are led by women.)
Cultural transformation is a long game, and when we spoke last June, Stanko said the effort required was keeping her alive. There had been times when she was so ill she had to crawl to her computer. Still, the rewards were there: in the “lightbulbs going on in officers’ heads”, the cases reopened, the suspects charged. Using disruption officers was proving particularly successful. In one case in Avon and Somerset, undercover police had posed as potential buyers of a suspect’s car and obtained DNA linking him, or someone related to him, to a sexual offence. (Later, they were able to charge his twin brother with two rapes.) As Operation Soteria reached its halfway mark, Stanko was as close as anyone had ever got to a real-time picture of policing as it is. And though it was worse than expected – more culturally stuck in the 1980s, more demoralised and depleted – she felt she knew the fixes.
Stanko’s black cat stalked past the sofa after a mouse and a plane rumbled overhead. Two days later, Stanko would be on a plane herself, on her way to spend 10 days off-grid in the Arctic Circle. When I asked her what she would read, she said “nothing”. She would fly to Norway’s northern coast, and from there to the remote Svalbard archipelago, sailing round it as a way to recharge. After that, she would have one more year to smuggle everything she knew about male violence into the police, and hope that it would last.
The English police force with the best record on rape is Durham, with an average charging rate of 8%. But the force has had recent experience of serious corruption. In June 2021, former Durham PC Kevin Bentley was sentenced to 28 years for 24 physical and sexual assaults carried out over three decades. Like Carrick, he had told his victims that his colleagues would never believe them. A few weeks before Bentley’s sentencing, Durham’s chief constable, Jo Farrell, had volunteered her officers for Operation Soteria. “I thought, right, we need to be part of that,” she told me when I visited the force last autumn.
Between February and April 2022, Stanko’s team combed through three years’ worth of Durham’s case files and interviewed investigators. They had found, unusually, no evidence of a complainant not feeling believed. But there had also been the same problems as elsewhere: investigations that considered the suspect last, officers who lacked expertise or were simply burned out.
Twelve miles south of Durham, I visited the force’s safeguarding team at their base in Bishop Auckland police station. Here, officers handle “high harm” crimes such as domestic violence, child abuse and rape. In the station’s second-floor office, I met DC Helen Towns – 34, blond, ironic. She loved her work, she said: the granular case-building, the relationships with complainants nurtured over months or years. She also acknowledged the ego that kept her at it: the unbeatable rush of seeing a repeat offender get a big sentence. “It’s a superhero complex,” she said.
But the rush was no longer enough. She mentioned the punishing amounts of overtime – sometimes working as many as 29 hours straight – and told me that she had recently applied for a transfer to the major crime team. Like many officers who do this work, she was exhausted. All the good ones go to homicide, the director of a Rape Crisis centre told me last year: there was a higher chance of securing a conviction, and of promotion.
Early the next morning, I joined a group of 20 officers at the Meadowfield training facility, a characterless corridor of prefabs on the outskirts of Durham, to learn how you interview someone about a rape. Rape is one of the few crimes in which the complainant’s account is often the best, and sometimes the only, evidence. Teasing out every last detail is a particular skill. The officers – 10 men and 10 women, who kept their coats on in the draughty room – would work on real and dummy cases, and share what they knew. Two lawyers from the CPS sat at the back, to advise on the strength of each case. No one in the room had done anything like this in years.
Their instructor was Patrick Tidmarsh, a 60-year-old actor turned criminologist based in Melbourne, who had recently flown to England at Stanko’s invitation. Tidmarsh walked between the tables, experienced at holding a room. He told the officers they were pioneering a new way of working, a change of culture: “Seriously, you are the vanguard.”
The day was gruelling, punctuated by trigger warnings. Tidmarsh played a video dramatisation of a real case, in which a young woman was assaulted during a massage. A week later, she went to the police. Who in the room would bring a charge? There was general agreement against doing so, even though the video was unambiguous about what had happened. One officer said that a jury member would give her “10/10 for responsibility”. After all, she hadn’t complained and she had paid. Tidmarsh pointed out that the first 15 observations from the officers had been about the woman: what about the masseur? Had he done this before?
He gave them another case, playing a recording of a complainant, voiced by an actor, telling her story to the police: her partner was away, and she had bumped into a group of former schoolmates on a night out. One of them insisted on sharing a taxi home, invited himself in, crept out of the spare room and raped her. The next morning she made him coffee and gave him a lift to the station. Tidmarsh asked the officers where they would begin.
“The defence will pull this apart,” said one. But the CPS lawyer called out that she would advise a charge: there were witnesses to show that the complainant had said no throughout the evening, and she had reported immediately. They should look at phone records, CCTV, forensics – but most of all, Tidmarsh said, they should interview her in a way that allowed her to tell the whole story. She had given her attacker a false phone number when he asked for it, and he had become angry on immediately calling it to find it didn’t ring. Small details like these, with a digital trace, could build a picture of a non-consensual encounter.
Tidmarsh closed by asking the officers about the cases they were working on. Many of these were complex, some involving generations of abuse, and what came across was the sheer difficulty and emotional weight of the work. When a violent relationship was key to unlocking your case, and that relationship wasn’t over, what did you do? Tidmarsh ended by addressing his audience as if they were a team of superheroes: “Durham, spread your knowledge.” There was laughter, and the officers dispersed.
Det Supt Victoria Cubby, Durham’s officer in charge of crimes involving violence against women and girls, drove me to the train station. She told me how, in court, the defence barrister would sometimes take an investigating officer apart: “They portray you as inexperienced, incompetent.” There was one case she had thought was nailed on: a man had raped a woman in her sleep; he even admitted it, but said it was what she liked. “And he was awful on the stand, but [the verdict] was not guilty. As he walked out of the courtroom he winked at the complainant – it was everything we could do not to react.” For some officers, defeats like these were the reason you moved on; for Cubby, it was why you stayed. To win next time.
A few weeks later, on a warm day in late October, I met Stanko and Hohl in the sociology department of City, University of London. The lobby was loud with students, but in Hohl’s sixth-floor office, with its view of the Shard to the south, there was a professorial calm. In the four months since I had visited Stanko at home, there had been more bullshitty political back and forth, which had delayed publication of their interim report: two changes of prime minister, a new commissioner of the Metropolitan police (Mark Rowley), four home secretaries (two of them Suella Braverman).
The two women logged into a meeting with DI Phil Sparrow of South Wales police. South Wales was the fifth force Stanko’s team had visited, between June and August, and they had continued to hold regular follow-up meetings. Sparrow, who is a veteran rape investigator, had recently completed an MA on the comparative efficacy of specialist units; his dissertation had proved their worth, and helped convince his superiors to introduce one in his own force. He now had 107 officers in a specialist rape unit, and in the past year, he said, south Wales’ charge rates had doubled from 5% to 10.8%.
When I asked Sparrow what made a good rape investigator, he cited compassion, emotional resilience, attention to detail. “It’s an area people have got to want to work in. A detective may be excellent at dealing with robbers or drug dealers, but I wouldn’t necessarily want them dealing with my rape victim. Especially having heard some of the feedback around whether this is ‘real’ police work with proper baddies.”
“‘Pink and fluffy’ was the phrase used,” Stanko interjected, referring to something she had heard at another force a few months earlier.
“Which I would have expected 25 years ago,” Sparrow said.
But the casual dismissiveness of “pink and fluffy” reflected a machismo that still runs through police culture. The author Alice Vinten, who served as a Met officer between 2004 and 2015, told me she had experienced the force as a “twisted brotherhood”, which insists that “you’re either ‘job’ (in the police) or not. And it’s this us-against-them attitude that prevents the dangerous ones from being exposed.” (She added that the good cops far outweighed the bad.) Vinten and others told me that the former commissioner Cressida Dick had been well liked within the Met, launching a mentoring scheme for female officers, but had become heavily institutionalised herself, had become “job”. Another former Met staffer told me Dick had “hired poison” among her senior team.
After Sparrow logged off, I walked with Stanko and Hohl around the corner to buy lunch. The professors talked about Stanko’s daughter’s upcoming wedding, and which of them would visit the other three Welsh forces. They had developed strategies for looking out for each other: Stanko with her cancer to manage, Hohl with two young children and another demanding research project on the go. “There are quagmires and quicksand all around us, and it’s really important not to get sucked into it,” Stanko said. She was mindful of the ticking clock: they had less than a year before the Home Office money ran out.
In early 2023 the drumbeat of bad news from the Met has got louder: David Carrick was given 36 life sentences; Wayne Couzens was sentenced to an additional 19 months after admitting three counts of indecent exposure; a former officer appeared at the Old Bailey charged with raping a woman after showing her his warrant card. In February, I talked to Det Supt Nicola Franklin, the Met’s officer in charge of rape and serious sexual offences, who admitted the headlines had had an impact on everyone’s work. But she had confidence in Stanko’s new investigative model, and in Mark Rowley: “He does recognise that he’s got thousands of officers who are committed, and hundreds that he will root out.”
Hundreds is a staggering number, and could be a conservative one. In the coming weeks many more police officers will be charged with sexual offences, and not just at the Met. In February, the Observer reported that in 2022 alone, about one in 100 officers in England and Wales faced criminal charges, including for sexual assault. A number of major reports into policing, both national and focusing on the Met, are imminent. All are likely to paint a bleak picture of missed opportunities, weak leadership and a culture in which misogynistic and racist prejudices thrive. When I spoke to Sarah Crew, chief constable of Avon and Somerset, in February, she pointed out that corrupt officers often have good relationships with their superiors, “not because the superiors are stupid, but because they’ve been groomed. These are the people who put themselves forward for extra duties, who say nice things.” Crew’s words weren’t meant to excuse senior officers, but to critique the institution as a whole: the way it had been blind to the dangers within.
After Carrick’s sentencing in January, I asked Stanko if she ever worried that the Met was irredeemable. The feminist group Sisters Uncut last year urged the public to withdraw consent and funding from British policing; like other abolitionist feminists, they argue that public safety is better served by improved childcare, education and healthcare. But Stanko was firmly on the side of reform as the best means of tackling the pervasiveness of sexual violence. “Otherwise what do we do with men who continually target vulnerable women?” Katrin Hohl was a committed reformist, for a different reason: “I am German. Growing up in the shadow of Nazi times, I know you never let state authorities go unchecked.”
The Home Office had published Stanko’s year-one report 10 days before Christmas, accompanied by an upbeat press release highlighting improvements in police referrals to the CPS. It was a successful misdirection: only a handful of national news organisations reported Stanko’s damning account of badly mishandled investigations, officers who blamed complainants, and a lack of experience and specialist knowledge. Despite the muted response, Stanko was happy with the report’s scope, and with the details she had been able to include: the senior staff who wrongly believed “the system is clogged with false allegations” (research has shown these account for 2-3% of reports); the women who were asked in police interviews if they could tell the difference between truth and lies (a line of questioning meant to be reserved for a child). She was optimistic that what had been unleashed these past two years – the anger, the scrutiny, the accountability – meant there could be no going back.
One passage in Stanko’s report heard from complainants who wanted to talk beyond their own experiences and discuss policing more generally. The researchers described interviewees who were “fatigued” by politicians claiming to take sexual violence seriously while failing to hold the criminal justice system to account.
Like many women, I know that fatigue. It is a form of anger rather than tiredness, the result of rage repeatedly meeting resistance or apathy. The man who raped me went on to have a 20-year career in the police, before working in local and national government. He has a dog, a family, a LinkedIn account, and I doubt he has ever given that night more thought, or even remembers it. Yet it resurfaces for me every time there is news of a police assault, which is often. For decades I have hoped that he didn’t do it again, and that being a police officer didn’t make it easy for him. What the past two years have shown is that this is wishful thinking.
Stanko has largely avoided writing about her own experiences, especially that period in the early 1980s when she was the target of harassment and intimidation. Over the years, she and Ximena Bunster lost touch. But in 2018, after millions of women began sharing their experiences as part of the #MeToo movement, Stanko experienced the return of a PTSD that had been the daily reality of a high-profile harassment case: anxiety, tearfulness, flashbacks. She flew to Santiago and visited Bunster a month before she died, aged 87. She visited the city’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, wanting to understand the regime Bunster had fled. For Stanko, it was a reminder of the precarity of democracy, and the role of fair policing within it. “That’s what I learned from Ximena,” Stanko told me. “I would be dead in many countries for doing what I’ve done. I’ve been threatened, but they haven’t shot me yet.” Her work would continue.
