Someone I know very well and care about very deeply, was
walking to her car in broad daylight just as she'd done so many times before.
She'd just put in a 12 hour shift at the hospital where she works as a nursing
assistant and was so tired she'd trouble putting one foot in front of the other.
She was desperate to get home because her cat hadn't come back the night before
and she was worried about him.
She was about 5 steps away from her car when she heard a voice.
"Lady, I think you dropped something."
She didn't think she had, but turned around anyway.
When the fist pummelled into her face she fell and hit her head on the
pavement. Too dazed to get up, she could do nothing as the man dragged her into
bushes. She was raped and beaten so badly even her own mother didn't recognise
her.
She'd scratched her attacker, so she had his blood under her fingernails, but
there was a mix up at the forensics lab and the only sample they had got lost.
The police made an arrest, but they let the man go because his lawyer argued
that her identification of him wouldn't stand up in court because she'd been
concussed when she’d fell.
Cathy (not her real name) is not alone in not getting justice.
In the UK,
the prosecution rate for rapists is pathetically low. According to official
figures in the UK
for 2012, only one in 30 victims (the majority of them women) can expect to see
their attacker brought to justice. In 2010, Jane Clough was murdered by former
boyfriend Jonathon Vass who'd been released on bail whilst awaiting trial for
raping her several times.
In the USA,
it's more difficult to determine, but it wouldn’t surprise me if most women who
are raped don’t get to see their attacker convicted.
I wrote Hell To Pay because I wanted to see an everyday woman turn the table on
her attackers after the law failed her. I was sick of seeing strong, brave
women like my friend subjected to the vilest of assaults and left with victim's
guilt. Cathy once said to me that the police asked her why she didn't ask a
male colleague to walk her to her car. The question upset her. She felt as
though they were blaming her for being attacked.
In time, she started to think they were right.
In my friend's case she never got justice. She never saw the man (if anything
that can be called a man could do such cruel things aimed at achieving the
maximum hurt and degradation to another human being) in the dock and never got
to tell her story to a court.
The Crime Files books come with a guarantee: that
women will always get justice and the bad guys will be punished. Maybe, just maybe, one day
that will happen in real life.
