Angry men shouting us down in Commons as we fight to get justice for rape victims, say female MPs

Female MPs fighting to speed up justice for rape victims are being subjected to “threats and intimidation” from male politicians who oppose plans to reduce jury trials.

Natalie Fleet, the Labour MP for Bolsover, who was herself a victim of grooming by an older man when she was 15, said “women were being shouted over” in the recent House of Commons debate on the government proposals to reform the court system. “It was intimidating,” she said. “It’s never OK for threats and intimidation to be used to control our behaviour.”

She said proposed changes to the judicial system – among them scrapping jury trials for defendants in England and Wales who are likely to receive a sentence of three years or less – were needed to ensure “victims get justice” in a timely fashion.

There are almost 80,000 cases in the crown court backlog. More than 4,000 of these are adult rape cases, a 70% increase on the number waiting two years ago. Some rape victims are being told that their case will not be heard until 2029 because of delays in the system. “If there’s one thing worse than being raped, it is going through the hell of waiting for that trial and feeling like you are on trial,” Fleet said.

Keir Starmer faces a Labour rebellion over the planned reform. Dozens of backbench MPs have expressed concern about the plan for some cases to be heard by a judge sitting alone instead of a jury. Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull East and a former barrister, has threatened to quit the Commons and force a byelection if the “undemocratic” reform goes ahead.

But Fleet warned that the mood around the reforms has become so toxic that she was “nervous” about speaking up on the issue. “I feel like I’m going to be attacked. Everybody who has said that I am wrong is a man. They shout in the chamber. They shout to the media. They shout on social media. They just keep shouting,” she said. “They keep just dismissing [us], they keep saying, ‘You are on the wrong side of this morally by bringing rape victims into it.’ And I think, why don’t you understand? How many victims have you sat with? How many times have you been raped?”

“They are part of the establishment. I think this is about class and gender. The people who are more likely to be accused of rape are male and the victims are female. The people in this debate that are shouting the most vocally on our side are male, and they’re loud and they feel it strongly, but there is a quiet army of women who aren’t shouting, they feel it so deeply they will do everything they can to get these reforms through.”

Linsey Farnsworth, who worked as a crown prosecutor before being elected MP for Amber Valley, said she was “struggling to understand the level of anger” among some of her parliamentary colleagues who oppose the proposed court reforms. “We are not abolishing jury trials. We already have a criminal justice system where most trials aren’t heard by a judge and jury. What we are doing is readjusting the threshold at which a jury is involved in a case.”

About 3% of trials involve a jury and this would fall to 1.5% under the government’s plan. “I’ve seen the criminal justice system all the way through and it’s broken,” Farnsworth said. “If we don’t do something bold and radical we are never going to fix it.”

Others argue that restricting jury trials will do little to reduce long waits for rape victims. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, who has long campaigned on child protection and sexual violence, said: “There is no doubt our court system is failing to give timely justice after years of underfunding. However, conflating two issues – removing juries and speeding up court scheduling – is not accurate.”

Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said the government should prioritise reopening courtrooms and allocating dedicated courts to rape cases. “Justice delayed may be justice denied, but justice delivered in haste loses the quality check that a jury of one’s peers provides. It risks letting victims down, and compromising the fairness of the process.”

The proposal to restrict jury trials was made by Brian Leveson, the retired judge, whose independent review recommended the creation of an intermediate court, presided over by a judge and two magistrates. He said this should hear cases relating to lower-level offences, meaning more serious crimes, including rape, could be tried more quickly with a jury. Under Labour’s plan, a judge will sit alone in cases involving crimes that carry a likely sentence of less than three years in new “swift courts”.

Vera Baird, chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission and former solicitor general for England and Wales, said “there is no doubt that jury trial is slowest” and “there’s no real suggestion that it’s fairer”. She said many rape complainants drop charges when they realise how long they would have to wait for the case to come to trial.

Those who persevere “face waking up every morning, for years, knowing that one day they will have to speak in public about the sexual abuse and indignity that happened to them”, she said.

Ian Burnett, the former lord chief justice, said defendants were “gaming the system” by opting for a jury trial knowing that there would be a long wait. “Only radical change stands any prospect of bringing the backlog within bounds,” he said. “It is not fair on defendants, complainants or witnesses for trials to come on years after the case entered the courts. Delay of the sort we are now seeing undermines the rule of law.”

Claire Waxman, the Victims’ Commissioner, said “bold reform” was needed and “half-measures” would no longer cut it. “A system that is crippled by endless delays and forces a rape survivor to wait five or more years for their chance at justice is indefensible,” she said. “We are at a tipping point. If we do nothing, or not enough, victims will give up.”

Leveson’s second report, which will be published shortly, will propose a set of changes to improve the efficiency of the court system. He will call for more collaboration between agencies, reform of case management and the better use of technology. One Whitehall source said Leveson would be “very clear” that simply curtailing jury trials would not be enough to fix the crisis. “This is a package of reforms and both structural and efficiency measures are needed,” the source said

Photograph by Gary Calton for The Observer