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Our son, a malicious girl and rape that never was
When Jamie, 13, was accused of rape by a 15-year-old girl, the police arrested him and subjected him to a tough, frightening interview. Four days later the girl retracted her allegation and the case was dropped. Jamie’s father, asks why the police displayed no insight into the minds of teenagers before locking his son in a cell
SIX O’CLOCK on a Monday night. A knock on the door. On the step: two detective constables. They show their identification, and ask if they can step inside for a moment to talk to our 13-year-old son, Jamie (not his real name). One of the officers asks: “Are you Jamie Sutton?†He says yes. The officer says: “Jamie Sutton, I am arresting you on suspicion of rape . . .†and reads him his rights.
It was as if someone had driven a tank through the wall. We thought of rape: a violent, aggressive, deviant sexual assault on a vulnerable stranger, on wasteland, in woods, in the back of a van. We looked at our son: a big lad who finds it difficult to conform, but shambling, affable, well-liked, articulate and sensitive. We knew that the charge must be untrue. We were bewildered and scared, and we panicked. We both instinctively foresaw the worst, with cinematic clarity — a miscarriage of justice, imprisonment, and our child irrevocably damaged. Maybe even dead.
My partner and I have always had a hazy, unfocused but generally benign vision of Jamie’s future. Suddenly that collapsed, replaced by a hard-edged image of years of brief contact over a grey utilitarian table in a bleak prison visiting room. In retrospect, it sounds like a pathetic over-reaction. But when the CID enters your home and alleges something so serious, reason deserts you.
Jamie was put in the back of an unmarked car and driven from our small rural town to a police station 14 miles away for questioning. My partner accompanied him. He was put into an adult cell (“He’s a big lad, isn’t he?†they said), then interviewed for 90 minutes. Jamie recalls the fear he felt: here he was in a bleak room with a tape recorder, a solicitor, and two officers playing hard cop/soft cop. He thought of how rapists, murderers and robbers had sat where he sat now. And he hadn’t a clue why he was there.
If he’d been aware of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (implemented in May 2004) he might have had some inkling. We had never heard of it; you probably haven’t either. The Act changed the definition of rape. “Rape†is now any act of non-consensual penetration — oral, **** or vaginal. Previously, it covered non-consensual **** or vaginal penetration. It might not sound immediately significant to you: it was to Jamie and to us.
Jamie was facing interrogation as a “suspected rapist†because he had met Sarah, 15, whom he knew from school, with a group of her friends in a local park. They did what teenagers do in that fumbling, experimental, exploratory way. She was very drunk, she offered him oral sex, he accepted, the deed was inexpertly done, the two walked back across the park to re-join the rest of the group, and Jamie returned home.
What had happened was a simple excursion into the practical side of sex education that schools don’t teach: something that can be learnt only through experience. You did it, I did it. It is what thousands of teenagers have done, and always will do. It happens every night. Only the most blinkered, ignorant Middle-Englander would consider it an extraordinary occurrence. Two days later, Sarah reported the incident as a sexual assault. The police knew better: this was rape.
As Jamie’s rights were read again and the tape rolled, the detectives probed into the most intimate sexual details relating to the incident and Jamie’s past experience. His mother and the solicitor intervened as the police laid on emotional pressure. They asked him to speculate on whether she was a virgin, to speculate on how her parents would have felt when faced with the situation. Finally, they asked — gratuitously: “If you had a sister, and she related this to you, how would you feel and what would you do?†Yes, well, what would you do?
Jamie mildly told them that he would make absolutely sure that the accusation was founded in fact before doing anything at all. Then he would stop and think. It was mature advice in response to a wholly unreasonable question. Maybe these officers should have taken note.
Throughout the interview, our son answered the officers quietly, articulately, and with self-control. Looking back and listening to the tape, we are proud of him, but to have our pride in our son’s strength and resolve confirmed in such appalling circumstances is bitterly painful.
Jamie and his mother returned home, emotionally and physically shattered. Together, while images of prison cells still haunted us, we fought to pull this back to the essentials: one park, two teenagers, some sexual experimentation, full stop.
Jamie insisted on attending school: he had nothing to hide. The girl also attended school, seemingly unaffected by events. Tribal alignments were forged in the corridors. We coped by doing whatever we thought might help: meeting the school, meeting a solicitor, trying to find out what might happen as the case progressed. But there was only so much that we could do, and then a weird and contradictory mix of anger and listlessness took over.
Everyday tasks went by the board: the takeaway containers piled up in the bin, clothes went unwashed, the house was a mess. Our physical existence was thrown into a disorder that reflected our mental state. We had no idea how long this might last.
All we could see ahead of us were months of unendurable emotional turmoil and uncertainty. The case file would be collated and passed to the Crown Prosecution Service; the CPS would ponder the matter and decide whether the charge should be taken further; if so, the court would grind into action. The months would pass.
There was no formal support for Jamie, or for us. No counselling, no advice. The only information we could glean about the process came from websites and youth agencies.
What gave us strength were visits from Jamie’s loyal friends (many of them girls) who comforted him and us, and said that they would provide character witnesses because they knew that the charge was a lie. One courageous girl, lately a friend of the accuser, supported him against her, which was gave us hope.
Four days after the allegation was made, Sarah (who had in the meantime been caught in the toilets in a state of undress with another boy), completely retracted her allegation, and the case was officially recorded as “no crimeâ€. According to the investigating officer, her story now went like this: she didn’t realise that Jamie didn’t realise that she didn’t want to do it.
What? We were dumbstruck. This was illogical nonsense. This still positioned Jamie as the perpetrator of a non-consensual act of oral penetration — rape. So how could it be “no crime� We hit the roof.
Unwillingly, the officer admitted that initially Sarah had said that she was crying and pushing Jamie away from her when the incident happened. Four days after she’d first seen the police, and six days after the incident, she decided that she hadn’t been crying, and she hadn’t pushed him away. The detective sympathetically advised us to go away and get on with our lives, and told Jamie to take a bit more care in the future. And that was it.
It seemed to us that the police were woefully ham-fisted and inept. It was only at the school’s insistence that they had come in to question witnesses. Or at least, witnesses to Sarah’s side of the story. None of Jamie’s friends was approached.
Some weeks after the “no crime†decision had been reached, we asked the police about how a teenage girl might have been treated after making such an allegation. They listed a panoply of provisions: specially trained officers, video recording of interviews, suites with medical facilities, support from social services, child psychologists, the NSPCC, and Rape Crisis.
The process of dealing with suspects is determined by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, we were told. Young persons are always spoken to with an appropriate adult present, and formal interviews are tape-recorded to ensure proper practice. And if completely unfounded allegations are made to them that result in unnecessary inquiries being made, the offence of wasting police time would be considered.
The police also stressed that “all allegations of sexual assault and rape are taken very seriously. This investigation was dealt with expeditiously with the named suspect arrested at an early stage and a decision made to halt proceedings as soon as the new evidence came to lightâ€.
We have no argument with this: all of it is absolutely as it should be for victims of rape. But this supposed rape victim was a 15-year-old girl who had given an ill-advised ******** to a 13-year-old boy, and who subsequently felt embarrassed about the incident. Sarah had made the allegation, we later learnt, because she fancied a boy called Rob, and she feared that if word got out about the incident with Jamie, Rob might not be interested in her. The upshot was that our son and our whole family suffered trauma on the back of a teenage whim.
This raises key questions. If the police had acted perceptively, it’s conceivable that none of the succeeding events would have occurred. They seemed to have no inkling of the workings of the teenage world and the teenage mind. A better-trained police force would be able to approach such a scenario a little more astutely.
We are angry because we feel that the police did not consider the circumstances, they did not exercise insight, and they did not appear to pause for thought before throwing the switch on a serious and potentially damaging process. They classified the allegation as rape and therefore they did what the book demanded.
Though we pressed the case strongly, the police were not prepared to lay a charge of wasting police time against the girl. We have no influence over this decision. We have no reparation, unless we are prepared to relive and prolong the agony by taking a civil action against her for making a malicious allegation. Through a third party, we have asked the girl and her parents to consider mediation. All we want is an opportunity to give this girl some — just some — idea of the impact that her frivolous accusation has had. They have refused.
Why should a young girl be able to make a false accusation of such a serious offence with impunity? What impact may this have on her peers? Will they think it is something that they can do, and get away with?
As for Jamie: he has shut it out. He operates, on the surface, as normal. But he tells us that the incident preys on his mind every day. We do not know what impact it might have upon him in future years. We feel indignant on his behalf.
One final observation: my partner is a teacher. We know other teachers in other schools, and they report more problems with a growing minority of teenage girls who are attention-seeking, malicious and manipulative in ways that boys — with a simpler, more literal approach — are not.
There is a tendency towards self-dramatisation. In the past year alone in Jamie’s school a girl arrived claiming to have swallowed an overdose of paracetamol tablets (she hadn’t); other girls have ostentatiously self-harmed (real self-harming is not an ostentatious act), and — in our case — a girl has cried rape.
We are left with the feeling that this girl made herself the star of her own episode of EastEnders. We were just bit-part players in what was, for her, a far bigger and more pressing drama. She is unaware of the damage she caused. All that mattered to her was making sure that Rob didn’t reject her. (He did.)
When Jamie, 13, was accused of rape by a 15-year-old girl, the police arrested him and subjected him to a tough, frightening interview. Four days later the girl retracted her allegation and the case was dropped. Jamie’s father, asks why the police displayed no insight into the minds of teenagers before locking his son in a cell
SIX O’CLOCK on a Monday night. A knock on the door. On the step: two detective constables. They show their identification, and ask if they can step inside for a moment to talk to our 13-year-old son, Jamie (not his real name). One of the officers asks: “Are you Jamie Sutton?†He says yes. The officer says: “Jamie Sutton, I am arresting you on suspicion of rape . . .†and reads him his rights.
It was as if someone had driven a tank through the wall. We thought of rape: a violent, aggressive, deviant sexual assault on a vulnerable stranger, on wasteland, in woods, in the back of a van. We looked at our son: a big lad who finds it difficult to conform, but shambling, affable, well-liked, articulate and sensitive. We knew that the charge must be untrue. We were bewildered and scared, and we panicked. We both instinctively foresaw the worst, with cinematic clarity — a miscarriage of justice, imprisonment, and our child irrevocably damaged. Maybe even dead.
My partner and I have always had a hazy, unfocused but generally benign vision of Jamie’s future. Suddenly that collapsed, replaced by a hard-edged image of years of brief contact over a grey utilitarian table in a bleak prison visiting room. In retrospect, it sounds like a pathetic over-reaction. But when the CID enters your home and alleges something so serious, reason deserts you.
Jamie was put in the back of an unmarked car and driven from our small rural town to a police station 14 miles away for questioning. My partner accompanied him. He was put into an adult cell (“He’s a big lad, isn’t he?†they said), then interviewed for 90 minutes. Jamie recalls the fear he felt: here he was in a bleak room with a tape recorder, a solicitor, and two officers playing hard cop/soft cop. He thought of how rapists, murderers and robbers had sat where he sat now. And he hadn’t a clue why he was there.
If he’d been aware of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (implemented in May 2004) he might have had some inkling. We had never heard of it; you probably haven’t either. The Act changed the definition of rape. “Rape†is now any act of non-consensual penetration — oral, **** or vaginal. Previously, it covered non-consensual **** or vaginal penetration. It might not sound immediately significant to you: it was to Jamie and to us.
Jamie was facing interrogation as a “suspected rapist†because he had met Sarah, 15, whom he knew from school, with a group of her friends in a local park. They did what teenagers do in that fumbling, experimental, exploratory way. She was very drunk, she offered him oral sex, he accepted, the deed was inexpertly done, the two walked back across the park to re-join the rest of the group, and Jamie returned home.
What had happened was a simple excursion into the practical side of sex education that schools don’t teach: something that can be learnt only through experience. You did it, I did it. It is what thousands of teenagers have done, and always will do. It happens every night. Only the most blinkered, ignorant Middle-Englander would consider it an extraordinary occurrence. Two days later, Sarah reported the incident as a sexual assault. The police knew better: this was rape.
As Jamie’s rights were read again and the tape rolled, the detectives probed into the most intimate sexual details relating to the incident and Jamie’s past experience. His mother and the solicitor intervened as the police laid on emotional pressure. They asked him to speculate on whether she was a virgin, to speculate on how her parents would have felt when faced with the situation. Finally, they asked — gratuitously: “If you had a sister, and she related this to you, how would you feel and what would you do?†Yes, well, what would you do?
Jamie mildly told them that he would make absolutely sure that the accusation was founded in fact before doing anything at all. Then he would stop and think. It was mature advice in response to a wholly unreasonable question. Maybe these officers should have taken note.
Throughout the interview, our son answered the officers quietly, articulately, and with self-control. Looking back and listening to the tape, we are proud of him, but to have our pride in our son’s strength and resolve confirmed in such appalling circumstances is bitterly painful.
Jamie and his mother returned home, emotionally and physically shattered. Together, while images of prison cells still haunted us, we fought to pull this back to the essentials: one park, two teenagers, some sexual experimentation, full stop.
Jamie insisted on attending school: he had nothing to hide. The girl also attended school, seemingly unaffected by events. Tribal alignments were forged in the corridors. We coped by doing whatever we thought might help: meeting the school, meeting a solicitor, trying to find out what might happen as the case progressed. But there was only so much that we could do, and then a weird and contradictory mix of anger and listlessness took over.
Everyday tasks went by the board: the takeaway containers piled up in the bin, clothes went unwashed, the house was a mess. Our physical existence was thrown into a disorder that reflected our mental state. We had no idea how long this might last.
All we could see ahead of us were months of unendurable emotional turmoil and uncertainty. The case file would be collated and passed to the Crown Prosecution Service; the CPS would ponder the matter and decide whether the charge should be taken further; if so, the court would grind into action. The months would pass.
There was no formal support for Jamie, or for us. No counselling, no advice. The only information we could glean about the process came from websites and youth agencies.
What gave us strength were visits from Jamie’s loyal friends (many of them girls) who comforted him and us, and said that they would provide character witnesses because they knew that the charge was a lie. One courageous girl, lately a friend of the accuser, supported him against her, which was gave us hope.
Four days after the allegation was made, Sarah (who had in the meantime been caught in the toilets in a state of undress with another boy), completely retracted her allegation, and the case was officially recorded as “no crimeâ€. According to the investigating officer, her story now went like this: she didn’t realise that Jamie didn’t realise that she didn’t want to do it.
What? We were dumbstruck. This was illogical nonsense. This still positioned Jamie as the perpetrator of a non-consensual act of oral penetration — rape. So how could it be “no crime� We hit the roof.
Unwillingly, the officer admitted that initially Sarah had said that she was crying and pushing Jamie away from her when the incident happened. Four days after she’d first seen the police, and six days after the incident, she decided that she hadn’t been crying, and she hadn’t pushed him away. The detective sympathetically advised us to go away and get on with our lives, and told Jamie to take a bit more care in the future. And that was it.
It seemed to us that the police were woefully ham-fisted and inept. It was only at the school’s insistence that they had come in to question witnesses. Or at least, witnesses to Sarah’s side of the story. None of Jamie’s friends was approached.
Some weeks after the “no crime†decision had been reached, we asked the police about how a teenage girl might have been treated after making such an allegation. They listed a panoply of provisions: specially trained officers, video recording of interviews, suites with medical facilities, support from social services, child psychologists, the NSPCC, and Rape Crisis.
The process of dealing with suspects is determined by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, we were told. Young persons are always spoken to with an appropriate adult present, and formal interviews are tape-recorded to ensure proper practice. And if completely unfounded allegations are made to them that result in unnecessary inquiries being made, the offence of wasting police time would be considered.
The police also stressed that “all allegations of sexual assault and rape are taken very seriously. This investigation was dealt with expeditiously with the named suspect arrested at an early stage and a decision made to halt proceedings as soon as the new evidence came to lightâ€.
We have no argument with this: all of it is absolutely as it should be for victims of rape. But this supposed rape victim was a 15-year-old girl who had given an ill-advised ******** to a 13-year-old boy, and who subsequently felt embarrassed about the incident. Sarah had made the allegation, we later learnt, because she fancied a boy called Rob, and she feared that if word got out about the incident with Jamie, Rob might not be interested in her. The upshot was that our son and our whole family suffered trauma on the back of a teenage whim.
This raises key questions. If the police had acted perceptively, it’s conceivable that none of the succeeding events would have occurred. They seemed to have no inkling of the workings of the teenage world and the teenage mind. A better-trained police force would be able to approach such a scenario a little more astutely.
We are angry because we feel that the police did not consider the circumstances, they did not exercise insight, and they did not appear to pause for thought before throwing the switch on a serious and potentially damaging process. They classified the allegation as rape and therefore they did what the book demanded.
Though we pressed the case strongly, the police were not prepared to lay a charge of wasting police time against the girl. We have no influence over this decision. We have no reparation, unless we are prepared to relive and prolong the agony by taking a civil action against her for making a malicious allegation. Through a third party, we have asked the girl and her parents to consider mediation. All we want is an opportunity to give this girl some — just some — idea of the impact that her frivolous accusation has had. They have refused.
Why should a young girl be able to make a false accusation of such a serious offence with impunity? What impact may this have on her peers? Will they think it is something that they can do, and get away with?
As for Jamie: he has shut it out. He operates, on the surface, as normal. But he tells us that the incident preys on his mind every day. We do not know what impact it might have upon him in future years. We feel indignant on his behalf.
One final observation: my partner is a teacher. We know other teachers in other schools, and they report more problems with a growing minority of teenage girls who are attention-seeking, malicious and manipulative in ways that boys — with a simpler, more literal approach — are not.
There is a tendency towards self-dramatisation. In the past year alone in Jamie’s school a girl arrived claiming to have swallowed an overdose of paracetamol tablets (she hadn’t); other girls have ostentatiously self-harmed (real self-harming is not an ostentatious act), and — in our case — a girl has cried rape.
We are left with the feeling that this girl made herself the star of her own episode of EastEnders. We were just bit-part players in what was, for her, a far bigger and more pressing drama. She is unaware of the damage she caused. All that mattered to her was making sure that Rob didn’t reject her. (He did.)