'A small number of men are getting away with a large number of rapes because they know they can'

Published on Friday 28 August 2009 14:36

Being attacked in her own home changed Abi Grant's life for ever. Her book reveals the truth about coping with the trauma of rape, and calls for urgent change to the legal system

He hasn't said sorry. That man in court did everything he could to get off. As far as I'm concerned we're connected until the day he dies. And if I get a second chance to hinder him I would."

Abi Grant is talking about Greig Strachan, the man who broke into her flat in the early hours of the morning in January of 1993, who viciously attacked and attempted to rape her. The first "hindering" she's referring to is his conviction, albeit some 12 years after the brutal attack, and the 11-year prison sentence he was given, later reduced on appeal to nine years. Grant's voice is soft but strong, her eyes are fixed on mine and despite the wry smile that follows what she says, and the sip of Diet Coke, her anger is palpable.

Fury and frustration are two of the motivations that drove Grant to write her book, Words Can Describe. A clear-eyed, coruscating description of the attack committed by Strachan and its dreadful, life-altering aftermath, it's more than a personal story of survival. Starting with a dedication to Stacey Westbury, a 23-year-old raped and murdered in her London home in 2007, and ending with a list of ten tips for dealing with traumatised people ("Don't pretend you understand by introducing a bad experience of your own. Getting raped isn't the same as when your mother died"), the book is Grant's attempt to fracture the silence that surrounds rape; to challenge the myths around sexual violence, that women ask for it, or deserve it. And most of all it's a call to action.

In England and Wales the rape conviction rate is 6.5 per cent and in Scotland it's even lower. According to figures released at the beginning of this month, fewer than 10 per cent of rape cases reported to the police in Scotland make it as far as court. In 2007/08 out of 908 cases of rape recorded, only 88 were pursued in court. Bear in mind that only 20 per cent of rapes in the UK are even reported and it's clear why Grant is angry. What might be more surprising is that she's also funny.

Grant laughs easily. Sitting in a London hotel, it's sweltering outside and she's taken off her shoes to cool down. Rape is a difficult topic to tackle, but Grant's manner is easy. Her humour is there in the book too. Even when she's talking about experiences that might lend themselves more readily to misery she finds space for her brand of sardonic wit. I wonder if it's partly that which has helped her to survive what she's gone through?

But I'm going too fast, rushing past what Grant is brave enough to linger on: January 1993.

Strachan had been standing outside the back window of Grant's North London basement flat for quite some time given the number of cigarette butts that the police later found there. He'd watched and waited. Grant had been out with friends commiserating that the West End musical for which she'd written the script had closed after a six-month run. She was 28, at the beginning of a career brimming with potential.

By the time Grant went to bed, it was the early hours of the morning. She fell asleep. Strachan then stretched his arm through a small window and opened the larger one beneath.

"All I could make out was a shape, dark, shifting and violent. He jabbed his tongue in my mouth and I could taste the cigarettes. He grabbed my left breast through my T-shirt and began twisting it violently. 'No' I whispered and, I think, 'please'. My voice didn't work. 'Shut up you f****** bitch or I'll kill you,' he said, his voice working fine."

What ensued was a vicious struggle in which Strachan attempted to rape Grant, repeatedly punching her about the head and breaking her nose. Somehow, through instinct, she managed to fight him off – biting and head-butting him. He fled. Grant, bruised, bleeding and in shock, dialled 999, but Strachan had cut her phone line. So she left her flat, somehow got upstairs and banged on her neighbour's door.

The attack that Strachan, a serial sex offender with previous convictions for rape and the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl, inflicted on Grant lasted 15 minutes. The impact cost her eight years of her life. The police drew a blank in their initial investigation. After a raft of tests, interviews, statements, forensic examinations, having her nose reset – experiencing the full force of a system in which you're a case rather than a person – nothing happened. After seven months the police confirmed that forensic evidence told them the man they were after wasn't on their books and that was that.

Grant couldn't work, she couldn't sleep, she drank too much trying to cope with what had happened and watched her life go down the tubes. She moved out of her flat, watched her relationships falter and her savings disappear until she was bankrupt.

If you're thinking that we've slipped into the territory of misery memoir, you'd be wrong. Grant doesn't do self-pity. She just tells it as it was; names the feelings of confusion, anger and despair. It's what makes the book as life-affirming as it is horrifying.

Grant's close friends supported her, but what happens to women who don't have that?

"They drop out. Police will tell you that 50 per cent of rape cases that get to court collapse on the day because the woman just can't go through with it." She pauses. "They only told me that at the end of the trial."

To say Grant is less than impressed by the justice system is a monumental understatement. As she puts it, "If the English legal system was a company, it wouldn't just go bankrupt, its customer base would burn it to the ground." You can see where she's coming from.

It took Grant eight years to get some semblance of normality back into her life. She got a council flat. She stopped drinking and started working again, writing scripts for Thomas the Tank Engine. Life wasn't the same, but it went on.

And then, four years later, a knock at the door changed everything. The Cold Case Squad had come calling. A fingerprint found in Grant's flat matched Strachan's. The case against him could go ahead.

Strachan's first trial was postponed five times, his retrial (granted for reasons that were not explained to Grant until long after the fact) was postponed three times. A self-employed writer, Grant couldn't work during this time so she found herself sliding into the same financial black hole she'd fought her way out of once already. When the trial did get under way, Grant found herself given little information, unaware of the rules of engagement and undermined at every turn. Mentally, emotionally and financially she was devastated all over again.

"If I have to watch one more barrister saying, 'Oh, it's a bit like theatre, you know' – no, it's not, actually. It's not like putting on a performance. It's real life. If it was theatre I could stand up and boo you and say you're rubbish, but what I have to do is sit there and be quiet. The only people who know what is going on are guilty people, barristers and the judge because they've all been there before.

Grant's suggestions for improving the system range from the contentious (she supports extending anonymity to men accused of rape, in order to protect innocent men from the glare of publicity) to the practical ("I think it'd help if we did things like get rid of the stupid costumes so that it normalises things") to the undeniably sensible: "The big thing that needs to be done is bulk prosecutions, so women can report a rape and say they don't want to go through with it if it's just them alone, but if another woman comes and reports the same name they can go forward in a joint prosecution."

This appeals to Grant because as far as she's concerned, despite what tabloid headlines might suggest about the need to protect men from false allegations or the idea that arguments aimed at improving women's protection from sexual violence demonise men, at the moment rape is the one crime that you're almost guaranteed to get away with.

"I think that a small number of men are committing a large number of rapes. They're using other men as camouflage and it's working.

"Every now and again some disaster will happen like John Worboys (a taxi driver recently jailed for a spate of sex attacks] or Kirk Reid (convicted of 26 attacks, including two rapes but believed to have attacked more than 70 women] and there's a flurry of activity and they'll say oh we must do this and then absolutely nothing changes."

Grant knows only too well how the defence against an accusation of rape can rely on discrediting the woman. What was she wearing? How much had she drunk? Did she know the man? It's why during Strachan's trial Grant was asked about how much she'd had to drink and whether she was in the habit of talking to men in her local pub.

"I don't know if you saw in the news recently there was a story about a 71-year-old woman who was raped by a 28-year-old man in the bushes of a car park. The reason it's significant is that it was an 11-1 majority verdict, which means that one person on the jury believed the defence's claim that the 71-year-old woman decided impulsively to ask a 28-year-old man, whom she'd never met before, to have sex with her in the bushes behind a car park in broad daylight.

"Even with a 71-year-old they played the 'the woman's a slag' card, that she was asking for it – literally asking for it; she approached this young man and said 'yes, throw me on the ground and have sex with me'."

In her book Grant tells the stories of three women who were raped by acquaintances – the attacks are unlinked, in that they involved three different men, but the methods used were almost exactly the same. In all three instances, the woman had met a man at a social occasion where they shared mutual friends. They chatted, of course. Then when the man offered the woman a lift home, she accepted. On being dropped off, the man asked to use the woman's toilet and once inside her home he raped her. Of course, none of these women reported what had happened to them. They knew how it would be portrayed.

"I've had someone else come up and tell me exactly the same thing (since I wrote the book]," she says. "A friend, someone who she thought was a friend, gave her a lift back from a party and then asked to use her toilet and then he attacked her.

"There are a large number of men who are living with women who've been attacked and they don't know because the women haven't told them," Grant says. "It becomes something that you put behind you, that you never mention again. The number of women who from the front look absolutely together but will then tell you about what happened to them when they were 21. I know very few women who at some point in their life have not been on the receiving end of an aggressive sexual request."

Grant is angry. Of course she is. But she's also willing to make the effort to describe what needs to happen if we're to understand and reduce rape. For Grant, sexual violence is a problem for men and women. To tackle it both sexes have to work together.

"We can get it away from the idea that this is a gender problem, to do with gender communication. It isn't. I sincerely believe a small number of men are getting away with a large number of rapes because they know they can."

If there's any justice, Grant's message will get through. sm

Words Can Describe, by Abi Grant, is published by Picador, priced 11.99.