Victims Commissioner hits out at Milly parents treatment

Milly Dowler's family were put through a "quite appalling" legal process which must be stopped to avoid the risk of rapists and murderers walking the streets, the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses has said.

Louise Casey said it was far from an isolated case and victims and witnesses were sometimes "treated as if they were an inconvenience in some legal game being played out in the court room".

The guilty verdicts have come at the price of the Dowler family themselves being put on trial.

"We can't let this continue," Ms Casey said.

"People must feel able come forward to report crime or give evidence in court because if they don't, then we'll have rapists and murderers walking the streets."

Ms Casey went on: "The experience that the Dowler family have endured through this legal process has been quite appalling.

"Sadly, it's not an isolated case.

"I have met many families of murdered loved ones who have told me that the process has been almost as traumatic as the death itself.

"Victims and witnesses have few rights, no real route of complaint, they are often given little information and sometimes treated as if they were an inconvenience in some legal game being played out in the courtroom."

She added: "We have a system which says victims must not take the law into their own hands but step aside and allow the Crown to punish criminals fairly on their behalf for the benefit of everyone.

"The other side of that deal is that victims and witnesses should be treated with dignity and respect.

"This doesn't mean taking away rights from defendants, but levelling up a system that currently treats victims and witnesses as a poor relation."

It has taken nine years for the Dowler family to get justice for Milly, even though the murderer lived just 50 yards from where she vanished in March 2002.

Both parents broke down while giving evidence when the defence probed into their lives and suggested Milly might have been running away because she was unhappy.

For her father Bob, an IT management consultant, there was the added humiliation of having to admit that he had an interest in bondage sex, and that police found a ball gag at the family home in Walton Park.

Milly had found a porn magazine with contact numbers for women providing kinky sex nine months before her death, and felt let down by her father, the court heard.

This led to detectives considering Mr Dowler as a suspect - the first of 54 checked out by Surrey Police over the years.

Milly's sister Gemma was so upset that her evidence had to be read to the court.