There are no solutions, only trade offs - yea, even about rape
The grand lesson of economics is that there are no solutions, there’s only a spectrum of available trade offs. Choices have to be made and it is not possible to do both things that are in conflict with each other. At the most trivial level if we have those plums for tea today we cannot have them again as prunes for pudding some time later.
This does, we’re afraid, matter:
Last year the court of appeal ruled against a group of women’s charities in a case that sought to link the declining number of prosecutions with changes to CPS guidance, which emphasised the importance of securing convictions. Low conviction rates have long been a source of concern to campaigners as well as to prosecutors. But the collapse in the number of reports leading to a trial is even more alarming, and likened by the victims’ commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, to the “decriminalisation of rape”. The number of prosecutions fell 60% in the four years to 2019/20 – a period during which the number of rapes reported almost doubled.
Whatever the courts and campaigners and the CPS say there, there is an inevitable conflict.
A high conviction rate means carefully choosing those cases which will lead to a conviction. A high prosecution rate means accepting marginal cases - or at least cases that are going to be hard to prove and therefore face a lower conviction possibility.
As long as we do maintain the idea that an allegation of rape must actually be proved there is no way out of this trade off. Prosecuting the marginal cases will lead to a fall in the conviction rate, raising the conviction rate will lead to a fall in the prosecution rate.
We agree, this still leaves wide open the question of what is the optimal trade off and we’re not silly enough to insist that the current one - whatever it is - is that correct one. We do though insist that this is the actual problem to be faced here. We face a series of possible trade offs. The choice is which one to we go with, not whether we can have a perfect world.