Adding insult to the injury of rape
The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority has acknowledged its rules were applied ‘wrongly’ when 15 rape victims who had been drinking on the day of their attacks were told they deserved only three-quarters of the compensation the law provides for them. The full figure is a paltry £11,000. That’s how much the UK legal system holds our bodies to be worth should we be intimately violated. Yet, while the news channels are rightly making a huge stink over the insult the CICA added to extreme injury for these people, there’s another, just as outrageous, factor to consider: how many rape victims, male and female, ever get told they can make a claim for compensation? And that they can apply even when their attacker is never caught?
tags: assault, bigotry, compensation, crime, justice, police, prejudice, rape
