Rape myths not behind low conviction rate, says leading family lawyer A rape victim receives counselling. Judges, prosecutors, police and jurors are generally capable of putting such prejudices aside, according to Helen Reece. Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Guardian The persistence of rape myths - such as that "real rape" only involves an armed stranger violently assaulting a woman - should not be used to explain away low conviction rates, according to a leading family lawyer. Judges, prosecutors, police and jurors are generally capable of putting such prejudices aside when considering individual cases, Helen Reece, reader in law at the London School of Economics, argues in a legal journal published on Monday. The low conviction rate - around 7% of reported rapes resulted in convictions during 2011/12 - is not significantly out of line with other common crimes such as burglary, she maintains. Writing in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Reece confronts the supposedly widely held belief that "victim blaming" makes it difficult to convict those who carry out attacks. The truth, she suggests, is far simpler. Unlike assault, which often takes place in public and sometimes within sight of CCTV cameras, rape is an offence for which there are usually no independent witnesses. Reece told the Guardian: "I don't think most people are subject to rape myths. I'm not saying that no one [is influenced by] them but the vast majority of jurors, police, prosecutors and judges have decent attitudes. Rape myths are used as a convenient label to explain away low conviction rates. Rape is a very serious crime, but I don't think it right to focus on [low conviction rates] as a problem particular to rape. There are a lot of [rape] cases where there's no other evidence than one person's word against another. Both sides are saying they had sexual intercourse but [don't agree that it] took place in the [same] way ... I don't think there's much more we can do to increase the conviction rate. I would like to see a more straightforward debate about the issue. In 2011/12 there were 14,767 recorded female rapes but only 1,058 convictions. In 1985, by comparison, there were 1,842 recorded rapes but 450 convictions. In other words, en eightfold increase in the reporting of rape over the period has resulted in little more than a doubling in the conviction rate. Of those cases that result in a full crown court trial, 51.1% resulted in a conviction in 2011/12. That, Reece said, is also not out of line with other serious offences. She takes issue with the idea that many of the myths are widespread and questions whether all are mistaken. One of the most frequently discussed is the "coffee myth," in which people are said to wrongly believe that if a woman invites a man home for coffee after a night out, it generally means an invitation to have sex with her. Reece said: "Most participants [in surveys on attitudes to rape] probably mean that an invitation for coffee is by convention a signal of consent and/or that women tend to signal consent in this way. Interestingly, rather than providing evidence of the prevalence of rape myths, those who agree with this statement are providing evidence of its truth ... the best evidence we have of how women show consent to sex is how people say women show consent to sex. The commonly advanced argument was that law reform had proved ineffective because judges, police, jurors and even the general public hold "rape myths," Reece said, but there was less evidence of people blaming victims than is often supposed. One survey frequently referred to was carried out by Amnesty in 2005. The word "blame" was not used in the questionnaire. "So the 30% of respondents to the Amnesty survey who thought that being drunk made the woman to some extent responsible for being raped may have meant that she was in some way culpable," Reece said. But they may [alternatively] have meant that her drunkenness was causally implicated in the rape, in the sense that she might not have been raped if she had been sober, that being drunk increased the risk of being raped. Not only is this a far more benign belief than victim-blaming, but the rape research provides solid evidence that it is also an accurate belief, with one proviso. Most rape researchers prefer to talk in terms of women 'enhancing their vulnerability' to rape, rather than in terms of any causal connection.