It has been announced that ‘Opertion Soteria’ is to be extended from five pilot areas to every police force in the country. Operation Soteria is the name given to a supposedly new method of investigating rape and other serious sexual allegations.
A report into the results of the Soteria pilots, written by the academics who were largely responsible for devising Operation Soteria in the first place, concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had been a great success.
The Soteria approach may indeed increase the rape conviction rate, but it will do so by convicting more innocent people
In Hellenistic religions, a soteria was a ‘sacrifice or series of sacrifices performed in expectation of… deliverance from a crisis.’ The crisis from which Operation Soteria is supposed to deliver us is an epidemic of rape.
Whether there is, in fact, a particular epidemic of rape, as opposed to changes in police recording criteria and greater willingness to report it is very hard to say, but few will disagree with the overall objective of trying to convict more rapists.
The Soteria approach is based upon six principles, or as it calls them, ‘pillars’. Some of
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