Sexual violence

The charges against Mason Greenwood, the Manchester United footballer who was accused of assault and attempted rape, have been dropped. Yet the trial of both him and the woman involved in the case continues unabated online. The ongoing discussion of the case brought back painful memories of my experience at the hands of my rapist – and the verdict of online trolls about what happened to me. When the reports about the conviction of my ex-boyfriend and abuser were published online, I did my best to ignore the coverage. But one afternoon, I scrolled through the comments on a tabloid news article about my case. I knew I shouldn’t look,

On Monday evening Sir Keir Starmer tweeted an explanation for why Labour would not be supporting the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill. Coming from a former director of public prosecutions this was dire stuff. First, and perhaps least importantly, the word ‘statues’ does not appear in the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill. Sir Keir knows this. What the Bill proposes is that where criminal damage is caused to a ‘memorial’ there should be no minimum financial limit before the case can be tried in the Crown Court, where the maximum sentence is ten years imprisonment. In practice, such a sentence has never, so far as I am aware, been