2026-09-23
54 分钟This is The Guardian.
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Hi, my name is Melissa Deans.
I'm the author of I Know Where the Bodies Are Buried, One Woman's Mission to Change
How the Police Investigate Rape, published in 2023. It's a profile of the criminologist Betsy Stanko, now 75,
who has devoted her career to tackling sexual violence, first in her Native America and since the 1980s in the UK.
After the murder and rape of Sarah Everard by a police officer in March 2021, she and a team of 54 academics,
most of them women, were given unprecedented access to 19 police forces in England and Wales.
Tasked with a wholesale overhaul of rape investigations.
I wanted to write this story to understand why less than 1% of reports of rape were leading to a conviction
and what the barriers to change were within police forces.
And also, more hopefully, to follow a team of inspiring people who are tackling this head-on.
How do you bring about a culture shift and, more importantly, make it stick?
I had written a piece for The Guardian's magazine about rape trials six years earlier
and at the time it seemed the statistics for charges and convictions couldn't get much worse.
Many of the lawyers and campaigners I spoke to told me that we were at a tipping