Chyann was ten years old when she wrote what her father had been doing to her and posted it in the “worry box” in her year 5 classroom.
After her teacher found it, the fallout was swift. Police and social services were called and her father was arrested. But it took more than a decade from that initial report in 2011 for the man who robbed her of her childhood to be brought to justice.
In January, Chyann’s father was convicted of 14 counts of child rape against her and her older sister Alex and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The abuse had lasted for about five years, when the girls were in primary school.
For the sisters, the intervening years had been dominated by battling to get him charged and into court.
Their case, highlighted in BBC1’s Panorama tomorrow, exposes the myriad flaws in the justice system’s prosecution of rape.
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Only 1.3 per cent of the 63,136 reported rapes logged by police in England and Wales in the year to September 2021 resulted in a suspect being charged.
Police and victim support services believe the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has referred fewer cases to be charged because it wants to raise the historically low 1 per cent conviction rate from reported rapes.
Dame Vera Baird, victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, said: “In the last five years, the CPS took a decision to prosecute fewer rape cases in order to increase their conviction rate.
“What seems to happen now is prosecutors try to second guess whether a jury would like this case. You know, had she had a drink? Was she flirting? How long after the event did she report? Any myths like that mean a conviction is less likely. So, jurors aren’t getting the chance to decide for themselves, so we now prosecute about a third of the people we did.
“If the CPS don’t change their approach, the police can’t get past them.”
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It took three attempts and a legal intervention to persuade the CPS to bring a charge against Chyann and Alex’s father. This was followed by nearly two years of trial delays before he was put behind bars.
For Chyann, 21, the wait has been interminable. “You can’t carry on life when you’re waiting. You build up for this date and then it gets pushed back and everything just spirals and you know you’ve got to wait again and again and you don’t see an end. I tried to kill myself about five times. It just seemed to be never-ending.”
Footage from Chyann’s first interview with Derbyshire police in 2011 is hard to watch. Sitting in an armchair with ankle socks pulled up and her toes only just reaching the floor, she struggles to say out loud what has happened.
“Tell me what it was that he did to you?” the female detective asks. “He… he…” she says, screwing up a tissue in her lap and pushing the tips of her trainers into the carpet, unable to finish the sentence. Finally she says in a quiet voice: “He raped me.”
The words were not enough to bring a prosecution. When police interviewed her older sister Alex, then 11, she said Chyann had made it up and that it was not true.
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Her father denied it, the CPS decided there was not enough evidence to bring a charge and the case was dropped.
Despite this, the family court, whose test for fact-finding is “the balance of probabilities”, found that it was too risky for the girls to stay with Chyann’s father and removed the children from their parents that same year.
Six years later, in 2017, Alex went to police to say that in fact she too had been raped throughout her childhood by her father. She and Chyann tried again to bring a charge but the CPS said they needed more evidence because Alex had not corroborated Chyann’s account when she was still a girl.
In a follow-up interview more than a year later, the police asked Alex why she did not report him as a child. Her answer revealed the power of an abusive parent to manipulate.
“I didn’t want it to stop back then. I thought that was how I was making my dad happy,” she said. “I thought that was a normal relationship between a daughter and her father, and I thought that was something that happened when your dad loved you.”
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Alex, 22, said her father had sworn her to secrecy. “I remember him telling me that I couldn’t tell anyone about it, because he would get into trouble.”
She said the abuse became so normalised in her childhood that she did not see the rape as aggressive and it would happen “very regularly, probably most days at one point”, whenever she took a cup of tea to her father after his night shift.
Despite Alex’s explanation, the CPS rejected the case. The police appealed the decision but the CPS upheld it.
It was not until the sisters got their own lawyer and put in a further appeal, using the CPS’s victims’ right to review scheme, that a charge was brought in 2019.
Despite the breakthrough it still took almost two more years before the case was heard. Court hearings were listed and prepared for in October 2020 and March 2021 only to be cancelled at the last minute, because the pandemic exacerbated the backlog in the courts.
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The court delays took such a toll on the sisters that they struggled to keep their jobs or move on with their lives and both became suicidal.
Between them they decided that if the hearing was pushed back one more time they no longer wanted to be part of it. The trial finally went ahead in January this year.
Alex said of the waiting: “I just didn’t care about anything. I didn’t really care about the future because I just couldn’t look past court.”
Chyann said she was unable to think about anything else. “I struggled to go into work. I had time off and because of the time off I got financial strains. I moved house a lot because I never felt safe.”
Many potential victims are so distressed by the delays in the criminal justice system that they pull out of the process altogether. More than half (57 per cent) of adults who report rape withdraw before the criminal case is concluded.
Detective Inspector Bethany Lee of Derbyshire police, the force who brought the case and fought the CPS to bring a charge, said: “I really hope that this case reassures the public that we do fight those battles on their behalf.”
She said the “vicious cycle” of strong cases failing to end up in court because the CPS or police wanted to improve conviction rates needed to stop. “When you’ve got a victim who is willing to be cross-examined and give their account, then they should be given the opportunity to do so, rather than pre-empting what a jury might think about it, or predicting that they might have a difficult time in court or in that cross-examination,” she said. “We should be giving them the opportunity to be heard and have their evidence tested.”
A CPS spokesman said: “These cases are uniquely complex, that’s why our victim’s right to review scheme was designed to make sure our decision-making can be scrutinised. After reviewing this case, we overturned our initial decision and a robust prosecution secured a substantial sentence for these horrendous crimes.
“The prosecution team focused on supporting the victims — including making sure special measures were in place so they could give their best evidence. We are delighted they saw justice and we are now working nationwide with police to transform the way these cases are handled.”
Commenting on the decline in charge rates, the spokesman said: “We are working with police to make sure more victims of these sickening crimes see justice - but driving up conviction rates forms no part of our decision to prosecute.
“There has been no change of approach – we will always charge if our legal test is met. Only 7 per cent of rape cases reported to the police are referred to the CPS and we make a decision to charge in 69 per cent of these.”
Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Britain’s Rape Crisis, Monday March 28 at 9pm
