Five Pillars: A Framework for Transforming the Police Response to Rape and Sexual Assault

Abstract The ‘justice gap’ for cases of rape and sexual assault is well-documented. Despite our rich understanding the problem, its visibility in public sphere, state commitments to increasing charge conviction rates, justice gap getting larger Western World. On a practical level, police are gatekeepers outcome justice—arrests, charges, convictions. As representatives society, also wield significant symbolic power defining faultline between behaviour that deemed ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In this article we propose theory-based practice-oriented framework transforming response draws on large body feminist literature violence criminal responses, combination with policing literature. This comprises five pillars: (1) suspect-focused investigations; (2) disrupting repeat offenders; (3) procedural approach victim-survivor engagement; (4) officer learning, wellbeing, organisational change; (5) use data. We conclude discussion implementation empirical validation.