In any documentary involving the British police there is always a moment where the disjunction between the form and content of what they are saying is so enormous it feels like you are suffering from a momentary dissociative episode. This reaches a possible apogee in Panorama’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Britain’s Rape Crisis (BBC One). Detective Brett Turner of the Derbyshire police force is interviewing a suspect who is denying all charges. “I know it’s hard to say: ‘Yeah, all right, I raped my two daughters’, it’s not nice to admit,” he says mildly. “But have a think about what you’re doing to your kids.” He encourages the father to “do the decent thing”. The father of Alex and Chyann – who allege that he abused them from such a young age and so often that they had no idea such misery was not a normal way of life – declines.
The police start putting together the case against him. The young women – barely out of their teens – become part of a system in which the odds of finding justice are woefully, almost hopelessly, small. In essence, Panorama’s investigation is into the fact that rape has effectively been decriminalised, as Dame Vera Baird, the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, put it in 2020, so small are the chances of a perpetrator being caught and punished.
