Eighty-three per cent of women who are raped in England and Wales do not report it to the police, which is partly why universities have a student resolution procedure – so that students who don’t want to press charges can still have redress. But at the University of Bristol, says Katie White, co-founder of Enough, the campaign to stop violence against women: “Fewer than five people report to the university each year.” She continues: “There are estimates that 8% of female students are raped while they are at university, so just calculating the student body at Bristol, that’s 500 students a year. It’s staggering. That’s about 99% of students not reporting officially.”
That’s the background to Enough, a not-for-profit that has handed out 4,500 self-swab “rape kits” in Bristol. You send them to a lab, and they will pass the results on to the police if that’s what you decide you want. You can also write a time-stamped testimony of what happened, on its website. Rather than a searchable database, this is a locked portal that only the victim can access. The point is twofold: it can be referenced for future criminal proceedings if there are any, and it is an accepted waypoint in trauma recovery, to record rather than try to forget what happened. It is estimated that 94% of rape survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in the first two weeks following an attack. Enough says it has received 100 reports to the portal in its first six weeks alone.
