It’s a tough job, being the presenter of a documentary about rape and its victims. But – given the enduring and increasingly scandalous horrors those victims are facing in a country whose appallingly flawed legal approach has effectively decriminalised the act – someone’s got to do it.
This time it is Stacey Dooley’s job. The two-part documentary Rape on Trial focuses on the difficulties presented by cases in which the supposed perpetrator and victim are known to each other. It also looks at the suffering caused by the ever-lengthening delays between rapes being reported and reaching trial, in the surpassingly rare instance (despite recent efforts to improve matters) that the Crown Prosecution Service agrees to let them proceed. The documentary was slated to take a year to film – it ended up taking three, so slow was the progress on any of the cases its makers were following.
