Trawling and bundling – policy and tactics in rape and sexual assault trials

UK Supreme Court

In the early 1990’s, a lifetime ago now, I was a junior trainee in a solicitor’s office in Leeds. It was a small general practice, and I soon had my own (supervised) caseload that consisted of some divorce, wardship, crime and conveyancing files; the whole gamut. I loved every minute of it and I had every intention of qualifying as a solicitor, but life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans and that never happened, though that’s bye-the-bye.

A few clients stick in my memory for various reasons, not least of whom is a man I’ll call Seth. Seth was a lifelong petty criminal in his 50’s, a regular client in and out of prison for most of his life, for mostly theft and receiving. This time he was facing a charge of theft, and adamant that he was not guilty. He generally pleaded guilty, other times not, if he thought he could get away with it, but this time he was insistent that there had been a terrible misunderstanding and he had been given permission to take some waste from a demolition site. His version was that he had asked if he could have some waste wood, the foreman had told him to ‘take whatever you want’, and he took that to mean that he could have some used bricks as well. The foreman, on the other hand claimed that he only meant the wood. The development company decided that a theft had been committed and contacted the police. It all boiled down to what did each man intend to happen, and whether or not Seth took the bricks, knowing that the foreman only meant the wood. The mens rea (criminal mind/intent) was central to the case.

In those days, solicitors sent junior staff to sit behind barristers during trials to take notes and possibly run errands, and that task fell to me for Seth’s trial. In due course, Seth was acquitted, but both my managing solicitor and I were somewhat bemused by his demeanour for those few days. Normally, quite blasé about proceedings, laughing and joking during breaks, quite relaxed and seemingly unconcerned by the outcome, this time he was a bag of nerves, chain-smoking, pacing, at times shaking from head to foot. When the jury was deliberating, he was unable to speak to anyone, preferring to nurse a cup of coffee in silence or sit and stare at the floor. Mercifully, they didn’t take long, and the ‘not guilty’ brought an audible exhale of breath and near collapse with relief from Seth. Before he bolted from the court, we asked him what had troubled him so much about this case. He was smiling broadly, back to his normal self and he told us – I’m used to prison. I don’t mind doing time for things I’ve done wrong, that’s part of the job, but I sure as **** didn’t want to go to prison when I hadn’t done anything wrong!

Seth, a seasoned criminal, was appalled at and genuinely frightened by the idea of being falsely accused and wrongly convicted.

Times have changed. Barristers don’t have solicitor’s juniors taking notes for them and I strongly suspect that today, Seth would be facing a clutch of charges, not just a single charge of theft. He took wood and bricks – 2 counts of theft there. Then, he could have been charged with trespass, but wasn’t, and he could have been charged with handling stolen goods as he took the bricks with a friend in mind and passed them on to him, but wasn’t. His friend could have been charged with receiving as well as a co-defendant, because Seth told him that he’d been told he could take what he wanted and was going back later with transport, so did he want some old bricks for his project. A whole host of missed charging opportunities!!

Fast forward to the 2020’s and I had the opportunity to sit in on a trial where a young man was facing a variety of charges of varying levels of seriousness relating to domestic violence, sexual assault and rape and 4 complainers.

Accused by one ex-girlfriend of rape and sexual assault, she went on a deep dive into his Facebook account and came up with a list of his ex’s names, names that she provided to police, and the police went a-visiting. Until that point, no-one had made any complaint and though some of the relationships were very short-lived (a matter of a few weeks), they were all well in the past. It was well-known among friends and family that the young man had ongoing difficulties with his mental health that he sometimes found difficult to control and that had been the case for a number of years too.

Within weeks of the first complaint and after those police visits, several ex-girlfriends had made official complaints while another contacted him and his family to describe the pressure that she had been put under - and resisted - to make a complaint. Of course, none of this was mentioned in court, and not a single witness was called in the young man’s defence, not even the ex-girlfriend who refused police pressure to complain. It could be argued that not only do we not have fair trials, we don’t have fair investigations either.

In Scotland there is currently much debate about the fairness of rape and sexual assault trials, about S274/275 and about the Moorov Doctrine. Additionally, men can be summoned to the Sheriff Court without even knowing that a complaint has been made against them, let along having had the opportunity to offer a defence before a court date. Recent votes by the Scottish parliament have ignored any and all concerns by Scottish legal minds, including those as eminent as Thomas Ross KC and Tony Lenehan KC, with MSPs apparently preferring to bow to the pressure of victims pressure groups and women’s rights groups who are apparently less concerned with truth and fairness than they are with targets, convictions and victimhood. It’s an ongoing debate that gets relatively little  serious attention in the media, which prefers to focus on the audacity, as some see it, of a group of women campaigning for fair trials, blackening their name and stirring up hate by repeating the inaccurate and emotive description coined by Pam Gosal MSP,  who described them as a ‘rapist rights group’. Moreover, when a representative of the group, known as JIMS, (Justice for Innocent Men Scotland), was invited to speak to a 4^th year class of criminology students at Abertay University by their tutor Dr Stuart Waiton, the result was condemnation by the University Principle and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Liz Bacon, offensive graffiti on university buildings and calls for Dr Waiton to be sacked with the media jumping on that bandwagon and largely failing to see the underlying and important message – our legal system is broken and needs fixing. With few exceptions, the irony of complaining about a ‘biased’ lecture in such a biased way was lost. Thank goodness for at least some balanced reporting from The Herald and The Courier.

One might ask, is not the purpose of a university to encourage critical thinking and the discussion of difficult even controversial topics, is vandalism the appropriate outlet for ‘strong feelings’ and why should a man be sacked for doing what has been done hundreds of times before without comment, which is to invite an outside speaker to address his class? Professor Bacon claimed that the talk ‘did not reflect the values of the institution’ but one wonders then if the concept of fair trials, the topic of the talk, is something that the institution considers is not one of ‘the values of the institution’, or at least will not allow it to be one of the values of their criminology department.

Such is the vehemence with which any notion that any woman claiming to be a victim of sexual impropriety of any sort should not find the man she accuses prosecuted and the result of that prosecution should be (a) guilty verdict(s) and a jail sentence to give them ‘closure’ is addressed both academically and in practice. Often, women talk of ‘getting my rapist prosecuted’ and ‘getting my rapist jailed’, not realising that they present themselves as being on a personal crusade to ‘up’ the statistics. With that in mind, let’s get back to the young man recently before the court, and the ‘fairness’ of it all.

Is it fair that ex-girlfriends are pressured into bringing complaints when they themselves haven’t seen anything untoward about their relationships until the police approached them?  (That even wives are put under that kind of pressure and then denied the opportunity to be a defence witness, as described by Brian Haskell, currently serving a sentence for rape in HMP Edinburgh and maintaining his innocence?)

Is it fair that, not content with a single complaint from a single ex-girlfriend, she and the police effectively create complaints from nowhere?

Is it fair that all the evidence that he and his family wanted to put forward was deemed inadmissible? That in the end, there were multiple witnesses for the prosecution, but no-one was allowed to speak for him but himself?

Is it fair that the guilty verdicts were all majority ones which means in Scotland that up to 7 out of the 15 jury members would have acquitted him? Is there then not doubt?

Is it fair that a complainant can require all the protections currently on offer – screens, evidence by video and a closed court, only to have no-one pay attention to the fact that she contradicted herself multiple times in evidence and a majority guilty verdict returned none-the-less?

Is there, really, anything about rape trials that can currently be called ‘a level playing field’ or ‘fair’?

Trawling for ‘victims’ is not unique to this particular case as it’s becoming more and more common that men are tried and convicted of crimes against multiple women over a number of years despite other women being prepared to testify in those mens’ favour. (See Brian Haskell above).

It’s becoming clear that the system is only too willing to criminalise the social fumblings, poor behaviour and manners of men even when in some sort of crisis and needing help, (it’s not unknown for a request for an ambulance and mental health help to turn into the sending of the police and an arrest, for men at least), and not at all willing to hold women accountable for their own social fumblings, poor behaviour and manners. This is not a new phenomenon, when, for decades, women have been 'punished' for false allegations in many cases with a ‘telling off’, a caution or a fixed penalty. Even when jailed, serial accusers such as Eleanor Williams are quietly released early while the most severe penalties are reserved for Carl Beech (18yrs jail for) or David Pantellis (an IPP sentence for 4 false allegations and arson to his own flat).

Isn’t it fair to say that accusations and complaints manufactured out of thin air are, in fact, false accusations, and if a conviction results, a wrongful conviction?

Of course, this is by no means an isolated case. It would be bad enough if it was. Multiple complainants and multiple charges of various degrees of seriousness is now a relatively common factor in cases involving young men, many barely out of their teens and reports of such convictions have burgeoned since 2021. Have teenage boys become more sexually aggressive for some reason, or it is that, one way or another, prosecutors seem to want to be determined to ‘get something to stick’? The social hustle and bustle of navigating how to have a sex life has become a battle of the sexes that criminalises men and renders women unable to navigate social interactions without the police and CPS (if not themselves) labelling them as victims. Press reports rarely give details of a convicted man’s defence, an omission that fails to show the complete picture, but it seems that news reports aren’t interested in that, only in the salacious details of ANOTHER man being branded a monster.

Have the efforts to get sexual crime redefined, targets met, men convicted and our jails full gone too far? And are false allegations only a real crime worthy of real punishment when men do it?

Is the progression from a lonely teenager being convicted of sexual assault in 2019 when his defence was ‘I was only trying to make a friend but the words didn’t come out’ to the police to contacting every previous girlfriend of an 18-yr old and trying to persuade them/her to make an accusation of rape – and often succeeding - what we want? Is this what we, as a society, have come to? Is this pressure for convictions, resulting in young men appearing before the courts, genuinely bemused, shocked and frightened because, genuinely, to them, it all seemed fine at the time, and it all seemed fine to their girlfriends too until the police knocked at their door what we want for our young people?

Not once is intent mentioned these days, but everything hinges on what those often pressured women say, in retrospect, they felt at the time but never expressed. Not once is mens rea raised as a legal concept. In fact the legal requirement regarding a defence to rape changed substantially in 2003 in England and Wales when a ‘reasonable belief’ in consent had to be both ‘genuine’ and ‘reasonable’. Fair enough one might think, if the system ever bothered to ask what the belief of the accused actually was. With feminists educating women and girls to think that they have been raped if they changed their minds during sex but didn’t communicate it, and that a touching of the elbow is a sexual assault if the elbow belongs to a girl and she says feels uncomfortable about it, regardless of why her elbow got touched? Haven’t we now got a situation where, if a man loses his temper any woman within earshot can claim to have been assaulted? Even children who overhear their parents arguing are now considered to be victims of domestic abuse?

How on earth are men supposed to navigate crowded trains and buses or difficult emotions? Why aren’t women held to the same standard?

How are children supposed to learn that everyone has difficult emotions that can get the better of us? How to apologise for not handling them well?

Isn’t it time we started asking the difficult questions instead of pandering to the ‘every man is a rapist’ mantra that is so common on social media and somehow using a broken legal system to turn it into a reality?

The UK Supreme Court ruling of the 12^th November 2025 reaffirmed  that ‘no society governed by the rule of law can tolerate the conviction or punishment of the innocent’ and stated that charges challenged by a defendant will necessarily require that the complainer be asked difficult questions.

The judgement is lengthy and detailed and will require examination by the best legal minds, though the cases which brought about the unprecedented approach from the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates remain to be fully appealed. It remains to be seen if appeals will be granted for convictions already handed down, and sadly, the appeals of David Daly and Andre Kier that prompted the intervention by the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates, were (some say puzzlingly), dismissed on Human Rights grounds, but legal advocates are expressing delight and the accused and their families are expressing hope at this new development.

It’s a first step, but even so, the question still remains - when will this craziness stop? Because I’m not sure that the Supreme Court ruling on its own is enough.

By Felicity Stryjak

Felicity Stryjak is retired having worn many hats in her life so far, teacher and paralegal among them. She was born in Torquay in 1953 and has lived in a variety of interesting places both in the UK and abroad. She intends Scotland to be her final place of abode. More recently Felicity created Falsely Accused Database to challenge the myth that false allegations are 'vanishingly rare'.

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