[BB] Every Crown Court in England and Wales will set aside a courtroom just for the hearing of rape and serious sexual offence cases, with the government earmarking a ‘multi-million-pound’ budget to specially adapt the courts for the task. Court houses will provide a special private entrance for sex crime victims, and special waiting areas inside, so they aren’t circulating in the same public areas as others.
Court staff, including judges, will receive special training as part of this initiative, which will see rape trials not only allocated their own courtrooms but also prioritised with fixed-date trials, rather than sitting on a waiting list like other court cases.
The change is part of the government’s ongoing attempt to get a grip on the towering courts backlog, which, through years of underinvestment in the courts system, with ever more technically complex and consequently longer trials, and a rise in the amount of crime being detected and prosecuted, has seen wait times soar. In more and more cases, victims can wait years for a court date, which critics say discourages people from coming forward, and in some cases encourages victims to withdraw cases when they become demoralised by the extremely long process.
Per a report in The Times, the average rape case took 424 days to complete once it had entered the Crown Court system.
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