The Legal System’s Failure to Understand Sexual Violence
The legal system remains fundamentally unequipped to understand sexual violence in the form it manifests within the victims of trauma. This isn’t because the system lacks intelligence or experience, but because it was built inside a framework which was never designed to hold the fragmented, non-linear, embodied reality of trauma.
When victims enter the courtroom, there is a translation of lived experience into a system that requires coherence to function, even when coherence is not how trauma survives or manifests.
The Reality of Disclosure
Reporting sexual violence is spoken about as if it is a decision the victim makes with clarity of mind, a choice free of fear, with a full comprehension of the language of the law, and an unfractured mind. There is not a single coherent moment when someone sits down and says: This is what happened.
The decision to report sexually violent crimes rarely begins with a choice of the mind.
It begins in the body.
With a knowing that what unfolded wasn’t right, nor was it lawful, and it is not always a conscious knowing, either. With the increasing use of drugs to make victims pliable or unconscious, memories fragment further than shock or trauma is understood. In all situations, confusion is the constant. The body reacts to something the mind cannot yet comprehend or organise into a narrative, and it is presented with disrupted sleep, hypervigilance, and exhaustion that make no sense within a “normal” day.
Even with recognition that something should never have happened, the body does not neatly package it into something ready for the police to investigate. It holds it, and the victim, often in a state of paralysis; with shock, fear, and disorientation – usually all three.
From research gathered over the years, we know that trauma is not stored linearly, nor is it chronological. It is not easily translated into the language legal systems require. Yet from the moment a report is made, that is exactly what is demanded: a coherent statement, a cohesive timeline, consistent details of the event and perpetrator, and a recalling of the time frames before and after the event itself.
This is expected not once but repeatedly across interviews, departments, months, and sometimes years. The expectation is that for a case to be successful, the account of events must remain stable, and that the person reliving their nightmare must also remain stable. With this level of pressure, the nervous system fractures even further.
It happens before anyone knows whether the report will even reach a courtroom, let alone result in a conviction. The investigation process itself retraumatises victims time and again, sometimes fatally.
The Neurobiology of Traumatic Memory
The legal system’s expectation of consistent, sequential recall fundamentally misunderstands how the brain processes threat.
During traumatic events, the hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding sequential, narrative memories, is suppressed by the stress response.[1]. What gets stored instead are fragments: sensory impressions, emotional states, physical sensations and mental disorientations. There is never a clean and tidy timeline for the police to tick boxes and prepare a case.
Research confirms that trauma and stress actively disrupt the part of the brain responsible for forming exactly the kind of memory courts require[2]. A victim may remember the smell of a room with absolute clarity but be unable to recall what day it was. They may remember what they felt but not what was said. One detail may be certain; another may be absent entirely.
In a legal context, this fragmented recall is misread and understood as an unreliable witness, an inconsistent truth, as evidence that something didn’t happen as described, and as lies. It isn’t, and it is not the case in most cases. It is evidence of trauma.[3]
The legal system operates on a standard built around an untraumatised brain, one that can recall events sequentially, consistently, and in detail. Decades of neuroscience demonstrate that this standard is fundamentally misaligned with how traumatic memory actually works.[4]
The Weight of Waiting
Re-traumatisation happens in the retelling, the repeated questioning designed to uncover facts, often with the same question reframed in multiple ways by different departments. It also happens in the waiting, the not-knowing, and within the silence between updates; nothing appears to be happening externally, but internally the victim replays questions until they become a tornado of chaos.
The body has not settled, cannot settle, because it cannot process what happened. It cannot move on because there is no “after,” no closure, and in most cases, no recognition or justice – only an ongoing loop of guilt, shame, loneliness, and what feels like insanity.
Sleep becomes regularly disrupted. Nights are broken by waking, by nightmares and by the body staying half-alert even at rest. Mornings arrive too early, bringing flashbacks, confusion, fear at being touched – even by our own family members. The body is awake before recovery can commence, as if it has been waiting for the inevitable, rather than harnessing the power of sleep, which should bring rest and regeneration.
Fatigue builds in a way that does not respond to sleep. You can follow all expected patterns of rest and still wake exhausted. You continue working, showing up, maintaining outward structure, but internally, there is persistent depletion that does not match external performance. Concentration shifts repeatedly, focus comes and goes, exhaustion overtakes the brain, and emotional overwhelm becomes all-encompassing. The body moves through the day with an underlying strain that is invisible to others, unless they know what to look for. The exhaustion is far beyond that of a new parent of a baby who will not settle, but without the support, the joy and most certainly without the consent.
From the outside, life is expected to continue as normal, whilst the nervous system acts like it has been placed in a maze with no exit.
Recent research found that the overall experience of sexual violence victims was negative before, during, and after the trial. Long waits, absence of updates, adjournments, and limited explanations about sentencing have adverse impacts on mental well-being, education, and work. Many were diagnosed with C-PTSD and PTSD; some had suicidal thoughts or attempted to take their own lives. Many described putting their lives “on hold” for the duration, some regretted ever reporting the crime, and most lost faith in the system.[5]
The Architecture of Distance
The legal system does not account for this in how cases are handled. There are timelines, targets, protocols, checklists, and the lawyers’ winning streaks to consider.
Those working within the system must create distance for their own well-being. They sit with case after case, detail after detail, and to do this, there must be detachment – a way of hearing what is said without fully feeling what is described. Otherwise, the system would not, and could not function.
That necessary professional distance becomes embedded in how cases are handled: how questions are framed, how responses are interpreted, and how inconsistencies are treated. Over time, it becomes structurally disconnected from human reality. For the majority, it is not intentional nor malicious; it is systematic and self-preservation.
Add into the system that rewards the ability to argue, challenge, find gaps, test accounts, and the ability to sit with the impact of sexual violence comes way down the list of priorities. Compassion moves out of the centre of focus, and not because individuals lack it, but because it is not what the system prioritises. Winning is.
Winning and building the strongest argument is the priority. Positioning language to withstand the scrutiny of the opposition, using statements, questions and legal terminology to confuse and break the victim, whilst gaining the judges’ favour, becomes the winning strategy for the defence.
Courtroom language becomes acrobatic, shaped, stretched, and positioned in ways bearing little resemblance to the lived experience and what actually occurred, widening the gap between reality and sanity for the traumatised victim.
The disjointed recall of mixed-up memories is what the courtroom must assess, and combining this with an onslaught of questions, the victim ends up on trial for a crime that violated every fibre of their being.
A victim suffering from C-PTSD, PTSD and anxiety is placed again in a position where their word is not listened to, and their boundaries and rights are being violated. They face immense pressure, often being forced to face their attacker in court, only for the case to be dismissed or ruled in favour of the rapist. And today, there is even greater pressure for recorded evidence, as if the victim knew what would happen and ensured the event was Instagram-ready for the world to believe them.
The Ellie Wilson Case
Cases like Ellie Wilson’s bring this into public view, and they are not anomalies.
Ellie Wilson reported that her then-boyfriend, Callum Maybury, raped her while she slept. Afterwards, she obtained a recording of him admitting what he had done. In 2022, Maybury was convicted of rape and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison.[6] [7]
But the ordeal did not end with his conviction. Wilson faced severe cross-examination tactics during the trial by Maybury’s lawyer, Lorenzo Alonzi, tactics she later formally challenged. A Faculty of Advocates committee found Alonzi’s behaviour amounted to unsatisfactory professional conduct in six of eleven complaints made by Wilson.[8]
Her experience became emblematic of how the process requires endurance from victims, not the perpetrators. Following her decision to waive her anonymity and speak publicly, Wilson then faced continued harassment by Maybury’s father, Dr Keith Maybury. He has been charged with harassment against her. [9] [10] Wilson has spoken about the ongoing intimidation she faces for speaking out about her experience and the criminal justice system’s failures by haters on various social media platforms.
Her case is not exceptional; it is recognisable by many of us who have pursued justice. It demonstrates that being investigated and going to trial is not always about evidence or coherence of memory. It is about the endurance and courage required for us to reach justice, not just for ourselves but for other victims of sexual violence.
My Own Experience
My own experience sits within that same pattern, not as something exceptional, but as something recognisable to so many other women.
My case that did not result in a conviction at the time, despite the presence of a known individual’s DNA on file, despite forensic evidential complexity, due to the police ignoring vital statements made by the rapist, and a refusal to go to court in what would be a ‘he said/she said’ case. The case was resolved seven years later, with a judge finally acknowledging spiking and rape had taken place, and that there had been consistent systemic failure by the NHS, the rape crisis centre, and the police investigation team. This resolution required a different legal route years afterwards because I refused to give up. The case for justice, however, is still ongoing some two years after the verdict was given.
Those seven years were far from linear in recovery. In the beginning, I operated from severe shock and a need to show up as a competent mother to my two sons. I also operated from dissociation, pushing trauma down to cope with day-to-day life, until the events of that evening came back with vengeance in ways I could never have predicted.
Trauma never moves in a straight line.
It is not something you can track or pin down.
For seven years, I functioned even though my sleep was fractured, nightmares regularly presented without warning, and my body woke in states of alertness that made rest unreliable. I pushed on, travelled the world, filled days with work and adventures, and put on a brave face. The sailing and travelling disguised the early mornings of waking into exhaustion rather than renewal. Then my return to Britain knocked me back to the night it all unfolded. Flashbacks, hypervigilance, fear of leaving the house, fear of being seen online. All of this shaped daily life in ways difficult to articulate until they became impossible to ignore.
The impact has been brutal and has shaped the work I do, the books I write, and the subjects I discuss in my advocacy. It has shaped and restricted my capacity to live life, and my ability to maintain consistency in the way the world expects of someone delivering brilliance in their field of expertise. It has affected my capacity for human interaction, the way I grow my business, and the events I attend.
Trauma, much like Japanese knotweed, invades every area of life, and is still not being acknowledged by the legal system, nor by organisations such as the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme.[11].
A System Built on Separation
The justice system asks victims to translate what happened into a form it recognises, while dismissing the very ways trauma prevents that translation from being clean or consistent, or crimes from being reported immediately.
The deeper issue is structural. Both policing and the legal system have been shaped within cultures that prioritise separation, separation of mind and body, facts and feelings, experience and response. Credibility and consistency are assessed through a framework men built to go into war, to protect themselves and the missions they fought.
Over time, this became embedded in procedure, in how credibility is assessed, how consistency is defined, and how human responses to harm are interpreted. When a system built on separation meets something inherently integrated, there will always be friction. At the moment, that friction is absorbed by the person carrying the trauma: the victim.
Victims carry the weight through investigation, through waiting periods that present as a lack of care, while being expected to remain stable in a state that is anything but stable. Until this is properly understood, rather than seen as a weakness, lack of credibility, or reframed as a false allegation, it will continue to show up in cases time and time again, with justice never being served.
The legal system says it understands trauma and conditions like C-PTSD. But if it did, fractured statements wouldn’t be named as disbelief. Inconsistency in events and timelines wouldn’t be misread as unreliability, and processes would be upgraded to prevent retraumatising victims.
The Social Invisibility of Perpetrators
There is another discomfort rarely spoken about directly. Most sexual violence does not happen in isolation from the community or social visibility.
It happens within relationships, friendships, workplaces, families, homes, schools, universities, and spaces we already inhabit and recognise. Those who inflict sexual violence move among us. We know them, a specific version of themselves they want us to see. We sit with them, work with them, share meals and conversations with them daily. Yet we don’t see them for all of who they are.
When sexual violence is disclosed, there is often a fracture in how that knowledge is held. It becomes easier to separate the “person known” from the “person accused” to maintain the version that fits social familiarity rather than confront the dissonance between proximity and possibility. This is how human systems compartmentalise people into manageable roles, colleague, friend, partner, father, son, rather than integrate those roles with even the possibility of harm.
In the courtroom, this asymmetry is pronounced. The woman giving evidence is rarely held in relational terms. She is not seen as someone’s daughter, sister, partner, colleague, or someone embedded in networks of relationships and trust. She is positioned as a singular account, a single narrative under examination.
The person accused often arrives already embedded in multiple social identities, creating cognitive distance from the allegation itself. This shapes how credibility is felt and extends into how the press reports these stories.[12], a wider cultural tendency to separate people from the crimes they have committed.
Professional Desensitisation
Many professionals within these systems – lawyers, prosecutors, judges, journalists – are not naïve to sexual violence. They have seen it before, prosecuted it, defended it, sentenced it, read the files, heard testimony, sat through evidence, and reported it. Many times over.
This is not about lacking awareness that sexual violence exists or that it is serious. It is about repeated exposure leading to desensitisation and minimising the victims’ experiences so the defence can win.
There is still a tendency for the courtroom to hold the accused as an individual case in isolation, even if he is already known for sexually violent crimes. Rather than allowing broader patterns of harm to inform risk, credibility, and behaviours in real time, each case is treated separately.
Perpetrators know they can walk free. They do. This sets unspoken permission for others to push boundaries and commit sexual violence.
A Historical Framework
When we look at the legal system through a historical lens, women were formally permitted to enter the UK legal profession following the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.[13] which opened the door for women to become solicitors and barristers for the first time. Before that, even women graduating in law in the late nineteenth century were barred from practice entirely.
The first women entered the profession in the early 1920s, but their entry did not influence it. Systems change slowly, over generations, as presence becomes normalised. Only then do authority structures start to shift, and institutional cultures become challenged from within.
In law, that shift has been gradual. Meaningful structural change, where women’s participation moved from exception to expectation, has largely accelerated in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the present day. The dominant frameworks of legal reasoning, professional identity, and courtroom practices were formed long before women were meaningfully present within them.
Law was built in a context where emotional distance, adversarial reasoning, and separation of experience from analysis were considered essential to professionalism. Even as the profession has diversified, the underlying architecture has not fully shifted. Expectations of credibility, coherence, and stamina remain unchanged.
If women had been meaningfully present within the legal profession and within the shaping of policy and evidential standards from an earlier point, would the way sexual violence is currently assessed look the same?
Systems are not neutral. They reflect who was present when foundations were laid, and whose experiences were considered typical. Rape is a crime that disproportionately affects women; this is not contested in global data. Yet for much of modern legal history, interpretation of that crime developed within systems where male perspectives were structurally dominant, not because of individual intent, but because of historical access to power, profession, and policy, and the guilt of many in power being perpetrators of the crimes.
Even now, although the profession has changed significantly, the legacy of that structure remains embedded in how credibility is assessed, how consistency is interpreted, and how trauma is translated into evidential form. The issue is not simply who sits in the courtroom; it is how the framework was built, and whether it has fully adapted to the realities of the experiences it is now being asked to judge.
What sits at the centre of all of this is not simply a failure of process, but a failure to meet human experience with the depth of understanding it requires. Behind every statement, every piece of evidence, every timeline, is a person who has had to find a way to keep living whilst carrying something that has already disrupted their sense of safety, trust, self and agency. If the legal system is to serve justice in any meaningful sense, it cannot continue to ask people to translate their harm into a form it finds comfortable while overlooking the reality of how that harm is lived. Justice has to move with the research on how sexually violent crimes negatively impact mental health. It shouldn’t only be about what can be proven; it is about whether the system itself is capable of recognising truth in the form it manifests, and whether it is willing to evolve when it becomes clear that it cannot.
[8] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwgw334e9zo
[11] https://www.sexualassaultclaims.co.uk/sexual-assault-civil-claims/levels-of-compensation-for-rape/
[12] https://instagram.com/therightwordsproject
[13] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-sex-disqualification-removal-act-1919
