The Administration of Survival.

Something strange happens when someone else does something wrong, and you are the one left to deal with the consequences.

Whether you’re challenging sexual harassment or discrimination at work, whistleblowing on something you know isn’t right, dealing with racism or Islamophobia, trying to navigate an immigration system that requires you to repeatedly prove who you are and why you should be allowed to stay, challenging medical or institutional failures, reporting abuse or seeking justice after a crime, somewhere along the way you can find yourself taking on another role you never applied for: administrator of the evidence.

Email exchanges need saving, phone calls and other conversations have to be documented, screenshots taken, dates remembered, letters sent, and increasingly complicated timelines tracked, often while you’re still trying to work, pay the bills, look after your family and deal with the emotional or physical consequences of whatever happened in the first place.

We encourage people to speak up, report it, challenge it and seek justice, but I wonder how often we consider the amount of energy, time, money and sheer bloody-mindedness required to keep doing that once they have.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week because my printer and stapler have been in overdrive again.

With the help of my local MP, Stephen Doughty, my experience with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority is now being passed to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman for independent investigation, which means I have been gathering together three years’ worth of correspondence, tribunal documents, medical evidence and receipts for Special Delivery letters relating to a compensation claim following the rape I reported almost nine years ago.

And as the piles of paper have grown around me, I’ve found myself wondering how many people simply don’t have the time, money, knowledge, support or energy to keep going. How many people don’t know what they’re entitled to in the first place, don’t know which organisation they’re supposed to complain to next, cannot afford professional help, struggle with the language or bureaucracy, or reach the point where protecting what remains of their health becomes more important than continuing to fight?

Because eventually we have to ask whether a right that requires extraordinary levels of resilience, literacy, time, money and administrative competence to access is genuinely accessible at all.

When the person harmed has to become the expert

There is something else I’ve noticed over the years of dealing with systems, both personally and through the stories people share with me. The longer something goes on, the more knowledgeable you have to become about the system you’re challenging.

You learn legislation you never wanted to read. You learn the difference between a complaint, a review and an appeal. You learn which organisation regulates which other organisation, who has jurisdiction over what, which deadline applies and which piece of evidence needs to go where. You learn to keep screenshots because webpages change, delivery receipts because letters disappear, names because you may need to remember who told you what six months later, and copies of absolutely everything because assuming an organisation has retained something you already sent can prove rather optimistic.

For somebody whistleblowing at work, it might mean learning employment law while still turning up every morning to sit alongside the people involved. For a woman reporting sexual harassment, there may be the added knowledge that making the complaint can change how colleagues perceive and treat her. Since April 2026, sexual harassment can itself form the basis of a qualifying disclosure under whistleblowing law, with legal protection against dismissal or detriment in qualifying cases, which is an important development. Yet the existence of a legal protection and the lived experience of invoking it are not necessarily the same thing.

For someone dealing with racism or Islamophobia, there may be the exhausting additional task of deciding which incidents matter enough to record, whether something was prejudice or coincidence, whether speaking up will make matters better or worse, and how much emotional energy they have available to explain an experience to somebody who has never had to question whether their name, skin colour, accent, clothing or faith affected the way they were treated.

For somebody navigating immigration systems, the stakes can include their home, work, family and ability to remain in the country in which they’ve built their life.

The circumstances aren’t interchangeable, and neither are the consequences, but there is a thread running through them: the individual is often trying to understand and navigate a system that the institution on the other side deals with every day.

They have departments. You have a folder.

Or, if you’re anything like me, several folders, a printer begging for mercy and a stapler wondering what it did to deserve this.

Rights you don’t know you have

This is where my own paperwork sent me down another rabbit hole, because before we even ask whether people have the energy to navigate these systems, surely we need to ask whether they know the systems exist.

How many people know what they’re entitled to when something happens to them?

More specifically in my case, how many women know they may be able to claim criminal injuries compensation after rape?

The late Baroness Newlove examined this while serving as Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales. Her review of criminal injuries compensation found that fewer than four in ten victims surveyed recalled being told by police about the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme. Nearly 40 per cent felt they needed help from somebody else to make their application, and the research raised the possibility that potentially thousands of eligible victims simply weren’t claiming because they didn’t know compensation was available.

That stopped me.

Because what is the value of a right you don’t know you have?

We often talk about access to justice as though the door is either open or closed, but perhaps access is more complicated than that. A door can be technically open while being remarkably difficult to find. There can be another door behind it, followed by a staircase, a security code nobody gave you and a form asking why you didn’t arrive two years earlier.

You can probably tell I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with bureaucracy.

There is a serious point underneath the humour, though. Baroness Newlove’s research didn’t merely identify a lack of awareness. Victims described delays, uncertainty, poor communication and the trauma of repeatedly revisiting what had happened to them. Her subsequent work recorded that, to many victims, the Scheme seemed “calculated to frustrate and alienate”.

That phrase resonated deeply with me because it describes something we don’t discuss enough when we talk about justice.

A system doesn’t have to deliberately set out to exhaust somebody for exhaustion to become one of its effects.

When giving up starts to look reasonable

We tell people not to give up.

I’ve said it myself. Keep going. Challenge the decision. Write the letter. Make the call. Ask the question. Escalate it.

But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with how casually we celebrate persistence without asking why so much persistence was required in the first place.

There comes a point when continuing to pursue something begins to compete with the rest of your life. Every hour spent constructing a chronology is an hour not spent working, resting, parenting, creating, exercising, seeing friends or doing whatever helps you feel remotely human again. Every unanswered letter creates another task. Every request for information you’ve already provided requires you to find it, check it, copy it and send it again. Every escalation means learning another process and explaining the history to somebody new.

Then we look at the person who stops and says they gave up.

Did they?

Or did they make a perfectly rational decision about where their remaining energy needed to go?

That question matters particularly when the original experience has already affected somebody’s physical or mental health. Research by the Victims’ Commissioner has repeatedly found poor communication, long delays and lack of support across the criminal justice system. In its 2022 survey, only a third of respondents said they would report a crime to the police again. By the 2024 survey, more than 6,500 victims had contributed their experiences, with women among the groups reporting particularly low confidence in the fairness of the justice system.

Those figures matter because institutional attrition doesn’t begin with compensation.

It can begin with the decision about whether to report something at all.

We saw that explored again recently in Stacey Dooley’s BBC documentary Rape on Trial. Women do not make decisions about reporting sexual violence in a vacuum. They make them knowing, or fearing, what reporting may require of them afterwards, whether they will be believed, what parts of their lives will be examined and whether anything will ultimately come of it.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to that when asking why people don’t report workplace harassment, racism, abuse, corruption or discrimination too.

“Speak up” sounds wonderfully simple until you’re the one who has to live with what happens after you do.

And then I discovered what my lost earnings are worth

There is another part of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme that I cannot quite get my head around, and perhaps somebody reading this can explain the logic to me.

If a criminal injury leaves you with no, or very limited, capacity to work and that loss continues beyond 28 weeks, you may qualify for loss of earnings. You receive nothing for those first 28 weeks and, after that, the payment isn’t calculated according to what you actually earned.

It is calculated at the Statutory Sick Pay rate in force when your claim is decided.

And this is where I have to pause and take a moment.

If I’m off work with the flu, I’m sick. If I’m recovering from surgery, I’m sick. If somebody rapes me and the psychological consequences leave me unable to sustain the career and business I spent years building, I’m not off work because I’ve caught something or because my body has naturally become unwell. I’m dealing with the consequences of a violent crime committed against me.

So why on earth are those losses being measured using Statutory Sick Pay?

I appreciate that criminal injuries compensation comes from public money and that no compensation scheme could, or should, attempt to recreate every possible version of the future somebody might have had. There have to be rules and limits somewhere.

But I also find myself wondering what would change if we were more willing to calculate, openly and honestly, what rape actually costs the person who survives it.

If a woman loses £50,000, £100,000 or several hundred thousand pounds in earnings over the years because somebody chose to rape her, why is so much of that financial consequence hers to absorb? She loses the income, the pension contributions, the business growth, the career progression and the opportunities she might reasonably have expected to have, while the public purse provides a comparatively small safety net and the person responsible for creating that loss may contribute nothing towards it at all.

Surely there is a conversation to be had here about accountability too. If the true financial consequences of sexual violence were calculated and recognised, would we begin to think differently about what perpetrators themselves should be accountable for? Would the consequences of rape be taken more seriously if we stopped treating the economic destruction it can cause as an unfortunate side effect for the victim-survivor and started recognising it as part of the damage caused by the crime?

I don’t know what that model would look like, and I’m not suggesting that somebody without money should somehow receive a lesser sentence than somebody wealthy. But I do find it extraordinary that when a rape leaves somebody unable to support herself, taxpayers can end up carrying the cost of supporting her while so much of the economic damage caused by the perpetrator remains sitting quietly on her side of the ledger.

And then I went down another rabbit hole, because I started looking at what happens when somebody loses earnings because of wrongdoing in other areas of British law.

This is where things become particularly interesting.

If a woman experiences unlawful discrimination at work and loses her job or suffers financially as a result, an employment tribunal can consider the financial loss she has actually suffered. Her earnings matter. Her salary matters. Past loss can matter, and future loss can matter. In discrimination cases, compensation for financial loss can sit alongside compensation for injury to feelings, and discrimination compensation isn’t subject to the ordinary statutory cap that applies to many other employment claims.

In other words, British law already understands perfectly well that wrongdoing can alter somebody’s financial trajectory and that compensation can involve asking what she would probably have earned had that wrongdoing not occurred.

So imagine, if you will, two women:

They earn the same salary, have comparable qualifications and have spent the same number of years building their careers.

One experiences unlawful discrimination at work and, as a result, loses that career. The tribunal can look at what she was earning, what she has actually lost and, where appropriate, what she may continue to lose.

The other woman is raped.

She develops a recognised psychological injury as a direct consequence and becomes incapable of continuing the career she spent years building. If she meets the considerably restrictive criteria for loss of earnings under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, her previous salary isn’t used to calculate that loss.

Statutory Sick Pay is.

Why?

I’m genuinely asking.

Why does British law understand the concept of actual lost earnings when unlawful discrimination damages somebody’s career, yet abandon that principle when a violent crime damages her ability to have a career at all?

And this isn’t only a question for high earners.

It’s the woman whose small business collapses because she cannot run it anymore. The single parent who had finally reached some financial stability. The young woman at the beginning of a career whose trajectory changes before she’s had the opportunity to discover what she might have earned. The self-employed person whose income depends entirely on being able to show up. The professional who can technically work for a few hours but can no longer perform the work she trained for.

In fact, the current CICA rules state that if you retain capacity for paid work but the type of work you can undertake is restricted because of your injuries, you don’t qualify for a loss-of-earnings payment on that basis.

Sit with that one for a moment.

You could be unable to return to the profession you spent years training for, but if you’re capable of doing another type of paid work, that loss of professional earning capacity isn’t what this provision compensates.

So what exactly do we mean when we say we’re compensating somebody for what a violent crime has cost them?

Because the more I look at this, the less convinced I am that we’re measuring the loss at all. We’re measuring what the Scheme has decided the state is prepared to contribute towards it.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

The cost nobody puts on the form

Last week I wrote about women losing access to their aliveness, and about the many reasons a woman who once appeared endlessly energetic, ambitious and engaged with life can become exhausted and disconnected from herself.

This week I’ve been looking at one place some of that energy goes.

Into folders. Into emails. Into complaints procedures and tribunal bundles. Into medical appointments and evidence requests. Into learning legislation, chasing responses, speaking to MPs, remembering dates and keeping receipts. Into proving, documenting and explaining.

None of that appears neatly on a compensation calculation.

Nor does the business opportunity you didn’t pursue because you were dealing with another letter. The afternoon you couldn’t write because your head was full of evidence. The family time interrupted by a phone call. The night you didn’t sleep because something in the day’s correspondence took you straight back into an experience you were trying to move beyond.

There are costs that can be calculated and costs that are much harder to put into a spreadsheet.

And I don’t believe this belongs only to victims of crime.

Ask the whistleblower who spent years challenging an organisation with considerably greater resources than they had. Ask the employee who documented months of harassment before anybody took her seriously. Ask the person who has repeatedly had to prove that racism played a part in what happened to them. Ask the Muslim who has had to decide whether yet another incident was Islamophobia and whether reporting it will make any difference. Ask the immigrant whose future depends upon producing the correct evidence at the correct moment. Ask the patient trying to establish that something went wrong with their care.

How much of their life has been spent administering the thing that happened to them?

And what might they have been doing with that time and energy instead?

Who gets justice when justice requires stamina?

I’m fortunate in one very important respect. I know how to research. I know how to write. I’m comfortable reading policy documents, questioning decisions and following a trail of information until I understand it. I also have an MP who has been willing to intervene, and my experience with CICA has now reached the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman for independent investigation.

Even with all of that, this has been exhausting.

So I keep returning to the people who don’t have those things.

The woman who doesn’t know compensation exists. The employee who doesn’t understand employment law. The person for whom English isn’t their first language. The person without a printer, spare money for postage, confidence dealing with officials or somebody who can help them understand a letter. The person working several jobs. The person already dealing with trauma. The person whose immigration status makes challenging authority feel frightening. The person who has learned through racism or Islamophobia that being technically entitled to fair treatment doesn’t necessarily mean they expect to receive it.

At what point does access to justice begin to depend upon your capacity to administer it?

I’m not suggesting that every decision should go our way simply because we believe we’ve been wronged. Nor am I suggesting that organisations shouldn’t ask for evidence. Of course they should. Fair systems require evidence, scrutiny and processes that protect everybody involved.

But fairness also requires us to look at who carries the burden of those processes, how often they’re required to carry it, and what happens to the people who simply cannot carry it any longer.

The Victims’ Commissioner has been warning about some of these problems within criminal injuries compensation for years. In 2025, after the Government abandoned a planned wholesale review of the Scheme, the Victims’ Commissioner said victims continued to report many of the same barriers identified six years earlier and described hearing accounts of a system that seemed to “obstruct rather than support”.

This is, I believe, is one of the key questions we should be asking of more of our institutions.

Not simply whether a complaints process exists, whether somebody has a right of appeal or whether a compensation scheme is technically available, but whether an ordinary human being, already carrying the consequences of whatever brought them there, can realistically keep going long enough to access it.

Because there is something deeply uncomfortable about creating systems intended to deliver justice, redress or protection and then requiring extraordinary resilience from the people who need them most.

My printer will survive. I’m slightly less confident about the stapler.

And yes, I will keep going because I want answers, not only for myself, but because every time somebody has the energy, knowledge and support to challenge a system that isn’t working, there is an opportunity to make it a little less difficult for the person coming behind them.

But I’m no longer convinced that “she kept going” should be the measure by which we decide whether a system works.

Perhaps the better measure is how many people shouldn’t have needed to fight this hard in the first place.