Rape victim: ‘I have lived with the guilt’
“I have lived with the guilt for 11 years. At last I no longer feel it was my fault.”
These are the words of the first victim of probably Britain’s most prolific serial rapist, the London black cab driver John Worboys, who went on to attack over a hundred women in five years between 2003 – 2008.
This mother has spoken publicly for the first time having brought an unprecedented case against the Metropolitan Police.
She has carried on her shoulders the weight of feeling responsible for all the other victims.
“The police should have done their job properly. They really convinced me it didn’t happen. I don’t want anybody else to go through what I’ve gone through.”
However irrational that may sound, she’s been haunted by that feeling for more than a decade.
Her account would prove to be first of many similar stories in the future. But at the time it was the only one and police didn’t believe it.
‘Culture of disbelief’
She was out partying in London one night in 2003. She was put in a ‘trusted’ black cab by friends and the next thing she knew was waking up in hospital the following day with little memory of the night before.
She was convinced she’d been drugged and raped. She was to learn much later that she’d fallen victim to John Worboys.
His method was to pick up women as fares, late at night in central London, charm them with tales of winning the lottery or at a casino, supply them with drink which had been spiked with sedatives, and then sexually assault or rape them.
His victims would invariably be unable to remember events: 104 women are now believed by police to have been Worboys victims.
Read more: Police ‘culture of disbelief’ over rape claims
The mother’s legal action against the police is that her human rights were violated because they failed to properly investigate her original allegation amidst a culture of disbelief.
A legal victory for her would remove police’s immunity from being taken to court for failing to protect the public from serious harm.
“If they had just listened to me,” she says. “It really hit home when I turned up at a Worboys ID parade and the other victims, about 30 women, were all chatting amongst themselves.
“I just sat in the corner thinking you are all here because of me, because I wasn’t believeable. The police thought I had made it all up and I hadn’t.”
The high court will rule on Friday on the woman’s claim against the police.
Operation Sapphire
Her case together with another of Worboy’s victims centres around appalling corporate failures.
There was a strategy and guidelines in place when the Met launched Operation Sapphire – dedicated teams whose sole focus was on sex crimes against women.
But when truly tested in the case of a serial rapist it failed because either officers didn’t follow the guidelines or simply were not trained to do so.
What the Met had set up failed to function. Eventually Worboys was caught, convicted and sent to prison for life in 2008.
But the delay brought trauma to some of the victims, who felt they had been confronted with a culture of disbelief and that in turn caused them to doubt themselves.
The mother said at times it got so bad she was on the verge of taking her own life.
“I felt nobody believed me. I started to think I have made it up. It didn’t happen. I started to have suicidal thoughts. But I was a mum and had to be there for my son.
Read more: Woman’s suicide after rape spurs urgent review
“But I was falling apart. I remember one time I was so low, but I wouldn’t cry infront of my boy, and we put the music on and I was dancing infront of him thinking he’ll remember his mum was fun.”
The Worboys case prompted a complete overhaul of the way the Metropolitan Police dealt with victims and led to the setting up of a central intelligence unit to investigate serial sex offenders.
The mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, says her case is not about money or revenge.
She says: “Nobody has held their hands up and said we are going to change things really. I need them to accept that what they have done is really wrong.”
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