Its an interesting article, but the crux of it appears to me to be that annonimity for suspected rapists would be unfair in addition to a list of other procedural issues.

However, it seems to me that the solution with regard to those issues is to fix them, not to use them as arguments against anonymity.

The solution to the video link question could be to wheel the defendant out of the room before the victim gives evidence.

The solution to the problem of the defendant seeing the victims evidence but not the other way round, would be to make that fair.

etc etc

It could be possible to make proceedings confidential and correct those flaws at the same time.


Having said all that, I was friends with a woman in leicester who managed to convict a guy who had been beating her up quite badly, and she was able to do this because previous victims of the same guy came forward to testify to their experiences.

I don't know how they found out as I never saw anything in the papers about it, but I would definitely be curious to know how my friend and the police went about discovering his previous track record.

My own feeling is that there was more than one complaint made, and probably withdrawn as I believe that that is often how rapists and abusers slip through the net.

I suspect that the police had a record of these previous complaints and were able to go and investigate based on them.

I think that the local grapevine played a large part in his conviction too.

So its a tricky question ...