A company in the UK offering rape testing kits faces widespread criticism – but shouldn’t we ask why it exists at all? | Zoe Williams

Two years ago, Katie White set up Enough, which distributes self-swabbing rape kits. These are DIY kits that people who believe they have been raped or sexually assaulted can use at home by collecting DNA and posting it to a private laboratory for analysis.

White was responding to a few stark facts about sexual violence in England and Wales: of more than 70,000 rapes reported to police in 2021-22, only 2,223 resulted in charges. The number of reports was only a fraction of rapes anyway: 83% of survivors choose not to go to the police.

Sixteen- to 35-year-olds are overwhelmingly the targets and crime survey data found a higher proportion of full-time students were victims of sexual assault in the past year than any other occupation type. From all this, White inferred that the number of student rapists being brought to justice was only the barest fraction of the total.

White says that the kits provide women with an option after a rape to gather evidence at home, before they decide what to do and whether to visit a sexual assault referral centre or contact the police. She tells me that the kits were positively received by students when they were handed out at campuses. The institutional response has been critical.

Victim Support and a number of rape charities have reacted strongly against self-swabbing because people may wrongly think of it as an alternative to going to a sexual assault referral centre (SARC) and accessing the ancillary support these services offer, such as counselling. The National Police Chiefs Council said the kits may “reduce trust in statutory services” and both warn that evidence collected outside regulated environments may not be admissible in court.

All of this is entirely fair: survivors deserve the best support available, and the best evidence gathering, should they decide to press charges. But what none of the criticisms address is the fact that rape survivors are avoiding those channels for legitimate reasons – they see a gruelling process that dominates the victim’s life as much if not more than the perpetrator’s, with a minuscule chance of conviction. If trust is low, it’s most likely because six years ago the then victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, Vera Baird, said that rape had been effectively decriminalised. A startup trying to find a workaround is a signifier of the problem, not a problem in itself.

Enough’s online materials were reported to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) by Martin Narey, former head of Prisons and Probation in England and Wales. One complaint was about the statement “430,000 rapes happen a year”, which Narey said was “frightening young women and terrifying their parents by exaggerating the likelihood of being raped”. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics have the number of reported rapes standing at 71,000, but these are the ones of which we know. The ASA found against Enough, questioning its methodology for estimating the number of total rapes, including those not reported.

It will never be possible to give exact numbers while such a small proportion of rapes are reported. The ONS’s own estimates are of about 900,000 sexual assaults and attempts of sexual assault of women (including rape) in the year to March 2025 (739,000 females and 162,000 males). It is irrational to accuse Enough of scaremongering when the government’s statistics are this terrifyingly high.

The inefficacies of criminal justice have gradually brought us to a place where the functionality of law feels more like a historical artefact than something that protects us. Maybe White’s guerrilla move is a concrete example of dwindling faith in the state’s ability to enact justice – and maybe that’s why everyone is so upset about it.

The only way to maintain this culture, which we call “zero tolerance”, and yet tolerate nearly a million actual and attempted sexual assaults a year, is with the fantasy that sexual violence isn’t real. This is why women don’t report it, and don’t access formal services.

The promise is to believe the victim, but plenty still prefer to believe the rapist: a fifth of men and a quarter of Conservative voters think that women routinely fabricate rape allegations. The classic feminist account is that women are simply seen as less credible than men, but it is time to revisit that, because a significant minority of victims are men, and they are believed even less. Successive studies show rape myths – foundationally, if you really didn’t want to have sex, you would have fought it off – to be more tenacious where the victim is male.

It’s simply more psychologically comfortable to think a mistake has been made, or someone is lying, than to think you live in a world where some people wilfully violate the physical autonomy of others. Where the evidence is irrefutable, we will do anything to distance those rapists from our own environs, as memorably described by the philosopher Manon Garcia, who sat through the Gisèle Pelicot rape trial: “People from Paris would say: ‘This is men from the south’; intellectuals would say: ‘These don’t look like guys who read many books’; her German and American colleagues would say: ‘It’s really a problem with French culture.’” (The UK’s National Crime Agency has since discovered a “truly international” network of drug-facilitated rapists.) Rape is so disturbing that the overwhelming preference is to find some other explanation. Surely there was a misunderstanding. Let’s not think anything hasty.

When I was young, we were still arguing about who to educate: women (don’t get drunk, don’t walk alone at night), or men (stop raping people). Now, we often argue in a coded way about who to believe, her or him. The more useful work is to start believing that rape itself is real.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

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