The father of a 15-year-old girl who has been waiting two years for her rape trial has told of his family’s “complete nightmare” of court delays.
His daughter was attacked when she was 13 years old and travelling home from meeting friends on an afternoon in summer 2020.
The latest nine-month delay to the trial is because a suitable judge cannot be found to hear the case.
“We want to get some resolution that it’s over, we can move on. We’re all flattened, just totally devastated by the whole thing,” her father, who cannot be identified, told the BBC.
He said that his family were unprepared for the “grief and frustration” they experienced taking the case to court. “It seems like total incompetence”, he said.
The courts are currently suffering from record backlogs and the victims’ commissioner told The Independent that the “chaos” is resulting in criminals going free.
Dame Vera Baird QC said that the delays were causing victims to drop out of cases, adding: “Delay is an enemy of justice”.
“If you are a victim of rape, domestic abuse or serious violence - a traumatised person, afriad of confronting your abuser - you would have lost sleep for weeks beforehand worrying about going to a public forum to speak about this.
“You will have worked yourself into that position, only to be case aside and told probably that your case will be another year,” she said.
The family were initially expecting to wait for two years for the trial to start, with the case going to court in June 2022.
However a few days before it was due to start, the family were told that the trial had been adjourned for another nine months until March 2023.
An email explained that the Judicial Secretariat had been “unsuccessful in securing a judge.”
It continued: “It also appears that the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, are not ready for the hearing to go ahead and the matter had had to be put back.”
However the CPS said that it was ready to go to trial on 6 June.
The father said that news of the delay “blew us apart”. He also explained that the family found out that the man charged with the rape of their daughter was working in a shop near their house.
“The guy who was charged with rape was working 30ft away from my daughter’s bedroom,” he said. “We couldn’t believe that.”
The CPS reportedly said that nothing could be done because the man’s bail conditions did not stipulate terms about distance he had to stay away from the family.
The father eventually approached the shop that employed the man and the man stopped working there.
