A proposed spiking law could give a voice to people who've been victims of drink tampering and needle injections.
Ella Shields, 21, stopped talking about the night her and her friends suspect their drinks were spiked in March last year. The group were taken to hospital after collapsing and passing out in a city centre pub.
They shared their story with the ECHO and on ITV News, but in just a month, they went from wanting to raise awareness and make a change, to wanting to stay silent.
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Ella, a final year popular music student at the University of Liverpool, told the ECHO: "It was very intense. Everyone was finding out about it, there was a lot said about us in comments and on news articles, so we all kind of agreed without actually saying it that we didn't want to speak about it anymore.
"A lot of it was saying we made it up, or it was like 'What do you expect going out'. A lot of the blame was put on us, or saying we drank too much. It was mainly men between 30 and 60 who were saying all this stuff. They didn't know us, but they had an opinion on us."
The response made Ella doubt herself, only adding to the lack of justice she found. The group last heard from Merseyside Police within a month after the incident, according to Ella, who said they found no evidence in a review of CCTV, and ultimately, no suspect.
Merseyside Police was approached for comment.
Even if police had found a suspect, they wouldn't have faced a charge of 'spiking' because there is no such offence.
It's currently covered by other criminal offences depending on the circumstances, including sexual assault, robbery, administering a noxious substance, and drug offences. This could change with Labour's recently announced plan to make spiking drinks a specific offence if they enter government after the next election.
The Conservative government dismissed the idea as "unnecessary" earlier this year, in response to MPs on the Home Affairs Committee calling for new legislation targeting spiking. The government said it had found no gaps in the various offences covering spiking incidents, of which it is usually women who are victims.
But Labour leader Keir Starmer argued creating a specific offence would "make it easier for people to come forward and report what’s happened and easier to prosecute". Speaking on ITV’s This Morning, he said it would also raise awareness of spiking, reports of which have soard.
There were nearly 5,000 cases of spiking incidents involving needles and drinks reported to police in England and Wales in the 12 months to September 2022. That's more than double the 1,903 crimes linked to spiking in 2019, although few cases are proven.
Ella thinks this new proposed law would acknowledge spiking as a violation in its own right, distinguishing it from other, sometimes connected, crimes like rape. The part-time support worker said: "Just because it may not seem as bad as another offence or another crime, it doesn't mean that it's not a crime itself."
She would also feel more confident speaking out about her own experience. She told the ECHO: "The way we talk about it now, it's almost like we did something wrong. We're embarrassed to talk about it because it's seen as something embarrassing for us, which obviously it shouldn't be.
"If it comes into place and there is a specific law against it, it goes from being an embarrassing thing we did, to a crime someone else committed against us."
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