Decades of Research, Zero Reform: Why England's Rape Trial System Still Runs on Myths

Multiple letters responding to the Russell Brand trial expose a pattern: Labour governments have pledged to fix rape myth deployment in courtrooms since the 1990s. The research exists. The reforms don't.

The Russell Brand conviction has reopened a wound that never closed. Multiple respondents — an academic colleague of pioneering researcher Sue Lees, the chief executive of Victim Support, survivors of sexual violence, and observers of Brand's religious conversion — converge on a single structural failure: England and Wales's adversarial trial system still permits systematic deployment of rape myths against complainants, despite decades of documented evidence and repeated government pledges.

The timeline is damning. Sue Lees published Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial in 1996, identifying how the legal system enabled rapists to escape justice while media and judiciary stereotyped women as sexually provocative. The 1997 New Labour government responded with reforms limiting sexual history evidence. By the 2002 edition, Lees was already documenting how the adversarial system had absorbed the reforms without meaningfully changing outcomes. Now, in 2025, Andy Burnham is pledging — again — that trials should not leave complainants feeling like they are on trial. The circle is complete. Victim Support's Katie Kempen strips away any comfort. Rape myths and stereotypes are deployed in courtrooms across England and Wales "day in, day out" — not as aberrations but as standard defence tactics. The Brand trial was notable only for its visibility, not its methods. The defence subjected survivors to attempts to "blame, shame and discredit them," reinforcing harmful beliefs not just in the courtroom but in wider society. This is not a bug; it is how the system operates. A survivor panel convened by Arch Teesside raises a separate but connected point: the focus on the entertainment industry as uniquely predatory obscures the reality that rape and sexual violence occur across all workplaces. Managers, CEOs, and senior colleagues wield the same imbalanced power as celebrities. Framing this as a celebrity problem provides a comfortable narrative that allows other industries to avoid scrutiny. Brand's public conversion to Christianity and baptism draw sharp critique. One respondent notes that genuine conversion should have been accompanied by public repentance and restitution to the women he harmed. Another, drawing on personal experience in 12-step programmes, describes how the framework of Christian forgiveness and recovery steps can function as a laundering mechanism — men seeking forgiveness for crimes "too severe to be washed away by completing the steps and making tea," including deliberately addicting young girls to drugs for prostitution. The structural diagnosis is clear. England and Wales possess an adversarial system that incentivises myth-deployment because it works for defendants. Research evidence has been available for three decades. Two Labour governments have now pledged reform. The gap between pledge and implementation is where accountability disappears. The question is not whether the evidence exists — it does, abundantly — but who benefits from inaction. Every letter in this collection points to the same extraction pattern: systemic costs are borne by complainants and survivors, while defendants, defence lawyers, and institutions that avoid scrutiny capture the benefits of an unreformed system. Until the incentive structure changes — not the rhetoric — the next high-profile trial will produce the same letters.