ABSTRACT
Rape investigations tend to over-focus on the credibility of the victim-survivor and thereby miss suspect-related evidence that would tell the whole story of a perpetrator’s sexual offending. This is detrimental to a fair, full, and effective police investigation. In this chapter, we summarise the existing evidence on the over-investigation of victim-survivors driven directly and indirectly by rape myths and misconceptions, but also by aspects of “default policing”. We then show how suspects receive comparatively little attention in rape investigations, police training, and academic research. We propose suspect-focused investigations as a remedy and illustrate this by drawing on5 Tidmarsh’s (2021) “Whole Story” approach and by using examples from the literature on sexual violence in the context of coercive control. We argue that shifting the police default from victim-focused to suspect-focused investigations is a necessary step in the transformation of the police response to rape.
