Over the last few days the British media has been obsessed with the case of a London taxi driver who has been convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting female passengers. The number of victims is quite large, and the offenses have happened over a period of many months. So the question being asked is, how did he get away with it for so long?

In investigating the issue, journalists have discovered that claims of sexual assault are rarely logged as crime reports. Offenses such as car theft get a much higher priority. Why? Well partly it is because some poor guy losing his car is much more important than some hysterical woman complaining just because someone fancied her, right? But it actually goes deeper than that.

The UK government has very aggressive targets for monitoring the effectiveness of the police. They want to make sure that crimes are solved, and offenders brought to justice. So every crime that gets logged needs to be followed up, action taken, results produced. Now put yourself in the position of a police officer. Someone comes to you claiming that she has been raped. You know very well that when it comes to court it will almost certainly be just a case of her word against his. He’ll be quietly confident, she’ll be an emotional mess; his lawyer will subtly suggest that perhaps she imagined it, perhaps she asked for it, perhaps she’s making the whole thing up to get back at him for some slight. The jury will not convict. To get a rape conviction in the UK these days you pretty much have to get a conviction for violent assault as well. So, knowing that you are pretty much bound to fail to “solve” the case to the government’s satisfaction, would you log it as a crime?

Of course women know this. They also know that if a rape case comes to court the newspapers will be all over it, and it is the woman’s reputation that will be dragged through the mud. Given police indifference, the likelihood of failure in court, and media hostility, many women don’t even bother to report being attacked.

And you know, I suspect that men know all of this too.