It’s 16 years since Nina Cresswell reported a violent sexual assault to the police. It’s been three years since she won a libel case brought by her assailant. Now, the police have admitted guilt in rejecting her original report.
What is the difference between experiences in Sunderland in 2010 and Morocco 48 years ago?
Sunderland
On the night of 27-28 May 2010 in Sunderland, 19-year-old student Nina Cresswell was in a nightclub celebrating the end of her second year at Sunderland University.
She was introduced to tattooist Billy Hay by her own tattoo artist and they exchanged a few words.
Later on she left to take the 15 minute walk to her home. Hay followed her. As she reached a tunnel with no CCTV he shoved her against the wall, tried to kiss her, then pulled out his penis demanding oral sex. Then he pushed himself against her and started taking her clothes off. He asked why she’d been flirting with him and ‘leading him on’ if she wasn’t going to put out.
Half-naked, she tore herself away leaving her shorts, keys and phone behind. Later she returned to recover her belongings with a homeless woman acting as a bodyguard.
Nina did what you’re supposed to do and reported the attack to the police early the next morning. They didn’t believe her. They said she had been drunk and her descriptions of the assailant’s beard varied from blond to ginger. They hinted that she had rape fantasies. It took the police a few hours to drop the case, concluding there had been no crime and that Nina had made it up.
They claimed that the CCTV images of the homeless woman were actually those of Hay calmly walking her home.
In 2020 during the Me Too movement, Nina took to social media to describe her ordeal. She named her assailant.
Hay’s response was to sue Nina for libel, but in 2023 Nina won the case. The court found that her allegations were substantially true, and her sharing of the crime was in the public interest.
The High Court ruling meant that a sexual abuse survivor could successfully defend a libel claim by proving truth and public interest after exposing her attacker online. This set a precedent that would help survivors who had named names in the #MeTooI campaign when they faced defamation challenges.
With the help of the Good Law Project, Nina lodged a legal case against Northumbria Police for failing to properly investigate her 2010 report.
The force has now settled before the hearing with an admission of the mistakes they made in their original investigation.
We reached out to Northumbria Police asking for a statement and enquiring whether any improvement in sexual assault investigation protocols had been made since 2010.
A spokesperson for Northumbria Police said:
“We can confirm after reopening the investigation into the report of a sexual assault from 2010, for evidential reasons the case was closed last year. Should any new information come forward, this will be reviewed. We have apologised for the way in which we responded to the report in 2010 and for any subsequent distress caused…
“As a Force, in recent years we have been part of the national Operation Soteria initiative, which aims to enhance outcomes for victims and bring about meaningful change in how investigations are carried out.
“We want victims to have the confidence to come forward, knowing they will be listened to and supported.
“We would encourage anyone who has been subjected to any sexual offence to reach out – we are here for you and we are committed to carrying out professional and diligent investigations to bring offenders to justice.”
Morocco
It was September 1978. My female friend and I were touring Morocco on buses. In Chechaouen we took a lift to a party we were invited to, the driver and his friend vouched-for by a British tourist.
We didn’t get to the party. We ended up parked on the mountain overlooking the town and then we were raped. They had threatened to shoot us dead. Afterwards – bizarrely – they took us back to our hotel.
There’s a term “fight or flight” that refers to the reaction to threat. There’s another response that’s rarely mentioned -“freeze” – that terrified rabbit-in-the-headlights reaction to trauma.
There was no point in our fighting back or running- we were in the middle of nowhere. And anyway I froze. There was no evidence of rape as we had no other physical injury. The psychogical scars took a few years to heal. These days we’d call it PTSD.
There’s very little I remembered of that night. I don’t recall their names or faces or their clothes or the car.
The memory that lingers is the mocking face of the full moon in a black sky above a hairy back.
We didn’t call the police, we didn’t see any point. In the morning we took the first bus and got the hell out of town. At the next stop we told a senior police officer what had happened, but he wasn’t particularly interested.
What would you expect in a frankly socially backward country where daughters were sold to the highest bidder? A tradition we saw a couple of days later at the Berber Ait Addou Marriage Festival at Imilchil.
Girls with the painted face of a potential bride were up for sale – some just eight years old.
Misogyny
Sunderland does not have the culture of a Third World country of 48 years ago. But with a police force that provides a get-out-of-jail-free pass for predators, is Britain today any safer for women than Morocco in 1978?
There’s a nasty habit in rape cases of blaming the victim: shouldn’t be drunk/ out at night/alone/on holiday/ trusting/ wearing the “wrong” clothing.
But the fact is that 99% of the time it is men who rape and women who get raped.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Margaret Attwood
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