February 16, 2003: A Malaysian girl is not kidnapped, raped and held for 30 hours while visiting her family in Coventry. According to Detective Chief Inspector John White quoted by the BBC: “in recent months an alarming number of rape claims had turned out to be false.”
Below is the main article from the local press, the Coventry Evening Telegraph, April 9, 2003, (CITY FINAL).
It contains some interesting comment from a man who is in a position to know. Detective Sergeant Stuart Bell headed the investigation, and he points out that they receive an alarmingly high number of reports of rape, ie Coventry Police. But many of them are simply withdrawn or do not stand up to scrutiny.
He continues:
“The very fact that we do investigate claims like this so thoroughly, and with the help of modern forensic techniques, means that if a story is not true, or has been embellished, it soon becomes obvious when we are running out of leads.”
This is the reality; stranger rape is rare, as Mr Bell points out, and acquaintance rape/date rape, is often no such thing. Sadly, even the police are often unwilling to speak with such candour in a public forum.
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