FORTY rapists a year are escaping jail sentences and instead are allowed to walk free with a caution, reprimand or final warning after admitting sex attacks on men and women.

Senior police officers, women’s groups and academics who have investigated the way that rape is dealt with by police and the justice system last night expressed surprise at the figure. Chief police officers said that as far as they were concerned rape was not an offence suitable for a caution.

The women’s groups and experts on rape called on the police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to provide details of cases in which cautions have been given rather than a full trial taking place.

Jennifer Tempkin, Professor of Law at the University of Sussex and an expert on the law on rape, said she had never known of a rape case resulting in a caution. “Some of these cases may be justified, but we just do not know anything about it,” she said. “Some explanation would be useful so we can all be sure that cautioning is being used properly. Forty cases of cautioning for rape in a year is a not insubstantial figure.”

The number of people cautioned for rape has more than doubled in a decade. Cautioning for rape has risen at a time when the rate of conviction for rape has fallen from one in thirteen reported cases in 1999 to one in twenty in 2004. More than half of rapists were current or former partners or boyfriends.

Latest figures show that in 1994, nineteen people were cautioned for rape, but by 2004 Home Office statistics disclose that the number had risen to forty, comprising thirty-six males and one woman cautioned for raping a female and three males for raping another male. When Labour came to power in 1997, the figure was twenty-six, comprising twenty-three men cautioned for raping a woman and three men for raping another male.

The overall figures for cautions include final warnings and reprimands which since 2000 have been used to deal with young offenders under 17. Like a caution, they involve individuals admitting their guilt.

In 2004 cautions were given to: nine boys aged 12 and under 15 who admitted raping a female; eleven boys aged 15 and under 18; three males aged 18 and under 21; and sixteen to males aged 21 and over. In the same year a further 751 people were convicted in court of rape, only 5.29 per cent of rapes reported to police.

Despite concern in Whitehall at the fall in convictions to a record low, the CPS was able to give only one example of a caution being used. A CPS spokesman said: “Cautioning is only used in very extreme circumstances and is not a decision that is taken lightly.”

Last night the Association of Chief Police Officers said that it had never heard of a case where a caution was given for a rape. It said: “Our guidance is that rape is excluded as an offence for which a caution is available.”

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