Civil servants ordered to rewrite drink spiking campaign over ‘victim-blaming’

Civil servants were ordered to re-write a social media campaign on drink spiking because it blamed victims for the crimes.

Alex Davies-Jones, a justice minister, told her officials they should stop the “culture of victim blaming” and instead focus on stopping perpetrators from spiking people’s drinks.

Speaking at a fringe event at Labour’s Liverpool conference, Ms Davies-Jones said she refused to accept the script her civil servants had drawn up for an awareness campaign ahead of government plans to create a new standalone offense of spiking drinks.

“The Civil Service brought me my script for talking about this on social media, on Tiktok, trying to bring in the youth,” she said. “One of the things they wanted me to talk about was how we keep ourselves safe from spiking: Cover your drink, make sure you look out for your friends, don’t accept a drink from a stranger.

“I refused to do it. I said we need to start reframing this, stop this culture of victim blaming. If you want to go out and enjoy yourself, you should just be able to go out and enjoy yourself and not have to worry about keeping yourself safe. Spike someone, was the message we had.”

She said that instead she ordered civilian servants to go back to the drawing board and draft a campaign script that warned perpetrators not to spike or face prosecution and get treatment for their behavior.

“So that was the message that we tried to take forward, and that’s the culture that we’re trying to change. So it’s going to take time, but it is bringing that front and center, and we’re doing it,” she said to applause from the fringe audience.

New strategy to tackle rape

Her approach mirrors a new strategy to tackle rape, known as Operation Soteria, under which police officers focus on the rape suspects’ behavior and previous sexual activity rather than investigating the credibility of the victim.

Operation Soteria is being rolled out to all 43 police forces in England and Wales in an attempt to improve rape and sexual offense charge rates that plummeted to 2.6 per cent and 4.1 per cent respectively.

Spiking involves putting alcohol or drugs into a victim’s drink without their knowledge or permission. It also includes injecting someone with a drink or drugs as well as adding it to food, vapes or cigarettes.

The police received 6,732 reports in the year ending April 2023, 957 relating to needle spiking. Police data suggested the average age of victims was 26 with women accounting for 74 per cent of all cases. In a YouGov poll in December 2022, 10 per cent of women and 5 per cent of men said they had been spiked.

According to data from the National Police Chiefs’ Council most spiking incidents (80 per cent) are in public places, in particular bars or nightclubs.

Spiking can be prosecuted under the Offenses Against the Person Act or as an assault but it is not a specific offense. But Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, and Dame Diana Johnson, the policing minister, believe that making it a standalone offense will improve the investigation, prosecution and reporting of the crime.

The home affairs committee which both of them chaired in the last Parliament recommended it should be made a specific offense punishable with up to 10 years in jail.

The committee said victims would be more likely to come forward to report cases if they were reassured that it was a criminal act that would be prosecuted. It would also send a clear message to perpetrators that such behavior will not be tolerated and result in severe penalties.