My abuser would be charged under new Scottish law

BBC News

08-05-2025

A woman who reported she was raped as a child but could not get her case to court has been told that her abuser would have been charged under new rules.Emma Bryson was 10 years old when a family member began abusing her - he was never prosecuted due to insufficient evidence and has since died.Last year eight judges made the historic decision to overturn an 87-year-old rule on corroboration in rape and sexual abuse cases - meaning more cases may reach the required legal threshold to go to court.Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain has since carried out a review of Ms Bryson's case - 40 years on from the abuse - and confirmed there would now be enough evidence to proceed.
Ms Bryson disclosed what was happening to her aged 14.She said: "I was just told, there wasn't any evidence, so they weren't going to take it forward."The person I was reporting was a family member, so it affected my whole family. It was a really, really difficult thing to do, and I wasn't equipped for it really."In 2016 she tried again.By then she felt able to talk about what had happened to her and she was confident something would be done."I made the assumption that if I went to the police, that I made a statement, if there was any evidence available, the police would be able to use that evidence," she said."I knew there were social work records, there were medical records, and lots of people knew about what happened to me."The second investigation took a year, but again, police could not progress because the evidence available did not meet the requirements of corroboration."Until that point, I didn't even know what corroboration meant," Ms Bryson said. "I thought as long as there's information to corroborate my account, that that would have been sufficient."
What is corroboration?
Scottish criminal law requires corroboration – two independent sources of evidence that a crime has been committed and that an accused person was responsible.By the very nature of sexual crimes, verifying an allegation of a rape or assault has always been difficult and meant many reports never make it to court.Ms Bryson set up the campaign group Speak Out Survivors along with two other women who also reported child sexual abuse - Suzy Angus and Shirley Ross.All three were told their cases could not be corroborated and their abusers were not charged.
They campaigned for a change in the law and as a result, the definition of corroboration was changed in sexual abuse and rape cases.In 2023 the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, took the rules of corroborating rape to court.In particular, allegations of rape required there to be corroboration of penetration through at least two sources of evidence. Evidence of distress by a complainer could not provide the necessary corroboration of the act, but could only confirm a lack of consent.
The court decided it was only the case against the accused that required to be proven by corroborated evidence, and not the separate elements individually.This meant distress shown by the complainer at the time could be used as evidence.Ms Bryson said: "I think it's important to say that for all three of us, when we started this campaign, we never did so with the expectation that we would change our own cases."We did it because we wanted to make things better and easier for other rape victims in the future and make that difference to enable more cases to be taken forward."When that legal change happened, that has effectively achieved that. More rape victims now will have better access to justice because of it."
'I felt vindicated'
As a result of the change in the guidance, Ms Bryson's case was able to be reconsidered. It took time to re-examine the evidence."It was a long time waiting, the third time around for me trying to see an outcome."But under the definition of corroboration now, there was sufficient evidence for my case to be charged," she said.The relative had died in the interim, but Ms Bryson said: "I felt vindicated, like all the work that we'd done for those seven years, it was worth it."We'd been right in our view that corroboration prevented offenders from being prosecuted and specifically sex offenders."She is proud of the work she and the other two women carried out."The child that I was has survived to become the adult that I am, and I'm really proud of that," she said."I think Suzy and Shirley would both say the same thing. I have no regrets, absolutely no regrets. I would do it again in a heartbeat."
The case against
Some defence lawyers say the change in the law could lead to miscarriages of justice. Thomas Ross KC feels it would be "impossible" to quantify how many there could be."There are already huge restrictions on the extent to which defence lawyers can cross-examine people in these cases," he told BBC Scotland News."There's a trend towards pre-recording of evidence, which also makes the challenge to the evidence a bit more difficult, and this on top of it, where there's less evidence required for it to go to a jury. "There's a danger, if no second source is required, that that might just be enough for them."He said that experience showed that where a "flexible law" is introduced - like this - then it is "stretched and stretched".He added: "The distress would require to be recent for it to be seen as corroboration, but case law can develop and develop, and before you know it, we've got a case where the distress is seen five years after the event, and the appeal court just waive it through, and that standard of evidence is lowered again."If you have been affected by any of the themes in this story, help can be found at the BBC Action Line.