Rape & Serious Sexual Crime

Our award winning ‘That Guy’ and ‘That Guy2’ media campaigns are entering the third phase. The campaigns have featured on national television, were shown on billboards at Hampden Stadium during the League Semi- Final and have been translated and aired in numerous countries. The messages are designed to drive a culture change in men’s attitudes towards women and to prevent sexual crime.

Work is ongoing to enhance our workforce to ensure we are trauma informed. Police Scotland are working closely with Dr Caroline Bruce, to develop training to our SOLO’s, SIO’s and other specialist roles.

We are working with COPFS, Victim Support Scotland and Rape Crisis Scotland to establish how we can work better together to improve a victim’s journey through the criminal justice process. Work is ongoing to examine attrition rates to establish when victims disengage from the criminal justice process and to identify why. We are working with a number of survivors to obtain their lived experience.

Improvements have been made to Visionally Recorded Interviews (VRI’s) and upskilling our Sexual Offence Liaison Officers (SOLO’s) to use the VRI equipment whilst also cascading organisational learning from COPFS about the VRI pilot schemes that have gone through court. The upskilling also includes trauma informed training. This will allow a victim’s evidence in chief to be captured by the SOLO’s.

We have worked closely with COPFS VIA team to improve our compliance rate for submitting Victim Strategies after an accused is reported for rape and sexual crime. This piece of work allows a smooth handover of information by Police to COPFS about any vulnerabilities a victim has and also how they want to be contacted to ensure that victims receive the support they require at every stage of the Criminal Justice Process.

We have issued guidance and revised question sets to our service advisors and call takers in relation to victims of sexual crime which includes the importance of a trauma informed approach, forensic capture and risk assessment to include both victims and suspects.

We are improving training for front line response officers about the use of sexual offences early evidence kits. This will provide officers with video tutorials on how to use and store the kits and samples in order to capture that crucial evidence.   

We are ensuring organisational learning is captured and shared with Senior Investigating Officers (SIO), through national SIO forums and also National SOLO forums.

In March 2024, we hosted a national CPD event at the SPC, which included presentations about Non-Fatal Strangulation and Gender Based Violence (GBV) within education settings. The event was well attended by SIO’s, COPFS, Scottish Government and NHS and received positive feedback.  We also had a number of survivors who were keen to know more about our training.