Demonstrators gathered in Kikar Rabin Saturday night demanding that the state provide legal assistance to victims of sexual offenses from the moment that they file a complaint, in order to prevent police and State Attorney mishandling of their cases.
"If my rapists have it, I deserve it too," chanted demonstrators, referencing the fact that legal assistance is granted to accused parties who cannot afford their own.
"When a woman comes to the police to submit a complaint after sexual trauma it is like a personal Holocaust and she cannot represent herself," said Ziv Leibowitz, the protest's organizer, expanding on how legal assistance could help women filing sex-offense complaints.
"The officers do not care, the state attorney does not care [about the woman filing a complaint]," said Leibowitz, who recently took to Facebook to detail alleged police mishandling of her own case.
In describing her case, she said that, among other inappropriate behavior, the officer who took her statement flirted with her and contacted her at night from his personal phone. During another meeting with police while recounting her case, Leibowitz described feeling attacked by the officer who she said acted as though she was irrational or lying.Leibowitz was later asked to make a complaint about the officer who took her statement, but the Police Investigation Department found that there was no criminal action and the case was passed to the police ombudsman for further investigation, Haaretz reported. Israel Police said they would continue to examine the incident professionally and sensitively in order to reach the truth, according to Haaretz.Israel Police have recently been criticized for their handling of the filing of a number of complaints about sex offenses. Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev appointed an advisor on violence against women last month and will examine ways to improve the manner in which cases are handled by officials and resources for women.
Victims of certain sexual offenses are currently provided legal assistance by the state in a number of cases, but the assistance is provided in cases where an indictment has been filed - with the vast majority of complaints never reaching this stage.
Some 84% of cases that made it to Israel’s State Attorney were closed in 2019, with an indictment issued in just 16% of cases, according to Israel’s association of rape crisis centers (ARCCI). Rape was the offense with the least amount of indictments issued versus cases closed with an indictment issued in just 8% of cases.
The proportion of rape cases in which indictments are issued has been steadily declining since 2014, according to ARCCI data.
Some 5,971 cases of sexual offenses were opened with Israel Police in 2019, and 6,085 were opened in 2018, according to the ARCCI. This despite the fact that the ARCCI received around 12,700 new complaints of sexual offenses in 2019, and around 12,000 in 2018.