Hello,

My name is Alison and I work for ITV's This Morning programme. Phil and Holly are doing a series of interviews in the lead up to Christmas with advice to help women stay safe when out and about during the party season.

As part of this we are looking for a woman to come on the show and do an interview with our presenters about their experience as a victim of date rape.

We understand this will be incredibly difficult for any woman to talk about and will be able to offer a team of counsellors in studio to offer support to any victim and their family as well as guarentee that the woman's anonymity will be protected.

We can offer a fee of up to £500 for the right story. It's not a huge amount of money, but the idea of the item is to make other women aware and to stop this happening to more people. We can also offer travel and a hotel for any woman willing to talk about this and their family.

If you are at all interested please contact me. My email is alison.jackson@itvplc.com and my number is 0207 157 4151,

Thanks,

Alison
x

I wanted to highlight the issue of date rape & how these rapists get off with it because of lack of evidence primarily because the victims cannot remember and the evidence leaves your system so quickly. This is the response from - This Morning:

"As a show we try to highlight this issue as much as possible. But legally we are very restricted as we can't hear anything from people without convictions. We need to be fair to all parties and I am afraid that one woman making a false allegation ruins it for everyone and we need to be fair to the men involved."

This is an insensitive, disgusting response as she clearly has no victim awareness if she thinks we victims need to be fair to the men involved - the very men that raped us!!! I for one did not make a false allegation and I am appalled at her response!!

Get off this site!!

Firstly let me apologise for any offence caused here. I should have stated in my first post that we needed someone who had managed to get a conviction before asking people to get in to contact with me.

Unfortunately for legal reasons for this item we need someone who has managed to get a conviction. I apologise unreservedly for upsetting the lady here and not stating this from the outset. I understand how hard it can be to get a conviction in this circumstance and how low conviction rates are for date rape. The whole idea of this item was for it to raise awareness for women in the steps they can take to protect themselves.

We would never intentionally cause any offence to anyone that was a victim of rape.

Alison

Dear Alison,

Firstly we are very grateful to such programmes for wanting to highlight this issue, especially in the run up to christmas. Please understand that sometimes emotions on here are very high and raw, and naturally this being a support forum we sometimes feel a little angry at some of the media's requests.

I would like to point out to you that very few get convictions, so the likelyhood of you interviewing someone for the programme is going to be pretty impossible. I'm talking the statistics of 10-15% actually reporting the crime and as yet no one has managed to secure a conviction! (see the roofie website statistics). So, I do think you may need to re-think this feature for your programme.

I'm sure the roofie foundation will be able to help you, and provide plenty of safety advice along with products that are avaliable to help prevent drink spiking etc.

Please feel free to message me on here, or on the general forums for further help.

I'd like to thank the kindness and care that you would provide a hotel and counselling, this is a first for someone to actually be more concerned with us, rather than their deadline.

Good Luck,

Carolyn.

Carolyn,

I found your email response quite patronising. You do not know what happened to me and I don’t need an advocate, so do not make apologies for other people's responses as it is not your place to do so. I should be able to respond without someone following up my response with the following:

"Sometimes emotions on here are very high and raw, and naturally this being a support forum we sometimes feel a little angry at some of the media's requests".

I was not angry at the media's request. I was appalled at the comment that Alison made where she said: "We need to be fair to all parties and I am afraid that one woman making a false allegation ruins it for everyone and we need to be fair to the men involved."

I felt that this could have been worded more sensitively.

Whilst I would never want an innocent man to be convicted of a crime he did not commit the nature of the request was not to talk about the innocent or those who have had false allegations made against them. I am a victim of drug rape and I wanted to highlight the difficulties of getting a conviction. I understand that this was not what the show wanted to focus on, but I wish someone could because if the law does not change to account for those who cannot give a verbatim account of events people will continue to be vulnerable to these types of attacks because the law currently protects the perpetrator!!

Dear Wendy,

I’m sorry if you found my email response quite patronising. I was not trying to be your advocate I was supporting you in response to this post. All I was simply suggesting is that all media requests need to bare in mind the fact that this is firstly and primarily a support forum, and as such should word their requests in such a manner. Also I do feel that we cannot alienate all media requests seeing as this is our only outlet for raising awareness and prevention. We all have a right to be upset and angry, and I was not taking that away from you, but on the same token we cannot vent at all media requests and have them feel they cannot approach us.

I too feel angry at the media requests because they seem to automatically assume we manage to get convictions. Have they even looked into the conviction rates of rape cases? Let alone drug rape cases? I don’t think they do, in fact I’d really like to know why the conviction or speaking to someone who has secured a conviction is so important. The importance is getting the message out there and the law to change!

So all I was trying to do was agree with you and explain to them how they should approach us. I do not truly understand Alison’s comment that made you angry. Perhaps she just didn’t want to make the feature only to find out it wasn’t a genuine case and in doing so, fuel the sceptics of drug rape and lose all the focus of the feature. (But that is just my thinking!)

I too wish that someone could speak to them and highlight this cause, there are many who have raised lots of awareness, and many women’s magazine’s are very good at covering safety aspects.

But the only point I was trying to make was that what they are asking for doesn’t really exist.