If I were a rapist, I would be laughing all the way to my next victim in the context of today’s news that rape prosecutions are at their lowest level in a decade. And if I was raped today, it pains me to say that I wouldn’t dream of reporting that rape to the police. As a lifelong feminist campaigner against male violence, I feel more pessimistic about the prospect of ending rape – which is what any civilised society should aim for – than I did 40 years ago.

For decades, the proportion of reported rapes that end in a conviction has been dismally low. But things are getting worse: today’s statistics show that although the number of rapes reported to the police has doubled in the last year, the number of rape cases charged and prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has fallen dramatically. Out of 54,000 reports of rape in 2017-18 (thought to be a fraction of the rapes actually committed), only 1,925 ended in a conviction.

It seems the CPS is more concerned with its public image rather than coming up with sound ideas about how to effectively convict rapists

Last year, the Guardian reported that prosecutors had been advised to take a proportion of “weak cases out of the system” to improve conviction rates. One prosecutor who attended a CPS course claimed staff were told: “If we took 350 weak cases out of the system, our conviction rate goes up to 61%.”

It seems the CPS is more concerned with its public image rather than coming up with sound ideas about how to effectively convict rapists. That is nothing short of an abomination.

In 2009, a crown court held that prosecutors should take a merits-based approach to deciding whether to prosecute a rape case. In other words, prosecutors are supposed to objectively examine the evidence in determining whether to take forwards a prosecution, rather than second-guessing whether or not the jury will convict because of the so-called credibility of the complainant. Up until 2009, this latter test is what prosecutors used. The problem with it was that far too few cases ever made it to court because of the prevalence of myths and stereotypes among juries, and their propensity to discount the accounts of complainants when they had been drinking, were wearing revealing clothing or were in a relationship with the accused.

Legal experts now believe the CPS has abandoned the merits-based test, and that this explains why conviction rates are declining so steeply. Kate Ellis from the Centre for Women’s Justice points to the fact that the CPS has simply deleted all references to the merits-based approach to rape prosecution from its guidance. “We also know that the CPS’s new policy is not to refer to the merits-based approach in any advice or briefings that it gives to the police or counsel,” she says.

The CPS denies this. Their director of public prosecutions, Max Hill, appeared to blame the police for falling conviction rates in an interview this morning. “There are a number of statistics in this report, one of which … is there has been a 23% drop in the number of cases that are referred to us by the police,” he told the Today programme. “Clearly if we don’t have a case referred to us, we can’t begin to consider it.” The CPS also points to the increasing amount of digital evidence police and prosecutors have to work through for each case as an explanation for the falling number of convictions.

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But I have seen a detailed analysis of the latest statistics by the Centre for Women’s Justice – which will be published in the next few weeks – which found that the drop in conviction rates cannot be fully explained by police failures to refer cases to the CPS.

Unless the CPS is held properly accountable, men who should be convicted of rape will continue to walk free. This means rapists will pretty much act with impunity, and women will be in even more danger from sexual predators than we are now. Without radical, urgent reform to the current system, rape will continue to become effectively decriminalised.

• Julie Bindel is a journalist and political activist, and a founder of Justice for Women