Three women who survived sexual exploitation have won the right to bring a challenge to the ongoing storage of their criminal records on the Police National Computer. In 2018 the women were successful in challenging the government’s Disclosure and Barring Scheme in relation to the requirement to disclose their history of convictions for street prostitution. They will now challenge the retention of those records.
The Court of Appeal, which last month confirmed that the so-called multiple conviction rule was unlawful as it applied to the three women bringing the claim, today handed down a judgment in which Lord Justice Bean stated,
“it is clearly arguable that the policy of retaining data concerning convictions under SOA 1959 s 1 until the offender’s 100th birthday interferes with the Appellants’ rights under Article 8 ECHR to an extent which is not justified as being necessary and proportionate.”
As a consequence the case was remitted to the divisional court for a fresh judicial review hearing with the police to be added as a Defendant.
The three women who brought the case were all pimped into prostitution as teenagers in the 1980s, as a consequence they were frequently arrested on the street for soliciting and loitering contrary to s1 of Street Offences Act 1959 and have multiple convictions for this offence. They all exited from prostitution many years ago but their lives have been blighted by the requirement to disclose these convictions when applying to work or volunteer for a range of jobs and activities.
As Fiona Broadfoot, one of the three women bringing the case said,
“Why should we continue to be punished by being made to explain criminal convictions which are actually a record of our abuse and humiliation? It’s important that we have won the right to have our records filtered by the police in any further DBS application, but why should the records remain on the police computer?”
QSA, one of the other claimants who was in children’s homes in Leeds when her pimp waited outside to collect her and put her on the street said, “I want to fight on till this whole history is erased from the national database, 100 years should be no years”
Harriet Wistrich, solicitor for the Claimants and Director of the Centre for Women’s Justice said,
“The requirement to disclose and store data recording what is essentially a record of sexual exploitation is shameful punishment by the state of women who suffered appalling abuse. We hope the precedent established will help the many hundreds of other women similarly affected. The women bringing this claim will now seek to get their records removed so that they and others can live free from stigma and humiliation”