I Couldn’t Let It End There - Feb ‘21
Speaking directly to the CPS - and choosing to challenge what didn’t feel right
Source: Sexsomnia Case Closed, BBC
This clip marks a moment I didn’t fully understand at the time - but I feel it now. It was the day I spoke directly to the Crown Prosecution Service about the failures in my case. Not in writing. Not through intermediaries. But face to face, voice steady-ish even when everything underneath it wasn’t.
Up until then, I had been trying to move through the system. Doing what was asked. Waiting for updates. Learning a new language, I never wanted to know. Accepting explanations that didn’t quite land, but felt impossible to challenge. Like many survivors, I was carrying the quiet hope that if I stayed cooperative, if I stayed reasonable, things might still turn out okay.
When my case was dropped, that hope collapsed into something colder. The decision itself was devastating - but what unsettled me most was how final it was. As if this was simply the end of the road. As if the impact of that decision stopped at the paperwork.
In this conversation, I wasn’t just talking about what had happened to me. I was trying to articulate something deeper - a growing unease about what this decision meant. About the precedent it quietly set. About how easily complex, uncomfortable cases can be moved out of sight. About what happens when legal reasoning loses contact with human reality.
I remember feeling a strange clarity in that moment. Not because the answers were reassuring - they weren’t - but because I suddenly understood something very clearly: if I didn’t speak now, this would disappear. Not just my case, but the questions it raised as well. The doubts. The consequences.
There was no dramatic confrontation. No raised voices. What there was instead was distance. A gap between institutional process and lived experience. And sitting in that gap, I realised how many victims are expected to hold their pain quietly, while decisions about their lives are made elsewhere. That was the moment something shifted. I didn’t leave that conversation feeling resolved. I left knowing I couldn’t be silent anymore.
Using the Victims’ Right to Review wasn’t a plan I had mapped out in advance. It emerged out of necessity. Out of the understanding that this was one of the only formal ways available to say: this deserves another look. That a decision with this level of impact should not be beyond question. That victims should not be expected to simply absorb outcomes that feel wrong, unsupported, or dangerous, and that they should not be normalised.
Choosing to use my voice wasn’t about being brave. It was about survival. About refusing to disappear inside a system that often relies on exhaustion and attrition to keep things moving. It was about recognising that silence is too often mistaken for acceptance.
This video captures the beginning of that realisation. It’s the point where my role began to change - from someone hoping the system would work, to someone willing to challenge it when it didn’t. From private pain to public accountability. From fear to something steadier: purpose. Everything that followed - the review, the campaigning, the push to strengthen VRR so others wouldn’t have to fight this hard - traces back to this moment. To the decision to speak openly. To name the failure. To trust that my voice, even when it shook, mattered.
Make Yourself Heard was born from moments like this. From the understanding that lived experience isn’t an inconvenience to policy - it’s essential to it. That systems only change when those most affected are heard, believed, and taken seriously. This was the day I stopped waiting for answers - and started asking harder questions. This was the day I chose to use my voice.
