Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan asks why cases of violence against women are still not being prosecuted

After seven years, former military policemen Jeremy Jones and Thomas Fulton have been cleared of raping their colleague Anne-Marie Ellement. She doesn’t know that because she took her own life two years after what the men describe as “a consensual threesome” – albeit one after which Fulton admits calling her a “slag” and a “c*nt” and following which she was found naked except for her cardigan, crying and saying she’d been raped. The judge apologised to the family, whose extreme tenacity in the face of what he described as the “extraordinary reluctance of the Ministry of Defence, the military police and the army prosecuting authority to investigate the allegations,” appears to have been the only reason the allegations were ever fully investigated at all.

Lily Allen’s ‘luck’ changed after seven years too. She was an object of a stalker’s obsession (involving death threats, abusive rants and approaches to her friends and colleagues) for that long while the police, apparently, did virtually nothing – she says she was made to feel “like a nuisance, not a victim” and given a panic alarm for a few months – until said stalker broke into her home one night threatening to knife her. Only when it became a matter of burglary, she said, did police seem much happier to act. She has gone public about it in an attempt to force the authorities to start taking the problem seriously. As she put it last week – “I’m a well-known, wealthy, white woman and my case was handled badly. What if I weren’t?”

Lucy Mangan: why are women’s cries for help still falling on deaf ears?