In the January 2023 edition of the Edinburgh Law Review, campaign co-founders Seonaid Stevenson-McCabe and Andrew Tickell have published a new research paper building on the research work of the CCA.

Entitled “Interpreting sexual offence verdicts: public attitudes to complainer anonymity and the “not proven” debate,” the article reports findings of an opinion poll on complainer anonymity we commissioned from the Diffley Partnership with the support of GCU’s Social, Criminal and Legal Justice Research Group (SCaLe).

The poll demonstrates high levels of public support for the principle of complainer anonymity and reporting restrictions in sexual cases. We also included questions in the poll, seeking to better understand public attitudes to the removal of reporting restrictions, exploring whether and how the outcome of a criminal trial impacts on public support for continuing anonymity in the context of Scotland’s three verdict system of guilty, not guilty and not proven.

An open access version of the paper with our full findings is accessible here.