Bereaved call for body to enforce coroners’ advice

Relatives of a teenage rape survivor who died after failures by mental health services are joining other families to demand a new body to enforce coroners’ recommendations to prevent future deaths.

Campaigners claim the failure to act on hundreds of coroners’ recommendations every year, and to learn from the findings of often expensive inquiries into disasters, means the same mistakes are being repeated.

Gaia Pope, 19, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after revealing that she had been drugged and raped when she was 16. She was found dead in undergrowth on a cliff 11 days after disappearing in Swanage, Dorset, in 2017.

After one of the longest inquests in legal history, the coroner, Rachael Griffin, made multiple reports last year to authorities including the NHS and police to prevent future deaths, but Pope’s family says most have not been acted upon.

The Inquest campaign, which works with families bereaved by state-related deaths, is calling for a “national oversight mechanism” to collate recommendations and responses in a new national database, analyse responses from public bodies, follow up on progress and share common findings.

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Source: The Times, 27 June 2023