The chief of the Metropolitan Police has announced that Scotland Yard will no longer 'automatically believe' claims of rape.
Commissioner Cressida Dick told the Times that "you start with a completely open mind, absolutely, when dealing with allegations of sexual assault. It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.
"Our default position is we are, of course, likely to believe you but we are investigators and we have to investigate."
The issue of sexual assault in the workplace has been a major talking point in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the subsequent #MeToo movement, in which women shared their experiences of suffering abuse and assault from male colleagues.
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Dick added that those who made advances towards colleagues at work parties would also not be subject to investigation of sexual assault, saying that "a misunderstanding between two people, clumsy behaviour between somebody who fancies somebody else, is not a matter for the police."
She also touched on the issue of historical allegations of sexual assault, which has been regularly discussed in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal and the decades of abuse committed by prominent persons that went unreported and uninvestigated.
"Speaking as a cop, opposed to a citizen, I'm interested in crime," said Ms Dick. "If it's a long time ago, or it's very trivial, or I'm not likely to get a criminal justice outcome, I'm not going to spend a lot of resources on it."
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The Metropolitan Police has come in for severe criticism regarding the historical abuse at the BBC, the inquiry into which many consider it to have botched.
However, it later spent more than £2 million ($2.8m) of Metropolitan Police resources investigating abuse allegations made by an unnamed man known only as 'Nick' against prominent politicians in Westminster, only for his claim later to be discovered to be uncorroborated.
'Nick' is now facing charges of perverting the course of justice from the Crown Prosecution Service.
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A later report into the Westminster Sex Ring case declared: "Those accused remained isolated and uninformed of the progress of these several investigations until finally being informed that there was an insufficiency of evidence against them.
"In short, these men are all victims of false allegations and yet they remain treated as men against whom there was insufficient evidence to prosecute them. The presumption of innocence appears to have been set aside."
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: UK News