A woman who was imprisoned and raped multiple times, but had her case dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service, has called for thousands of rape cases to be reopened after the publication of a landmark government review. Kat Araniello, a rape survivor and campaigner, has said the government’s unreserved apology to failed victims was “a baby step in the right direction” but if ministers were “deeply ashamed” of the failures, they must take action. “That starts with looking at the bad decisions that were made,” she said. “A real apology would see cases being reopened and re-evaluated. An apology is something I’d accept if they had made a mistake. This isn’t a mistake, this is a travesty.” There is no provision and no additional funding for reopening cases in the report. Victims have the right to request a review if their case is dropped and a government spokesperson said: “It is for police and prosecutors to make operational decisions on whether to reopen a case, taking all available evidence into account.” The Guardian first spoke to Araniello in 2019. She went to the police after a man whom she had briefly dated raped her three times over the course of four days in 2017, once at knifepoint. The man was charged, but the case was later dropped by the CPS. “Politics does not go any way towards making what happened to me any better,” she said. “Please remember I’m a person. This happened to me. And I expect you to have the integrity to look at my case again.” Araniello’s call is backed by groups representing victims, which have criticised the lack of funding and urgency in the review, despite its promises to overhaul how the crime is dealt with. Katie Ellis, solicitor at the Centre for Women’s Justice, said it was a “missed opportunity” and added that after the case of Liam Allen – which collapsed in 2017 when it emerged that information had not been disclosed to defence lawyers – 3,600 live cases were reviewed by the CPS, followed by a more detailed report. “It doesn’t feel like the commitment is really there to rectify what has gone wrong in the past and the review is very purposely forward looking,” she said. Katie Russell, from Rape Crisis, said cases should be opened at victims’ request. “There will be a resourcing issue and a time issue because there’s already a massive backlog in the system, but this has to be prioritised because there has been a gross breach of trust and failure of justice,” she said. Ministers are at odds about the impact a decade of austerity has had on the police and the CPS and the report makes no mention of cuts. Police have lost thousands of officers and senior police say austerity led to the disbandment of specialist teams which affected their ability to investigate rape. While the CPS has had budget cuts of 25% and staff reductions of 30% since 2010. Although the justice secretary, Robert Buckland, accepted that cuts had affected the criminal justice system, the Tory MP Kit Malthouse rejected the suggestion on Friday saying the reasons were “more complex”. He added: “Has the CPS been under strain generally, yes, has the whole public service been under strain of course it has”, in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The Labour MP Jess Phillips, shadow minister for domestic violence, called the report “wishy-washy”, adding that its failure to mention a decade of large-scale cuts across the justice system was “massively dishonest”. “Even the sorry seems weak because they can’t identify that massively cutting back on police resources, on non-frontline police officers, on courts and the CPS has led to this problem,” she said. Bonny Turner, a victim of rape and campaigner, said the apology was of little comfort. Without reopening tens of thousands cases like hers, the failings of the past five years would go unexamined, while rapists walked free, she said. “It feels as though I lost the justice lottery, and had my rape happened just two to three months earlier, in 2015, the man who raped me and admitted it might have been prosecuted,” she said. “If this government is genuinely sorry, then they need to prove it by putting things right, not just from this point forward, but retrospectively for all victims of rape failed since 2016. Our cases must be reopened, reviewed, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”