PLEA FOR VICTIMS

I know I run the risk of sounding like a broken record but it seems to me that our politicians, state and federal, just don’t get it. And that’s being charitable. Often it seems they just spout self-justifying words where the mouth is in action but the brain hasn’t really kicked in.

A good recent example. The Herald Sun reported that twenty per cent of convicted rapists in the state of Victoria do not go to jail. At all. Twenty per cent! And of people convicted of other indecent assaults and serious sexual offences forty per cent walk free.

Now, the crime of rape carries a justifiable maximum sentence of 25 years. Nobody ever gets it. In fact, here in Victoria, the average jail sentence for rape – for the ones who even go to jail – is four years. And that is a sick joke. That is not justice being done or even being seen to be done.

As I said on 3AW before the Parliament House rally which attracted ten thousand Victorians: We have a troubled and frightened and angry community which increasingly feels betrayed by the men (and too few women) on the Bench. Too many sentences are “manifestly inadequate by acceptable community standards”.

I talked to Attorney General Rob Hulls after he had been quoted in the media trying to defend the judges. He said that sentencing was a difficult area in which the courts had to “ balance competing concerns”.

What competing concerns? I believe a cowardly, violent, bullying rapist deserves to go to jail. I believe there should be a sentence of at least seven years before parole. That’s less than a third of the maximum sentence a judge can impose. I now believe there should be minimum mandatory sentences.

A 27-year-old man who repeatedly rapes a seven-year-old girl in his care should not walk free with a suspended sentence. He should have got the full 25 years.

A drunken yobbo who spies an innocent, sleeping, 22-year-old through her apartment window and then burgles her house and her body should not walk free with a non-custodial sentence.

And don’t accept the hogwash that “a suspended jail sentence is still a jail sentence”. It isn’t. Those rapists are punished far less than their victims. The letters and e-mails I get from victims of rape, incest, paedophilia and child porn are wrenching and heart-breaking. It seems pandemic.

One victim was set up for child pornography at the age of thirteen. “On several occasions I was given Milo that was laced with what I think was Rohypnol. I only remember flashes of the events but distinctly remember seeing a video camera and waking up dazed and very sore.

“I am now 27 and this whole incident ruined my emotional upbringing. I am one of the children in those tapes having their innocence taken away. How anyone could not think that these videos are wrong frustrates me to tears. Every time those tapes are viewed my innocence is again being violated. It never ends for the children”.

Another victim of incest wrote: “I am a professional. I have a loving husband and children but nothing fills the emptiness inside me. My father was the perpetrator, my mother just as bad because she never said a thing. She has actually just received an Order of Australia medal for her services to the community!”

That victim attached a letter she had finally sent to her molesting father and her pliant mother and her brother and sister. It was a copybook example of an incest victim’s self-loathing, self-doubt and thoughts of suicide.

“I have people who love me, yet I can’t feel that love. I just want to be on my own and die…. All my life I have felt like a failure and no-one cared for me…over the years I have gone through hell not being able to sleep because I was too scared… sleeping in the alcove above the bedrooms… wishing I had the guts to kill myself”.

The stories of suffering and betrayal and permanent scars go on. And the courts are almost complicit.

In the New South Wales Court of Appeal earlier this year rape victims were virtually raped a second time. This time by the legal system. The Appellate Court ruled that victims of sexual abuse are not entitled to compensation if they can’t show evidence of injury – even if their attacker pleads guilty.

And, in my mind, the most rabid, insensitive, devastating comment came from a female judge. Ruth McColl.

She said: “Bodily harm is only established if there was hurt or injury calculated to interfere with the health or comfort of the victim and that hurt or injury need not be permanent but must be more than transient and trifling”.

How can any injury to a rape victim by “trifling”? How can any judge KNOW what effect sexual abuse can have on a female (or male) twenty or thirty years down the track in lives where precious youthful innocence has been lost?

I have talked to rape and incest victims who, thirty years after being abused by a father or a stepfather, have sexual problems in their marriage because they have not, or cannot, tell a husband what happened in those evil days of the past.

That any judge, let alone a female one, can use words like “transient” and “trifling” when discussing the effects of sexual abuse is mind-boggling and disheartening.

She would seem to echo the out of touch attitudes of other judges – mostly white middle-aged males – who deem it a bigger crime to steal from a bank than steal a teenager’s virginity, self-esteem and self-respect.

Just think about it again:

Twenty per cent of convicted rapists in Victoria – one in five – do not go to jail. That IS a travesty of justice.

October 24, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004