RAPED AGAIN

Many times in recent years I have been vocal criticizing judges in this country. Out of touch judges. Men in wigs totally, it seems, out of touch with community values and community standards.

I have criticized the WASPS. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But the criticism also applies to Catholic jurists.

There are too many middle-aged, conservative, blinkered males making decisions hurting too many people. Innocent people.

And I raise the issue again today because of a ruling by the New South Wales Court of Appeal that, in effect, rapes the victims a second time. This time legally and in the courts.

The 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 the most 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”.

Can you believe this? Transient? Trifling? How can a judge KNOW what effect sexual abuse can have on a male or female twenty or thirty years down the track in lives in which youthful innocence was lost?

I have talked to victims who, thirty years later, after being abused by a father or stepfather, have sexual problems in their marriage bedroom because they have not, or cannot, tell a husband what happened back then.

Some years ago I did a one-hour TV forum for the Nine Network about rape and incest. It was called “No Means No”. And I used that telling line: What part of the word “NO” don’t you understand?

I quoted a Victorian judge from a rape trial when this middle-aged, ignorant, and insensitive misogynist described a sexual assault on a middle-aged country woman as “a garden variety rape”. I kid you not.

She had been attacked in her home one morning. Tied up with electrical cord. Beaten with a cricket wicket and sexually assaulted for hours.

A “garden variety rape”.

In the New South Wales case that the Appeals Court has rejected five children in one family were sexually assaulted on at least 14 separate occasions.

The minimum awards they could have got were between $7500 and $25,000.

The Appeals Court betrayed them. As I have said many times: Who’s looking after the children?

Thursday, June 17, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004