Perverting Justice

Protesters attend the Womens March 4 Justice Rally in Canberra, Australia, on March 15, 2021. Jamila Toderas/Getty Images

Commentary

Scotland is currently pushing ahead of Australia in the feminist drive to see more men behind bars but no doubt we will catch up soon.

Their latest plan, announced in a proposed criminal justice bill in April, involves new laws to abolish jury trials in rape cases. Scottish lawmakers believe members of the public can’t be trusted to adjudicate on sexual assault cases because they don’t have the right attitudes.

According to Scottish law lecturer Stuart Waiton writing on spiked-online.com, Scotland’s justice department has claimed it is not possible for ordinary people to be “trauma-informed.”

As Waiton suggests, it’s worth thinking about what a trauma-informed approach to rape trials means in practice.

He quotes a government document that explains that the trauma endured through rape can affect “the demeanour and presentation” of victims. That is, the trauma caused by the sexual offence “may make a victim appear less credible or reliable.”

But enlightened, trauma-informed judges “will recognise this behaviour as evidence of trauma—evidence, that is, that a crime has taken place,” says Waiton.

As he explains, the result is obvious: “And just like that, a less-than-believable ‘victim’ can now be believed.”

Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf speaks during an anti-poverty summit in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 3, 2023. Peter Summers/Getty Images

There’s abundant evidence demolishing the whole notion of trauma-informed practice, as spelt out in a Centre for Prosecutor Integrity report on “trauma-informed junk science.”

It quotes an Air Force Office of Special Investigations assessment dismissing such approaches as based on “flawed science” as well as negative evaluations in journal articles and expert commentary.

Yet Australian courts may well end up soon following the same path as their Scottish equivalents.

Strengthening the Agenda

And the Albanese government is busily pushing it forward.

On May 1, they announced $14.7 million (US$9.8 million) to “strengthen sexual assault laws,” adding to the $20 million announced in last year’s budget for initiatives, including—wait for it—“trauma-informed legal services.”

Across the country, there are advocates already pushing this agenda. It’s an agenda that school children and their parents attending a charity event this September at St Luke’s Anglican school in the Queensland coastal town of Bundaberg will not be expecting.

Somehow, a guest speaker has been included in this breast cancer fundraiser who has nothing to do with cancer.

Trish Wyatt is a local woman who describes herself as a  “rape victim.”

Yet the man she accused of violent sexual assault was found by a jury last year, after only 30 minutes of deliberation, NOT GUILTY on all charges in the Queensland District Court.

A statue of Themis, the Greek God of Justice, stands outside the Supreme Court in Brisbane, Australia. Dave Hunt/AAP Image

Wyatt, who has published a new book entitled “Don’t Report Rape,” claims that her alleged perpetrator was found not guilty is proof that our justice system simply doesn’t work.

“Our justice system is so flawed and so broken that it provides a legal loophole or get out of jail free card for rapists,” explains Wyatt.

Not just any rapist. She’s alleging she’s a victim of an “extremely violent and life-threatening” sexual assault taking place over an eight-hour period, which, apart from repeated intercourse, allegedly included attempted strangulation and all manner of other activities.

Alleged Incident

Read Wyatt’s account of her ordeal, and there’s only one possible conclusion. The jury simply didn’t believe beyond reasonable doubt that it all happened.

Wyatt suggests the reason is simple—they weren’t trauma-informed.

They didn’t realise the behaviour that made her appear less credible or reliable was actually proof that she was traumatised by the rape.

Behaviour like:

• Making no attempt to leave the unlocked motel room over an eight-hour period, even though the police station was only two minutes down the road.
• Having a shower in the motel room before she left the next morning and kissing her sleeping assailant goodbye before exiting the room. Wyatt claims this trauma-informed “fawn” response aims at keeping the perpetrator on the side to avoid more violence.
• The day after the alleged rape, sending a text message to another man she’d been chatting to online, saying, “Hey, Handsome xxx.”
• Continuing to go out and meet men after the alleged assault. She met her current partner 20 days after the event.
• Stating to the police four days after the event that she was “not even sure a crime had been committed.”

Wyatt also argues she was “slut-shamed” and “victim-blamed” in court due to the defence revealing that she’d had sex with another man the night before, that she’d agreed to have this first date in a motel room because she was “100 percent after casual sex,” and she arrived with two bottles of wine and four rum/coke mixed drinks plus ended up sharing the man’s marijuana.

A former social worker, Wyatt, has been diagnosed with PTSD since the alleged incident but is actively working to change rape laws, speaking at the March4justice and promoting her new book.

Charging Ahead Without Regard

Make no mistake, the push is on to change the way our justice system deals with sexual assault.

The debate taking place in Scotland is based on the assumption that juries are subject to “rape myths,” which Scotland’s top prosecutor, Dorothy Bain KC, describes as “prejudicial and false beliefs about rape that affect their evaluation of the evidence presented at trial.”

Although Bain claims there’s “overwhelming evidence” that juries are affected by such beliefs, this is simply wrong, as Rick Bradford explains in his excellent recent blog post, Rape Trial Juries and the Erosion of Justice.

Bradford shows Bain is relying on jury studies cooked up by feminist law professor Fiona Leverick based on self-selected volunteers judging pretend rape cases.

Yet definitive research studying real juries was conducted in 2018-19 by Cheryl Thomas, professor of judicial studies at University College London.

This showed hardly any real jurors believe such myths. Most jurors are not influenced by rape myths and are quite capable of proper judgements about guilt or innocence in rape cases.

But just as the Scottish government is choosing to ignore this vital fact, Australian governments are likely to also charge ahead with their goal of ousting juries from rape trials—unless the public makes it very clear this is not on.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.