The Australian Legal System Fails Rape Victims

4 Pages 1074 Words

“The experience of the few women who do seek justice after being raped is heartbreaking testament to the failure of the adversarial criminal law achieving convictions”
Do you agree with this proposition? Justify your position.

Similar to many Western countries, Australia uses the adversary system in both criminal and civil cases. The standard of proof of the adversary system in criminal cases is “proof beyond reasonable doubt”, and with a nation-wide rape conviction rate of one per cent, many important questions are being raised.

One of these issues stems from the rate of report of sexual offences to the police, which currently stands at approximately 15%. There are many reasons for this number being so low, the most worrying being “fear of legal system” or at least a lack of faith in it, by victims. A Rape Crisis Hotline in Victoria receives 15,000 calls per year from distressed women who are victims of sexual assault. Most of them do not report their ordeal to the police for this exact reason; “the victims fear the system, the think it will just chew them up and spit them out with nothing to show for the whole nightmare”. Other reasons cited by rape victims for not reporting attacks include “feeling ashamed” and “being blamed or held responsible by the police or courts”. On top of this, there is the very real knowledge that the chances of their attacker being convicted at a trial and punished for his crime (men still represent 93% of sex offenders) are only one in 100.

In NSW in 2000-01 of the approximate 3% of the sexual assaults that reached the Courts, 36% were acquitted and only 30% were convicted (12% of which were convicted on a lesser offence).

‘Tracey’ [not her real name],44, of Victoria, and was sexually molested by her father from the age of four up to the age of 15, at which point she moved out of home. ‘Tracey’ was also raped by her father in her early twenties. In 200...