Terrifying truth about rape convictions: ‘It shatters your belief that the world is a safe place’
FEBRUARY 23, 2017
THESE are the numbers that should terrify us all.
A report just released from the Crime Statistics Agency found that in 2009 and 2010, over 3,500 rapes were reported to Victoria Police. Of those, a tiny 3% ended in a court conviction.
Even more startling, 41 police reports were made against alleged perpetrators who already had at least six prior sexual offences recorded. Nearly half (18) of those reports went nowhere. No charges, no court appearance, no conviction, nothing.
And these are the rapes that have been reported. Hundreds of thousands of women in Australia have been raped or sexually assaulted and never go to police.
Why are charges and convictions so difficult to achieve for sexual violence? That’s something Nina Funnell knows all too well.
NINA’S STORYNina was sexually assaulted nearly 10 years ago, by a man who held a blade to her throat in Sydney’s Hunters Hill. Despite police eventually finding DNA evidence from the crime scene, no one has ever been charged with her assault.
“When you don’t get an outcome” she says, “you feel so powerless, and so much of the trauma of sexual violence is being powerless. It shatters your belief that the world is a safe place and that justice is something you can rely on.”
Nina’s experience, traumatic as it was, became worse in her dealings with NSW police.
After she escaped her attacker and was desperately running for home, she called 000. She told them what had happened to her. She was still out on the street and had no idea where the man who attacked her was. The phone operator took her details and disconnected the call.
Terrified, and assuming the disconnection was an accident, she called them back. Again, still alone on a dark street, with a man who had held a blade to her throat still somewhere in the vicinity, they took her details and hung up.
Luckily, she got home safely and waited for police to arrive. She says she doesn’t know how long that took, a common reaction for victims of trauma, when shock and adrenaline distorts their perception of time.
The police took her back to the scene of the attack, where they found one of her shoes and her broken necklace.
Later that week Nina went back to the police station to review her statement and look through photos of known offenders in her area.
“It was so shocking” she says, “there were hundreds of them. And as I was looking through them all, the officer who was showing me this huge book said to me ‘you poor girls, you just don’t understand the risks that you take and the dangers out there’. I was still bruised and shaking from the attack, and he thought I didn’t understand the dangers? It was Hunters Hill on Sydney’s lower North Shore and all I did was walk home.”
Nina couldn’t identify her attacker from the photos, and she was told it could take up to six months to process the DNA evidence.
Four months after the attack, frustrated, angry, and still recovering from the horror of the it, Nina couldn’t wait any longer, so she went to the media. After her story aired on Channel 7 the DNA results for her test came back within days. She knows, however, that most people don’t have that option.
“It worked for me, but only because I had contacts in the media. What it meant, of course, was someone else got pushed from the top of the list.”
The results found male DNA, but no match in the NSW database. Nina doesn’t know if the DNA was ever sent to other states for matching.
“I know enough about sex offenders to know it’s very unlikely a man who attacked me the way he did only did it once. But the police couldn’t tell me anything about the investigation. It was incredibly frustrating, and just made me feel powerless all over again.”
Police have to be extremely careful about the information they give to victims. If they tell them anything that might taint their evidence in court, it could mean the offender goes free. But they can explain the process to victims, and treat them with respect and dignity.
“Victims might be traumatised, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid. The communication process in my case was terrible. I just felt like they weren’t doing anything and didn’t care about what happened to me.”
Worse was to come. Five years later NSW policeman Marc Osbourne was found guilty of three counts of filming a person engaged in a private act without consent after he videoed himself having sex with various women and showing the films to other officers at Gladesville police station. The same station Nina was taken to look at photos of sex offenders, and told she should be “more aware of dangers”.
“I just felt violated all over again. I felt like that was the culture there, that the people who were meant to be taking my case seriously, the ones I was so vulnerable to, and put so much trust in, were laughing at sexual exploitation of women.”
THE PROBLEM WITH POLICE
Police, as Nina experienced, are the gatekeepers of criminal proceedings against sexually violent offenders. They decide whether to investigate a reported crime, and how thoroughly they are going to do so.
They also make the decision about whether to take the results of the investigation to the next stage — laying charges and bringing the perpetrator to court.