MARY CARR ON THE JUSTICE SYSTEM FAILING RAPE VICTIMS

THE outcome of the Belfast rape trial struck like an earthquake and its tremors are still being felt around the country. Immediately after Wednesday’s notguilty verdicts, a rallying cry sounded over social media for mass protests the following day in solidarity with the young woman at the centre of the trial.

Saturday saw marchers take to the streets a second time. Protesters in Dublin walked behind a banner saying ‘Stand with Survivors’ to the Department of Justice on St Stephen’s Green, while in Belfast, the scene of the nine-week trial, a smaller demonstration took place with protesters holding up large pink letters spelling ‘We Believe Her’.

The cities of Galway and Cork also played host to rallies.

On one level, IBelieveHer is an emotional reaction, a visceral outpouring of rage and despair at an unpopular verdict.

But it has wider significance in how it has triggered a groundswell of disgust at how rape cases are treated by the criminal justice system while highlighting the need for change.

Sensitive

We congratulate ourselves that compared to Northern Ireland, we handle rape trials in a sensitive fashion.

In this country, rape trials take place in camera, the accused have anonymity right up until they are found guilty in the vast majority of cases, and the identity of the complainant is shrouded in secrecy.

But the figures for conviction and reporting rates tell another story.

The Rape Crisis Centre reckons that 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported, and in 2009, the last year for which we have figures, the conviction rate was a miserable 8%.

Anonymity, it seems, has done little to convince the majority of victims that they have a decent chance of bringing their assailants to justice, let alone that their lives will not be even more destroyed by the ordeal of going to court.

The trauma that women endure during rape trials was highlighted during the Belfast case in vivid and excruciating detail.

The complainant spent eight days in the witness box being cross-examined by formidable lawyers; Paddy Jackson was in the box for one day.

Her reasons for pitching up at Jackson’s house on that fateful night were picked over closely.

She was asked how she felt arriving at the home of the rugby star.

She had to deal with the insinuation that she was some class of a celebrity stalker, who had gone out that night, determined to nab a famous soccer player. And that’s before we get to how her underwear was displayed in court or the graphic descriptions of her genital injury or the intimate details of the sex acts she took part in.

All this might be necessary to establish guilt or innocence given the way rape law is currently structured, but one would have to be devoid of a single shred of human decency not to conclude that having her relive what she maintained was a rape to strangers, retell her humiliating narrative over and over again, and insist repeatedly on her version of events was close enough to a violation.

The outcry at the verdict has been loud and shrill but amid the cacophony there have been suggestions about how the justice system could be reformed for rape.

Some proposals may admittedly be outlandish and unworkable, but at least they force us to contemplate ways of ensuring that women who take to the courts are not punished so harshly.

Motives

Under the law, defendants are entitled to the ‘presumption of innocence’, a cornerstone of our legal system, but perhaps extending a ‘presumption of credibility’ to victims of sex crimes may lessen the ferocity of the attacks they endure on their motives and behaviour.

Another way of minimising the torture of reliving every second of a sexual assault and having everything that went beforehand held up to intense scrutiny is to give fuller legal force to consent.

This might shift the onus from the complainant to the defendant during the trial.

Instead of the woman having to prove that she was raped, that she did not consent, and – in an even tougher ask – that her rapist knew she did not consent, there would be an obligation on him to show he had established consent.

As things stand, all defendants often seem to have to do to escape punishment is say that they thought or believed that her silence was consent.

If we want to improve trust in the law’s ability to offer redress, we have to offer something better than the current system, which treats rape in much the same way as robbery.

The fact that the vast majority of women never even try to report rape to the gardaí might seem to bear out Germaine Greer’s view that the law of rape is pointless and that there has to be a better way.

Greer’s opinions are often dismissed as off-the-wall and outdated and she has fallen foul of the PC brigade because of her withering criticism of two of its holy grails; the MeToo movement and transgender rights.

Doubtless many people will feel that yet again she has gone too far in her forthcoming book, On Rape, where she argues that the crime of rape should be abolished.

In its place she suggests that the assault law be expanded to include sexual assault in various degrees of gravity; these offences would carry lesser penalties but the payback for women would be their demanding a lower burden of proof.

Coherent

‘Centuries of writing and thinking about rape – as inflicted by men on women – have got us nowhere,’ writes Greer.

In a recent interview, she dismissed rape as a ‘daily crime’ that’s ‘not spectacular’, and suggested rape cases wasted police time because the burden of proof was ‘too high’.

‘My feeling is we ditch rape altogether (as a crime) because it’s hopeless,’ she said.

‘I have seen the police working up a rape case trying desperately hard to build it up so it will stand up in court – and wasting their time. The burden of proof is too high and that’s because the tariff is too onerous.

‘Rape is a daily crime, it’s not spectacular. What we need is a coherent law of sexual assault.’

Many of us, not least of all rape victims, might be outraged at Greer’s theory of rape not being, as it currently stands, a heinous crime, second only to murder.

Her proposal to downgrade it may lead us to suspect that she wants to drag us back to the Dark Ages when women were chattels to be ‘taken’ by men, without legal or social repercussions.

But no-one could argue with her contention that the current law is failing women. The figures speak for themselves. Germaine Greer might not have the right solution, but one thing is certain, nothing less than sweeping reform is called for.