Alison Mau
In a few months the trial Sexual Violence Pilot Court will deliver its final report after two years in operation. In its wake, there should be no more excuses when it comes to trying crimes of sexual violence. The first change made should be to turf juries out of the equation altogether. Juries have proved time and time again they do not understand the nuances of sexual crime, and cannot seem to free themselves of bias and rape myth.
They do not get that a woman might not feel safe to scream and struggle when she’s being assaulted, or that her skirt length or the number of drinks she’s had should have no bearing on their decision to convict, or let an accused go free.
The opinions of dinosaurs in the jury room are making our justice system and therefore our society, a much more dangerous place.
I’ve reached this conclusion after a week buried under emails and messages from lawyers, complainants and jury members themselves, and months investigating possible changes to the way the justice system handles sex crimes.
It’s a very rare thing, to get a glimpse inside the jury room. Jurors are not supposed to talk about their experiences, even after the trial has ended. But in the space of a week late last year, two jurors from separate rape trials in different parts of New Zealand contacted me in a red-hot rage.
In the privacy of both jury rooms appalling bias was shown against the complainant with questions like ‘‘was she a virgin?’’ and words like ‘‘trollop’’. Both juries seemed uninterested in truly considering the facts – they just wanted to get out of there.
The response to that story was overwhelming, and letters and personal stories flooded my inbox. They would fair break your heart, some of them. For example, I give you exhibit A: the extraordinary story of the hat in the courtroom.
In the early 1960s, ‘‘C’’ was
sexually
attacked by a chap she knew, whom she had thought was respectable. It happened in his apartment and although C fought like a tiger to get away (‘‘a lamp got knocked over and broken in my struggle’’) it was only the man’s flatmate walking in that allowed her escape – she ran tout-suite along the road to the police station, where a kindly officer made her a cup of tea and took her statement.
She heard nothing more until a letter arrived, telling her to turn up to court – the man was being tried for her attempted rape. The defendant, in his spruce suit, had a full legal team in attendance. C was all alone.
‘‘Suddenly, someone exclaimed that I wasn’t wearing a hat,’’ C says.
She had received no guidance, there were no victim advisers – she had never even been inside a courtroom before. ‘‘I did not know anything about any requirement for something on my head.’’
Everything came to a grinding halt while a search for a hat was launched. Eventually a police officer returned with a spare. ‘‘It was an ugly and embarrassing wait while they found a stupid hat, and it was a ridiculous hat, but it was stuck on me anyway.’’
The hat caused an outbreak of laughter in the courtroom and C was so upset she burst into tears and could not even speak. There was no break so she could gather her composure.
‘‘I couldn’t go on, I was so mortified and embarrassed.’’ Case dismissed, said the judge.
Quite aside from her distress in the courtroom, C astutely concludes that ‘‘getting off scot-free, meant no deterrent for that fellow striking again. What a travesty’’.
Yes, it’s all a long time ago, and silly hat rules no longer apply. Yes, there are now processes in place – if only relatively recently – to help the complainant understand what’s