Jail for random Origin assault
Campaign to end silence
A SOLDIER was left with horrific facial injuries after he was randomly attacked by a man at the Seaview Hotel.
It was State of Origin on June 5, 2019 when Shane Andrew Foreman, 31, punched the random man.
The Townsville District Court heard the man had told Foreman to go away twice after the two men became argumentative about Queensland winning the game.
When Foreman approached the man for a third time, he punched him in the side of the face while he was sitting down.
Crown prosecutor Amanda Payne said the victim was a soldier based in Adelaide and had sustained serious injuries, including fractures to his eye socket, nose and jaw that required surgery.
Ms Payne presented Judge Michael Rackemann with a victim impact statement written by the soldier detailing the emotional and physical impacts of his injuries and the inability to carry out his duties in the army.
The court heard Foreman was on bail at the time of the assault.
He was involved in an altercation on a Magnetic Island bus on New Year’s Eve 2018.
The court heard Foreman punched a passenger twice in the head after his mate initially attacked the victim on the bus.
He pleaded guilty to four of
fences, including assault occasioning bodily harm.
Defence barrister Dane Marley said his client had a dysfunctional upbringing and an alcohol abuse problem but was now in remission.
“He has a major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder,” he said.
“He has indicated he is remorseful for his conduct.”
Mr Marley said Foreman was a father to four children and was worried about their welfare if he was to go to jail.
Judge Rackemann reminded Mr Marley having a family was not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
“It’s always a problem when people go to jail,” he said. “They leave behind people who are disrupted but that can’t stop them from having to pay the price for their criminal acts.”
As the judge summed up the case, Foreman sat wiping away tears in the dock.
He told Foreman he needed to “engage others” to help him on his road to rehabilitation.
Foreman was sentenced to 18 months’ jail.
A CHILD safety advocate believes the days of keeping child abuse under wraps are over, but predators are still lurking in plain sight.
The Townsville Bulletin’s major investigation, Predator at the Pulpit, into paedophile priest Neville Creen revealed how his decades of abuse on 22 known children were kept secret by the people his victims told.
In an explosive interview and a heartbreaking “In Her Own Words” piece, one of his victims, Kathleen Walsh, detailed the devastation of having told a number of nuns and a priest about the abuse she suffered at the time, and receiving no help.
In September 2020, it became an offence to fail to protect a child from child sexual offences and to fail to report a belief of child sexual offences.
The law has the ability to be retrospective, but the person needs to have told someone about the abuse after September last year.
Ms Walsh wants these laws to change, to hold the people she told accountable for their inaction. naction.
Bravehearts founder Hetty Johnston (pictured) said she understood Ms Walsh’s position, but retrospectivity was limited by law.
“It’s taken until now, and people like her, to get these laws changed,” Ms Johnston said.
“They needed to be changed, and I can understand how frustrated and angry she might be at those people for not defending her.
“It’s a silent crime, and the people who knew said nothing.
“These things weren’t to be spoken about … and if you spoke about it as a female survivor it was almost weaponised against you.”
Ms Johnston said victims’ families were often used by attackers to get closer to them.
“Between 85 and 95 per cent of offenders are known to their victims … and the family protects them too.” Ms Johnston said this close connection to family made it painstaking for a victim to come forward, with little hope of being believed.
“There was not a lot of benefits of speaking up, no substantial punishment fo for the offender, so no m motivation for that vi victim to talk.
“The offenders rely on this.”
Ms Johnston said th the entire community h had a responsibility to lis listen and speak up to pr protect children.
“We all have a resp sponsibility to stop se sexual interference ag against our children, an and it’s not OK to ke keep that secret.
“It’s never OK.”
CATCHING the monsters who prey on vulnerable children takes time and perseverance, and is a job for some of Townsville’s best detectives.
It comes with almost inevitable setbacks, but it’s a task to which a small group of officers dedicate themselves.
The predators they work to prosecute may be found everywhere, from within families and sporting organisations to those groups, like churches, that were once seen as pinnacles of moral integrity – the pillars of society.
At its peak two and more decades ago, no one reported sexual abuse to police.
But now victims are coming forward, asking today’s police force for help.
They are getting it.
THE STRUGGLES
Townsville’s child protection unit is investigating at least 35 historical cases of child sexual abuse from around the region.
More people are coming forward all the time.
One of the unit’s historical detectives, Sergeant Nicole Stewart, sees, listens to and works with the victims who represent that number.
She says catching up with historical abusers is a tedious and frustrating process.
She was the lead detective investigating the extent of convicted paedophile Neville Creen’s abuse and became one of the few people trusted by one of Creen’s victims, Kathleen Walsh.
“Time is the biggest impediment to this,” Sgt Stewart said.
“Memories fade, people pass away … buildings get demolished ... so you’ve got all these challenges.
“Some (cases) just hit roadblock after roadblock … the house was burnt down … there are no school records because they got lost in a flood. But I guess that’s the joy of our job, the digging.”
Sgt Stewart said each case was different with evidence for the average investigation taking about two years to compile before going to court.
Reports of sexual abuse often come to police from the victims themselves, but they also come from online reporting, friends and the Catholic Church.
“Often, a lot of have had mental psychological issues what’s happened to
Stewart said.
“So we have to be very mindful of that and work with them on that.”
But some victims struggle too much with the pain of their own trauma, putting cases at a standstill for months, or permanently.
Sgt Stewart says just 8 per cent of historical sexual abuse complaints make it to court.
“We have to get them to go into a these victims health and because of them,” Sgt lot of detail in their statements,” she said. “So in their mind, they are almost reliving what happened to them, things that (have been) pushed back (in their memories) for 20 or 30 years.
“So sometimes we’ll get through that first or second appointment, then get a major setback … or they’ll fall off the face of the Earth.”
CHANGING TIMES
“Why wasn’t time?”
It’s a question many ask when hearing the revelations of sexual abuse in the church during the 60s and 70s, but one easily answered by today’s police.
Head of the child protection unit Dave Miles said police and community expectations were different when so-called pulpit rape was rife.
“Your priest was deemed to be the pinnacle in the community,” Senior Sergeant Miles said.
“So the community expectations
it reported at the would be such that probably it (sexual assault) wouldn’t be reported. They didn’t talk about things like sex offenders, or didn’t talk about child abuse … but as society has matured, so has the police force.”
The law has highlighted this change.
The offence of grooming a child did not exist during the peak period of institutionalised abuse.
The charge of maintaining a sexual relationship with a child, which has a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, came about only in the 1990s.
Sen-sgt Miles said as society had matured, the acceptance of sexual abuse had shifted, and police were more experienced.
“With that has come technical expertise, forensic expertise, specialist interviewing techniques … we have a much larger capacity to do this kind of work,” he said.
The truths of this kind of abuse would finally come to light up to 30 years later for men, and often slightly sooner for women, Sen-sgt Miles said.
He said stigma was a huge factor that led to fewer than 5 per cent of sexual assaults on males being reported. Many victims were spooked at the thought of others knowing about their abuse and would struggle when police tried to reach out to potential witnesses.
“When you start the process, and you speak to those people, they can destroy family units, they can tear the dynamics apart,” Sen-sgt Miles said. “Or they can release a whole range of other victims and actions and activities.”
Often a lot of these victims have had mental health and psychological issues because of what’s happened to them. So we have to be very mindful of that and work with them on that.
Sergeant Nicole Stewart
NOT FOR FAINT-HEARTED
It takes a special kind of police officer to pursue justice for a victim of sexual abuse who may have spent years staying silent.
But the job also takes a toll on them, and many police are unable to handle the kind of horror they must deal with every day.
Sgt Stewart said officers had to learn to dissociate themselves and return to normal life when they left the office.
“You have to develop an ability to separate yourself from that work,” she said.
“And then, obviously, have a release. If you have that it ensures that at the end of the day, you can go back to being a mum or dad, a normal person in society.”
The process is long, draining and sometimes disheartening, but Sgt Stewart said it was worth it to see the victims’ relief at convictions.
“It can be frustrating when you get stuck and you can’t go to court,” she said. “But it also doesn’t make it less valuable when we don’t win, because that doesn’t mean it hasn’t really happened.
“When we do get a win, and even if it’s a small win ... you don’t always agree with what the sentences have been, but none of that matters if the victim’s happy.”