While some friends and I sunned our legs on the back porch the other day, our conversation turned to mortality. We're deep like that. One woman recounted the tale of her almost-death which completely altered the way she lived her life. When she was 20, she had been raped by a stranger at knife-point.
When the police finally found the perpetrator, she discovered that he had raped other women in the area, and had murdered some of them. While he was being charged, she decided to opt out of the proceedings. They had enough evidence to 'put him away' for a long time, which is presumably what some of the survivors wanted. But my friend didn't believe that prison would rehabilitate him, nor that it would aid her own survival.
Her perspective, which came from her deep pity for the misery which led to his awful deeds isn't mainstream, but it might help us understand this disturbing graph which circulated in social media last week.
There are, of course, many barriers that discourage women from reporting abuse to the police. In a legal context, sexual assault is incredibly difficult to prove, often boiling down to one person's testimony against another's. Long and gruelling court proceedings are unlikely to deliver the remedy the survivor needs. Survivors can endure social victim-blaming, and risk retraumatisation in the process.
As an advocate of restorative justice, my friend recognises the shortcomings of the criminal system which does more to impede justice for survivors than it does to enable it.
Yet I somehow still feel vindicated by the law. It could be that I watched too much Law and Order in my formative years, or that the idea of giving up on the belief of legal protection is all too scary.
I recently reread Helen Garner's 1997 book The First Stone. In it, she laments the ease with which two young women reported an alleged incident of sexual harassment to the police. She sees the legal system as damaging to everyone involved in such a case.
While I admire the book for many reasons, I read it a couple of decades after it was published, at a time when it seems reasonable to believe that the law can remedy any injustice. I grew up in the age of litigation, the age of suing those who bother you. I couldn't see what Garner was talking about.
During incidents when I've felt threatened by men, I've crudely invoked the law to remind the threatening character, and perhaps myself, of my right to safety and security. Things along the lines of 'I'll call the cops!' and once, bizarrely, 'I'll sue you!' which is gen-Y for 'you're out of line'. These adolescent defences simply articulate that my rights are inalienable, and that the state will protect them.
Of course, sexual violence being one of the least reported and least convicted crimes, the state is actually quite incapable of protecting my rights in that department.
A new taskforce initiated by Defence Minister Stephen Smith will spend the next 12 months addressing more than 1000 sexual assault claims within the Australian Defence Force over the past 60 years. Following Smith's official apology to the survivors of these abuses, the primary aims of the taskforce are acknowledgement and compensation for survivors, rather than immediate punitive action for perpetrators.
The head of the taskforce, retired West Australian Supreme Court judge Len Roberts-Smith, told ABC that the proceedings would not be 'a civil liability-type scheme, where people have to establish damages and liability and to go to great lengths of proof to establish a claim'.
The compensation of up to $50,000 per applicant (from the existing military budget) will not prohibit them from further legal action outside the taskforce. The taskforce will attempt to identify abusers, and will also refer relevant cases to police and the military justice system.
This framework shows more sensitivity to the needs of survivors than many other state responses. It follows in the vein of a truth commission, where really hearing claims and providing a context for perpetrators to take responsibility are more important than retaliation. While it probably won't lead to a royal commission, the taskforce is an important recognition of a failed bureaucracy.
Where the law doesn't have the scope to deliver justice for any of us when we need it most, we are compelled to reassess our blind faith in the institution.
Ellena Savage is a Melbourne writer who edits Middlebrow, the arts liftout in The Lifted Brow.