AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
December 20, 2013
Gay Alcorn
Columnist
So fraught has any discussion of rape and sexual assault become, so enmeshed in gender politics, so prevalent – from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, to the Stephen Milne rape saga, even Julian Assange’s refusal to travel to Sweden to face rape allegations – that it seems any crime involving a sexual element is highly charged.
The reason why sex offences are so emotional is understandable given how we have grappled with them historically. The notion that rape was a property crime against a father or husband was not fully abandoned until marital rape was outlawed in Australia in the 1980s.
And whatever the law says, conversations in offices and pubs will still mention a woman’s sobriety or short skirt if she later claims she was raped, particularly by someone she knows.
The law has been reformed in the past 30 years, and the attitudes of the police and courts to victims transformed. Maximum jail sentences have increased, and the definitions of what constitutes rape changed, all to emphasise the seriousness of sex crimes and to make it easier for victims to seek justice. And none of it has budged conviction rates; the Office of Public Prosecutions says that just 45.1 per cent of all sex cases last year that went to trial led to a conviction, down from 54.8 per cent in 2004.
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