Victims of sexual assaults, particularly in cases unlikely to result in a conviction, should be able to access other forms of justice, former state attorney-general Rob Hulls says.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Mr Hulls, now the director of RMIT's Centre for Innovative Justice, said that while more people had been prosecuted for sexual offences over the past five years, they still carried one of the lowest rates of conviction of any crime.
This was partly due to the ''he said, she said'' battle after perpetrators pleaded not guilty, and the high standard of proof - beyond reasonable doubt - required for serious crimes.
The adversarial court system, which is often costly and unwieldy, had failed many victims as a result. It would continue to deter them from the prosecution process and could retraumatise them.
''We need to offer non-adversarial options, not as a supposedly soft alternative or diversion but as part of the core business of justice,'' Mr Hulls said at the international Broadening Restorative Perspective conference at the MCG on Tuesday.
''Most importantly, we can no longer assume that a wrong is adequately addressed by a mutually exclusive choice.''
Research showed that while victims wanted offenders punished, they wanted the crimes against them condemned, to share their stories in their own way and to prevent future violence more.
''We owe it to victims of sexual offences to find better paths through the maze - ones more likely to see their experiences properly acknowledged, and prevent them from occurring again,'' he said.
Mr Hulls cited the military's Defence Abuse Response Taskforce's model for investigating rape and sexual assault allegations as an example of restorative justice.
The federal government created the taskforce last year to investigate allegations of rape and sexual assault after a female cadet at the Australian Defence Force Academy was unknowingly streamed on Skype having consensual sex with a fellow cadet. Since then, more scandals have emerged, including revelations that 17 army members, including officers, were involved in a sex email ring.
Most of the taskforce's potential responses to allegations made the military responsible for things such as counselling and reparation payments without waiving victims' legal rights which ''are likely to see senior defence personnel involved in an independently conducted conference''.
Mr Hulls said this approach could be replicated in civilian courts, potentially ''through a checkpoint at the initial stages of a sexual assault complaint in which certain cases could be evaluated, in consultation with the victim, to establish what approach may be most effective before it proceeds any further down the adversarial path''.
