REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE “RAPE LAW: VICTIMS ON TRIAL?” CONFERENCE
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE “RAPE LAW: VICTIMS ON TRIAL?” CONFERENCE OF THE DUBLIN RAPE CRISIS CENTRE
Dia dhíbh ar maidin a chairde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur measc. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
I am very pleased to be here with you this morning and thank you all very much for the warm and generous welcome. My thanks in particular to Brendan Spring for his introduction, to Ellen O'Malley-Dunlop for inviting me here to open this conference and of course to my former colleagues, the School of Law in Trinity College who are conference co-hosts.
Thirty years ago when the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was in its infancy I remember, at its early meetings, discussing the very topic we are discussing today- the difficult experience of the victim in rape trials. It has long been a fraught issue but the context in which it is discussed today is somewhat different from those start-up days. Back then some of the leading academic writers on Criminal Law could not bring themselves even to acknowledge the existence of sexual offences, though there is plenty of evidence from newspaper and other reports that violent sexual assaults were far from rare and victims were often shamed into silence and non-reporting. A pervasive and unhealthy delicacy lay around the discussion of these offences and it fatally inhibited the interrogation of the law, practices and procedures governing them. The professions and agencies which dealt both officially and unofficially with sexual violence had not then developed the integrated network of endeavour which is now commonplace and which is much in evidence at this conference. Victims had few supports, few courageous role models and a mountain of very real fear to overcome before they could contemplate facing the rigours of a criminal trial in which the legal, psychological, emotional and physical pressures on them were likely to be considerable - so considerable, that they conduced to a culture of non-reporting of such crimes which allowed rapists to indulge in the belief that they were untouchable.
Rape is one of the most heinous crimes in the criminal law canon and to be accused of such a crime is also of course to be placed in the maelstrom of serious legal, psychological, emotional and physical pressures. However where victims of a crime are so paralysed by fear of a process that is theoretically designed to protect them, that they fail to report crimes or fail to follow through to trial, then it hardly needs to be said that the common good is compromised. The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre along with others has painstakingly helped change that culture of paralysis over these past decades and law, attitudes, processes and procedures have all markedly improved. However the recent publication of the Rape Crisis Network's study "Rape and Justice in Ireland" indicates that many victims still feel let down by aspects of the complex of systems and processes that exist to protect and vindicate them. Why that should continue to be so, how those concerns can be effectively addressed and what price is being paid by both victims and society as a result are things which I know will be the subject of useful debate here today.
Later today, I will attend the official opening of the Criminal Courts Complex in Dublin – a stunning new facility, a landmark building where the designers were tasked among other things, with creating a victim-sensitive and appropriate environment, including specially designed victim support rooms to give enhanced privacy, security and comfort for victims and their families. Such sensitivities would have been far from the thoughts of architects and planners in earlier eras and it is a credit to the work of victim support organisations like the DRCC that consciousness of the needs, rights and realities of victims has moved out of the shadows and into the mainstream. I hope that for future victims the physical environment of trials and consultations will at least offer a more positive experience.
But of course better bricks and mortar are only a part of the intricate set of constructs which affect victims of sexual violence. The trauma of such violence is often of itself life-altering, causing psychological and physical long-term damage. The strong person who the day before the rape could have confidently told their story in a police station or a witness box, is not in the same situation the day after the rape, or for many days thereafter. The strong person who could have shrugged off a vaginal examination for a routine medical check is in an utterly different situation when being medically examined post alleged rape. The invasiveness of these procedures and practices which are regarded as necessary to secure vital evidence and to ensure a fair trial are much greater in the case of offences of sexual violence than in most other crimes and again thanks to the lobbying of the DRCC and other NGO’s, today’s medical, legal and police personnel are much better educated and trained in dealing with these matters than were their predecessors.
There has been a manifest continuum of public and professional education in these matters that still continues apace and that this conference will help to develop further. Yet for the individual victim who lives in a personal, social and community context there may be other factors at work from attitudes and fears to events which can conduce to make a victim deeply uncomfortable at any or all stages of the post-rape criminal process. It may be questionable to what extent any such process dealing with such a dreadful event can be anything other than a grimly tough and uncomfortable experience, but one thing is not debatable and that is the fact that both victim and society have a strong vested interest in ensuring that there is a criminal process and that rapists do not remain at large because their victim’s fortitude and resilience falter at some stage or other of that process for reasons that are forseeable and reasonably avoidable.
The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre saw the need to befriend, counsel, advise and support victims who might otherwise either resile from reporting serious crimes or who might experience the criminal process as a lonely journey in which they had to look out for themselves. The alleged rapist will have his or her own legal team, but in the criminal justice system victims of crime are not, as a general rule, formally represented in the same or a parallel way and so do not have access to a range of official personal advisors or supports, apart from what might come their way informally via the prosecution and police team. The Centre has contributed hugely over the years in creating a voluntary framework of support and care on which victims can lean and depend to help them come successfully through what will inevitably be a difficult and challenging period of their lives. It has also contributed considerably to greater public awareness of the multiplicity of issues raised by sexual violence and the downstream consequences for victims.
We are no longer as ignorant, naïve or silent as we were thirty years ago. An insight into the chilling price paid for that silence was graphically set out in the Ryan and Murphy reports, both of which unmasked the dangers of a culture of unaccountability and left worrying questions about the areas of vulnerability to sexual violence and abuse which are still protected by cloaks of secrecy, privacy and noblesse oblige.
As a society we are stronger post Murphy and Ryan. As a society we are stronger every single time a rapist or sexual predator of any kind is called to account and held to account before our courts. But we would have no such reports and no successful convictions without victims who are prepared to initiate and sustain the process that leads over months and sometimes years to a court verdict. That process, of its nature, carries no guarantees in terms of outcome but one thing is sure, if a victim does nothing for whatever reason, then his or her rapist will grow in confidence and in opportunity to wreak further havoc in the lives of the innocent. Victims who take on their attackers through the courts not only vindicate their own trauma and take back control over their lives but they help to seriously limit the freedom of would-be rapists to continue their violent behavior. Every time a victim faces down an attacker in court they deserve support, respect and gratitude from the public, for theirs is not just a personal service or a personal crusade but a crucial public service. Whatever gets in the way of that public service is something the public needs to know about and to be interested in. That is where the scholarship and research conducted by academics with an interest in this area is of such importance and why today’s conference holds the potential to help us develop our criminal justice system in ways that punish the offender who rapes and creates an encouraging environment in which victims can feel confident to do what it takes to ensure that punishment follows the crime.
So today’s conference is a thought-provoking opportunity to discuss how the criminal justice system can be both meaningfully victim sensitive and also fair to a person accused who is entitled to the presumption of innocence until found guilty beyond reasonable doubt. I thank you for this important work and wish you well with your discussions. Go raibh mile maith agaibh.