Page 839 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 13 March 1991
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MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (12.12): Mr Speaker, I want to contribute briefly to this debate. With my colleagues I also welcome the initiative that Mr Connolly has taken in bringing this motion forward. It is clearly appropriate and it makes, I think, a contribution towards ensuring that the ACT is at the forefront of developments in this area. I think it is hard for those of us who have not been the victims of serious crime - and I am fortunate to count myself in that category - to understand the devastating effect that crime, even some minor crime, can have on its victims. As a solicitor for a number of years in this city, I did deal with people who were victims of crime in various ways, and the impact in some cases was quite extraordinary and deserving, I think, of more attention from our legal system than was hitherto the case.
I have to say that the effects of even minor crime can be quite devastating. I recall dealing with some cases of people who were victims in a very small way but who felt extremely aggrieved and who, I am sure, suffered scars of a quite profound nature. I can also recall acting in a criminal injuries compensation matter for one particular client, the victim of an assault, whose entire personality was altered by that crime and who later committed crimes herself because of the devastation that was inflicted on her by the original assault some time before that. So, a focus on the rights of the victims is very important and I support that.
Mr Connolly mentioned in his remarks that there were some dangers in the concept of a victim impact statement but that the way in which they were handled, I think he said in South Australia, created a sensitive environment in which they were used, and that in those circumstances they had proved to be effective. There is, I suppose, an element of retribution in such documents; but, given what I have said about the psychological effect on victims of crime, perhaps that element is not inappropriate. I know that there is some jurisprudential impurity in the notion of giving victims some right to feel that vengeance has been exacted. That obviously cannot be the aim of any decent legal system; but it should, I think, if possible, be a by-product in some cases, such that the victims have some progress made towards rehabilitation - and the scars that I mentioned before can be, as I have said, extremely deep.
I will just comment briefly on a couple of the paragraphs in the motion which refer particularly to the rights of the victims of crime. These paragraphs obviously focus on information flow - on giving victims full information on their rights, on what courses of action are open to them, and on what is happening to the person who performed the crime against them. That is obviously all very important.
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