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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (23 October) . . Page.. 4057 ..

MS TUCKER

cases of sexual assault are perpetrated by men. Nationally, of the reported cases in 2001, 81 per cent of victims were women. By far the highest rate of sexual assault is perpetrated on males and females under the age of 19, particularly adolescent girls and very young boys. Measures of reported sexual assaults do not reflect the true amount of assaults occurring in our community.

Rapes are one of the most under-reported crimes. Rape trials also have a high drop-out rate, because of the trauma of the process. The majority of women do not seek help and do not tell anyone. A majority of survivors do not take their cases to court.

It is true of crime in general that only a small proportion of cases make it to court. But the problem with sexual assault is not generally the difficulty of finding the perpetrator; it is a problem of the cultural and personal shame leading to not reporting and choosing not to go ahead with prosecution because of the trauma of trials. That is the main motivation for reform of the laws here: to make the trials less of an ordeal, without compromising the fairness of trials for people accused of sexual assault and so ensure that more perpetrators are formally brought to account in our justice system.

Of course, enabling prosecutions is by no means the only work that needs to be done. Prevention is always the best way to reduce crime. One brief example is: the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training in 1994 noted the importance of early education, addressing of the link between learned masculinity and violence, and the importance of learning at an early age to deal with the issues of power and control in any attempt to eliminate violence based on gender.

Although rape has been recognised as a crime for a long time, there have been severely restricted interpretations of what counts as rape as it was understood by the privileged men in power within a society that largely accepted without question the power imbalance between men and women-to the extent that women were regarded as the property of men, inferior to men in many ways and incapable of many things. While feminism over the past 150 years has developed general awareness of this, and values, views and laws have changed to bring us much closer to equal, imbalances remain.

It was in living memory that rape in marriage was recognised as a crime, recognising that women continue to be thinking, choosing humans after committing to marriage. There are many changes to be pleased about. Sexual violence, however, is where the patriarchal power play is at its most crude and abhorrent.

In reviews of judicial attitudes on various aspects of sexual assault evidence and trials, it is clear that some of those attitudes are alive and well. It is in this context, and in the realisation of rape as an expression of power, that a lot of attention has been given to how to change conditions in sexual assault trials to remove some of that power imbalance.

On creating a preference for complainant evidence by audiovisual link where possible in new section 43, the scrutiny of bills committee report raised a number of issues. The first is the danger that, by allowing complainant evidence to be given remotely, there will be an underlying message communicated to a jury that the complainant is truly the victim of assault by the accused. The second issue raised is more general-that there is an inherent value in the accuser facing the accused in public if caught. This is on the assumption that

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