It was bad enough, albeit totally expected, that Melbourne’s Herald Sun and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph would parade before its readers regular stories about victims of crime and their families being unhappy about a sentence handed down to an offender.
(The Herald Sun has essentially become a cipher for the views of Noel McNamara, a victims of crime spokesman whose message is relentlessly predictable.)
But now The Age has also begun to trot out the dissatisfied victims line. On Monday it used the hook of a letter to the editor from a man whose children had been murdered by his wife, to drum up a story about victims’ rights and the headline-grabbing comments of the Victorian DPP Jeremy Rapke last week about the criminal justice system.
The father of two boys murdered by their mother has attacked defence lawyers as manipulators of an unfair justice system and backed prosecutor Jeremy Rapke’s controversial stand on victims’ rights.
“The system favours the accused far more than it should,” David Fitchett wrote in a letter to The Age. “They have all the rights.”
Now, if Mr. Fitchett had said that he thought the system was perfectly fair, that would have been a news story. But his views are shared by 99 percent of victims or relatives of victims, particularly where a serious physical assault or death is involved. And that’s not a criticism of Mr. Fitchett — he is understandably emotional about a terrible loss and he is entitled to hold this view given the circumstances. But that does not make it right.
When is the media in this country going to focus on this simple fact — that victims have never had so many rights, and the criminal justice system now protects them even when they embellish their claims of suffering?
As to the former, let’s look at the views of former Commonwealth DPP, Damian Bugg, expressed as recently as July this year.
“Victims were, by the mid 1980s, beginning to have a voice. Advocates and victims lobbyists had begun to obtain traction and in 1986 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and published the ‘Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power’,” Bugg said. These Principles are reflected in all jurisdictions in Australia through victims’ charters.
And said Bugg, “Earlier involvement of prosecutors in the charging process and closer involvement and contact between prosecutor and victim lead to, in my opinion, better presentation of matters before Court. The process of keeping the victim informed throughout the passage of a matter from offence to verdict has taken much of the anguish and upset out of the process for victims and has given rise to a higher level of reporting.”
And victims have it easy when it comes to anyone questioning their veracity. Human nature being what it is, the system of victim impact statements is abused for money or revenge in some cases. Occasionally, victims will claim all manner of mental and physical suffering to bolster their chances in a civil claim, or they will hype the rhetoric about the negative impact of a convicted person simply as a way of getting back at that person.
Yet a victim who plays this game gets away with it — victim impact statements are taken at face value because to doubt the victim’s word at that stage of proceedings will harm the defendant’s chances on sentence.
When does the media ever expose a victim’s exaggerations? Never it seems.
I echo Liz’s opening sentence. I agree with the rest of her paragraph as well. I work with a person who was a victim of child abuse and to this day, the effects are evident. The victim never forgets, only the perpetrator forgets. No amount of money can change the past. We’ve had 22 years of United Nations General Assembly guidance in these matters and I am quite happy to continue along. To suggest that a victim of crime profits hugely from the crime has to be a joke? Right? Who cares if a victim embellishes the experience a little? The ordeal may well prove to have long, long, long – lasting effects.
An interesting choice of article for this National Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I would like to clarify one issue relating to who receives victim support and coverage. Not all victims of crime are created equal within the law and as such there are many ‘victims’ who still don’t ‘have it so good’. Women who have been victims of domestic / family violence and sexual assault continue to be grossly under represented in receiving the type of support and coverage given to other ‘victims’. Rather than comparing experiences let’s provide better supports to these women, whose rights as victims of crime are consistently ignored.