Perverting Justice

Bundaberg’s bizarre heroine promotes her failed rape case plus the feminist push for juryless rape trials.

Scotland is currently pushing ahead of Australia in the feminist drive to see more men behind bars but no doubt we will catch up soon. Their latest plan, announced in a proposed criminal justice bill last week, involves new laws to abolish jury trials in rape cases. Scottish lawmakers believe members of the public can’t be trusted to adjudicate on sexual assault cases because they don’t have the right attitudes.  

According to Scottish law lecturer Stuart Waiton writing on spiked-online.com, Scotland’s justice department has claimed it is not possible for ordinary people to be “trauma-informed”.

As Waiton suggests, it’s worth thinking about what a trauma-informed approach to rape trials means in practice. He quotes a government document which explains that the trauma endured through rape can affect “the demeanour and presentation” of victims. That is, the trauma caused by the sexual offence “may make a victim appear less credible or reliable”. But enlightened, trauma-informed judges “will recognise this behaviour as evidence of trauma – evidence, that is, that a crime has taken place,” says Waiton. As he explains, the result is obvious: “And just like that a less-than-believable ‘victim’ can now be believed.” Neat trick, eh?

Hmmm, if only the Brittany Higgins case could have been determined by an enlightened, trauma-informed judge, someone like Chief Justice Lucy McCallum perhaps, who could have seen Higgins’ behaviour, described by Federal police as “evasive, uncooperative and manipulative,” as clear evidence of her trauma. Oh well, lucky we had the public prosecutor Shane Drumgold to protect the traumatised Higgins and ensure no new jury had a chance of another go at her.

There’s abundant evidence demolishing the whole notion of trauma-informed practice, as spelt out in a Centre for Prosecutor Integrity report on “trauma-informed junk science”, which quotes an Air Force Office of Special Investigations assessment dismissing such approaches as based on “flawed science” and quoting numerous negative evaluations in journal articles and expert commentary.   

Yet Australian courts may well end up soon following the same path as their Scottish equivalents. The Albanese government is busily repaying the debt owed to the feminists for helping destroy the Morrison government by pouring money into many of their pet projects – like tilting justice to help alleged rape victims. Last week they announced $14.7 million to “strengthen sexual assault laws and prevent further harm to victims through the justice process”, adding to the $20 million announced in last year’s budget for initiatives, including – wait for it – “trauma-informed legal services”.  

Across the country, there are advocates already pushing this agenda. It’s an agenda that school children and their parents attending a charity event next September at St Luke’s Anglican school in the Queensland coastal town of Bundaberg will not be expecting.  

Somehow, a guest speaker has been included in this breast cancer fundraiser who has nothing to do with cancer. Trish Wyatt is a local woman whose claim to fame is as a self-described “rape victim”. Yet the man she accused of violent sexual assault was found by a jury last year, after only 30 minutes of deliberation, NOT GUILTY on all charges in the Queensland District Court.

Clearly, Trish Wyatt is an inventive creature, so she used this slight hiccup in her narrative to her advantage by calling her new book “Don’t Report Rape.”  She claims the fact that her violent perpetrator was found not guilty is proof that our justice system simply doesn’t work. “Our justice system is so flawed and so broken that it provides a legal loophole or get out of jail free card for rapists,” explains Wyatt.  

Not just any rapist. She’s alleging she’s a victim of an “extremely violent and life-threatening” sexual assault - “I truly thought I wasn’t going to survive that night” - taking place over an eight-hour period, which apart from repeated intercourse, allegedly included attempted strangulation, anal sex, fisting and a very strange form of fellatio which somehow involved him kneeling on her chest and forcing himself into her mouth. Hard to imagine how this worked unless he had extremely short legs or was extraordinarily well-equipped. No wonder the defence barrister suggested this never happened.   

Read Wyatt’s account of this horrendous ordeal and there’s only one possible conclusion. The jury simply didn’t believe beyond reasonable doubt that this all happened.

Wyatt suggests the reason is simple. They weren’t trauma-informed. They didn’t realise the behaviour that made her appear less credible or reliable was actually proof that she was traumatised by the rape.

Behaviour like:

• Making no attempt to leave the unlocked motel room over an 8-hour period, even though the police station was only two minutes down the road. 

• Having a shower in the motel room before she left the next morning and kissing her sleeping assailant goodbye before exiting the room. Wyatt claims this trauma-informed “fawn” response aims at keeping the perpetrator on side to avoid more violence.

• The day after the alleged rape, sending a text message to another man she’d been chatting to online saying “Hey, Handsome xxx.”

• Continuing to go out and meet men after the alleged assault. She met her current partner 20 days after the event.

• Stating to the police four days after the event that she was “not even sure a crime had been committed.”

Wyatt argues she was “slut-shamed” and “victim-blamed” in court due to the defence revealing that she’d had sex with another man the night before, that she’d agreed to have this first date in a motel room because she was “100% after casual sex”, and she arrived with 2 bottles of wine and 4 rum/coke mixed drinks plus ended up sharing the man’s marijuana. Wyatt was contemptuous of her alleged perpetrator’s behaviour, a man ten years her junior, sobbing in the patrol car after being arrested and breaking down in distress in court.      

A former social worker, Wyatt has been on a disability pension due to PTSD since the event but is very actively working to change rape laws, speaking at the March4justice and promoting her new book.  At the launch, local labour party MP Tom Smith enthused about her writing: “I absolutely love this book” and supported all her recommendations for change to the justice system. Our wimpish political class invariably kowtows to such women, however outlandish their claims.

Now Wyatt is to speak at the charity event at St Luke’s school. Having received a concerned letter from parents at the school, Mothers of Sons (MOS) has written to the school principal and board, questioning the appropriateness of a guest speaker who is intent on undermining the justice system and misleading the public about the effectiveness of our juries. The MOS letter also raises questions as to whether Trish Wyatt’s behaviour really presents an admirable role model for an Anglican school. The letter sent to the school will also be circulated to the school board and local press. We’ll see whether MOS gets a response.

It would be great if many of you reading this could also write – here are draft letters and contact details for the school principal and board, and Tom Smith MP and the Opposition MP. (To edit the draft letters, go to file and then download, to obtain a word document you can use.) The feminist juggernaut is intent on utterly undermining our justice system unless we show people in authority that there’s active resistance to their plans.

Make no mistake, the push is on. Last year, during the media hubbub around Brittany Higgins and Christian Porter, we saw repeated calls for independent courts for rape cases – secretive kangaroo courts which would undermine legal protection for accused men. Affirmative or enthusiastic consent laws are being introduced across the country and no doubt juries in rape cases may be for the chop.

It’s all driven by ideology, rather than reason or science. The debate taking place in Scotland is based on the assumption that juries are subject to “rape myths”, which Scotland’s top prosecutor, Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC describes as “prejudicial and false beliefs about rape that affect their evaluation of evidence presented at trial.”  Although Bain claims there’s “overwhelming evidence” that juries are affected by such beliefs, this is simply wrong, as Rick Bradford explains in his excellent recent blog, Rape Trial juries and the Erosion of Justice.

Bradford shows Bain is relying on jury studies cooked up by feminist law professor Fiona Leverick based on self-selected volunteers judging pretend rape cases. Yet definitive research studying real juries immediately post-verdict (involving a total of 771 jurors) was conducted in 2018-9 by Cheryl Thomas, Professor of Judicial Studies, at UCL. This showed hardly any real jurors believe such myths.  

Thomas’ report concluded: “The overwhelming majority of jurors do not believe that rape must leave bruises or marks, that a person will always fight back when being raped, that dressing or acting provocatively or going out alone at night is inviting rape, that men cannot be raped or that rapes will always be reported immediately. The small proportion of jurors who do believe any of these myths or stereotypes amounts to less than one person on a jury."

So, the first-ever empirical research on actual jurors serving on real cases showed the feminist propaganda is wrong. Most jurors are not influenced by rape myths and are quite capable of proper judgements about guilt or innocence in rape cases. But just as the Scottish government is choosing to ignore this vital fact, Australian governments are likely to also charge ahead with their goal of ousting juries from rape trials – unless the public makes it very clear this is not on.