System Failure
The Silencing of Rape Survivors
One in five Australian women has been the victim of a sexual assault. For these women, there is less than a 1 per cent chance that their rapist has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted of the crime. These are the bare numerical facts of system failure.
We offer rape survivors a stark choice: go to the police, or remain silent. In recent times, the public pressure on survivors to report has increased, alongside a growing focus on two other options: civil action against the perpetrator, or going public. These evolving social responses are intended to offer an alternative to the tradition of silencing. However, each of these choices, for survivors, involves a further sacrifice of what they have already lost.
The legal system’s responses to rape were designed without survivors in mind, and they do not address, in any way, the questions that survivors ask or the needs they express. Simply put, on the systemic response to rape, we are having the wrong conversation.
Michael Bradley is a lawyer and writer. As managing partner of Marque Lawyers, a commercial firm with a strong human rights interest, Michael has become directly involved in work for sexual violence survivors and advocacy for reform in that area of the law. In his work with dozens of survivors as well as leading experts in the field, he has observed consistent patterns in the legal system’s response to these survivors and their experiences within that system—patterns that are at once deeply disturbing and clear pointers to why the system continues to fail.
Michael is the Chair of the Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy Initiative (RASARA), which leads policy reform in this area. He is also a widely published essayist on legal and social justice issues, with a regular column in Crikey and previously The Drum, as well as other media including The Saturday Paper and Australian Financial Review. His book Coniston, on the last massacre of Aboriginal people, was released by UWA Publishing in 2019.
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