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What the experts say

• Mini-doc transcript - Dr Melanie Heenan

Mini-doc transcript - Dr Melanie Heenan

In Australia, the best statistics we’ve got on incidents and prevalence of sexual violence is a survey that was done in 1996, and through that survey, in the previous 12 months of that survey, there was over a hundred thousand women who said they’d been sexually assaulted, and when they asked women to reflect on their lives, since the age of 15, there were over a million women who could identify experiences of sexual violence, at some stage.

In Australia, the figures on reporting have remained fairly static, so some would suggest it’s as few as one in ten that literally report a sexual assault to the police. So that’s nine out of ten women who do not disclose or report to police. There were some that would suggest, and research would support that women won’t even tell a service in any great numbers. So there might only be 4 out of 10 women who would literally call a service, or even anonymously disclose that they’d been sexually assaulted.

They take place in the home, absolutely predominantly in the home, whether that’s her home, his home, a home, a private home, its almost overwhelmingly in a private residence or a private place. There certainly are assaults that occur in other contexts, so there are a small proportion of rapes that occur where strangers are the perpetrator, again they often occurs in a private home, potentially in her home, in the victim/survivor’s home, more than in any other home. Public places are much less likely to be a venue or location for a rape or sexual assault.

The long term health effects for sexual assault and physical violence are extraordinary. We have really powerful evidence basis for that. And we certainly have for many many years known that the impact of sexual assault or rape has really long term and quite damaging effects on women’s mental health, on their capacity to re-engage with the social world in which they live. They sometimes become agoraphobic, they develop what is called post traumatic stress disorder. That might mean that they have nightmares, that they have flashbacks, that they disassociate from certain contexts. We also know, more recently perhaps, that the longer term health effects literally on their physical health can be incredibly damaging.

Women do face incredible levels of disbelief still. Not just in any public context, like a court context, but they also face it from family members and friends. They’re questioned about why they let him in, or why they went with him somewhere, why they were drinking with him, how they couldn’t have known that it was going to turn into a rape situation.

What we do know is there are a miniscule number of false allegations, a miniscule number of charges that are laid against women for making false allegations. But there is absolutely the assumption that most women who report this crime or who report this assault are making it up.

The fear of being blamed for the assault is overwhelming. I think for women, that it often keeps them silent. For years, if not decades. I think they also face a number of barriers or disincentives to thinking about going through a process where they’ll have to talk about the intimate details of the assault. So if they contemplate reporting to the police, I think women get that they’re going to have to tell a complete stranger exactly what happened. I think they fear that if they do go ahead with reporting, and they do go through a court process, it will result in an acquittal or he’ll get off, and that will mean a jury doesn’t believe them, it’ll mean that the court’s exposed them to what is often a grueling process of cross-examination, they often feel completely stripped bare in that context, and often talk about secondary victimization in those contexts or feeling that it wasn’t worth it.