Editor’s note: This piece contains discussion of sexual assault, violence against women, and animal cruelty.
Image: Theen Moy, Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
It was March of 2020 and the world had ended. I was driving on the freeway, going to visit my mum, but mostly we passed our hours locked in our separate houses, still believing the pandemic would be over in a few weeks.
On the radio, a news announcer described how someone had castrated and disembowelled a koala on a popular hiking track, its body found by weekend walkers early the next morning. The next item was about a South Australian man accused of impersonating a police officer and raping and stealing from at least one woman.
The two crimes curdled together in my mind.
*
There’s an old journalist’s adage that says, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, as if violence is just another opportunity for bad puns. I read the news every day, but no story appears about the alleged police impersonator. No more details of the arrest, no bail hearing.
It feels to me like something that should be getting attention. Not just because the accusations imply enough violence to satisfy the disquieting media demand for conflict. But because it’s a story that seems to overflow its own edges.
The crime of impersonating a police officer is a demonstration of how easily the trust we’re forced to place in (often undeserving) institutions can be turned against us. It makes me think about the koala—in the years before it was attacked, hundreds of people had hiked through its habitat. Every unwanted but harmless interaction wore away at its defensive fight and flight responses. And now it was dead. The Australian population is similarly conditioned to the police insignia. When the blue uniform appears at the door, we’re told to open wide and obey. But symbols of trust are easily misappropriated and misused (by impersonators and professionals alike) and when that happens, the thin membrane separating us from someone else’s violence quickly evaporates.
I decide to go to the arraignment—if no-one else is going to write about this case, maybe I should. But I’m eaten up by regret as soon as I enter the District Court building in Adelaide. No matter where I stand among the tangle of doorways and staircases that scream of their architect’s admiration for Escher, I am in the way.
This is how my day has started every time I’ve been assigned to report on a court case. While other journalists move confidently in little cliques toward mysterious doorways, I’m forced to find a corner large enough to accommodate my panic.
Crime reporting, especially if you don’t do it regularly (and I only do it rarely), is as confounding as the buildings it happens in. It is completely controlled by a huge list of things you can’t do, many of which are expressed in Latin. And the rules aren’t like most other rules of journalism (ethics, grammar, being free from commercial influence), which are just trotted out, exercised for show, when convenient. They’re real rules—the kind that, when ignored, can result in huge fines or, nauseatingly, even a change in the course of justice.
Crime reporting is as confounding as the buildings it happens in, and is completely controlled by a huge list of things you can’t do.
What can’t be published while a matter is sub judice (in English—the entire time period between a warrant being issued or an arrest being made and the conclusion of court proceedings) is far-reaching. Veteran journalist Lisa Wilkinson, in a staggering episode of irony, was found to have recently crossed the line while receiving an award for her crime reporting. The words Wilkinson used in her acceptance speech when receiving a Logie for her coverage of the Brittany Higgins rape allegations were described by ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum as obliterating ‘the distinction between an allegation and a finding of guilt’, and the trial has since been delayed out of concern it may be prejudiced by media coverage.
So, on the day of the arraignment, even though I find the right courtroom (somehow) and enter it, do the weird obligatory little bow in the direction of the judge, and locate a seat that doesn’t contravene COVID regulations—I am still stiff with anxiety before the proceedings begin.
I know that all I’m allowed to write is an unembellished account of what takes place in the court. I also know that audio recorders aren’t allowed, my shorthand is terrible, and I’ve only brought one pen that seems to be running out of ink.
And finally, I know that for a few people—the person accused of the crimes, the alleged victims, their families—these days in court are likely among the worst days of their life. But I, with the help of my shoddy pen, will erase the humanity of their experience, because that’s what the rules require.
I, with the help of my shoddy pen, will erase the humanity of their experience, because that’s what the rules require.
The rules are an ostensibly good thing in the same way that the whole justice system is an ostensibly good thing. Incredibly flawed, destined to create suffocatingly awful moments of unkindness and unfairness, but conceptually—when looked at from just the right angle and level of privilege—sound and necessary. It probably is true that if the media could publish whatever it wanted, actual justice would be even harder to come by.
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The result of these rules, though, is that court reporting is reduced to handful of template scripts. Whether the crime is defamation or murder, the format is the same. Tiny splashes of narrative scaffolding, like the demeanour of a family member outside court, open the way for voluminous quoting of things said during trial. The addition of the liberal use of caveats (the letters a-l-l-e-g-e-d-l-y must wear out quickly on court reporters’ keyboards) absolves journalists of responsibility when audiences do what is instinctive (but not always conducive to justice) and build a full story of what happened from a few scraps of data.
As I sit in the courtroom waiting (for hours, as it turns out) for the arraignment, other cases roll through and I’m plunged into a sea of narratives. The judge is only dealing with pleas on this particular morning, and each matter is brief: a list of charges is read out, a plea is entered, maybe a little bail negotiation takes place, a trial date is set.
I’m there for three hours. Each matter takes maybe ten minutes. All except one (a car accident) involves an alleged crime against a woman or a girl. There are macabre and possibly coincidental parallels between the cases that feel immediately important—the prevalence of choking in the instances of domestic violence, the terribly young ages of victims listed in the sexual assault charges.
It is a parade of horror that reminds me forcibly—like a sense memory, but triggered by a sort of hollow emotion I can’t name—of the morning police briefings I used to receive as a newspaper reporter. They’d appear in every journalist’s inbox daily, and among the service station thefts and party district assaults, there were regular listings of rape.
The consistency of these reports should be unsurprising. In 2020, there were 396 victims of homicide and related offences reported to police, while 27,505 victims of sexual assault were recorded in the same year.
But rape, like domestic violence—another hugely common crime that disproportionately affects women, girls and non-binary people—rarely makes the paper. There is still a ‘behind closed doors’ mentality (sometimes masquerading as sensitivity) about violence against women that subconsciously positions it as not being truly transgressive, unlike, for example, murdering a stranger on the street.
There is still a ‘behind closed doors’ mentality about violence against women that subconsciously positions it as not being truly transgressive.
The transgressive is newsworthy, the ordinary is not. Even the portrayals of violence against women that do leak into the mainstream through the booming true crime industry are often unrepresentative. The victims in these stories are usually white and privileged and the perpetrators are more likely to be serial killers or outlandish confidence men than intimate partners.
Amid this gaping void in public conversation, 23 per cent of Australian women—almost a quarter—have been sexually assaulted, with 60 per cent of those assaulted more than once. This unrelenting flood of crime engulfs us, but in the media, reports of sexual assault mix misleadingly with murder. They both appear as awful, but vanishingly rare, occurrences.
This remains true even as Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame bring the issue of crimes against women onto the evening news. There’s a persistent vision of these experiences as isolated, when they are terrifyingly ordinary.
But that’s only part of the media’s silence on crimes against women. The other element is that domestic violence and sexual assault are often crimes of contested narrative. A victim might allege violence, the accused might say they were never in the same room. This means that while they’re sub judice, cases of rape and domestic violence are especially tightly bound by the court reporting template. There are very few contextual details guaranteed to remain uncontested that can be safely reported. And these proceedings are also more likely to be subjected to further restrictions, like suppression orders or being held in camera (not accessible to the public or media)—leaving little for publication.
Alleged crimes against women remain invisible (or at best, reduced to faithful but dry renderings), because the rules strip away the ability for journalists to make them compelling. Storytelling is driven by a desire to parse the chaos of existence into something more meaningful. In court, journalists are instinctively drawn toward narratives that offer reasons why people do awful things to each other. At their worst, those narratives are overly simplified and fuelled by damaging cultural assumptions. Victims and alleged perpetrators are rightfully protected from this tendency by the rules, but storytellers are left with only a tiny window through which the why can be explored. Few journalists (with notable exceptions, like Lucia Osborne-Crowley) are equipped with the detailed legal knowledge required to tread this line safely, so they don’t. The why is abandoned, and the story loses its power.
Statistics can’t bridge the gap—they are poor fodder for the public imagination. Where the plague of violence against women can be truly felt is in places like that courtroom, where I waited for the arraignment. As I sat there, dozens of untold stories made the air thick around me, and the misunderstanding of scale became stark and plain.
*
Eventually, the case I was there to see came before the court. The defendant joined by video link, he pleaded not guilty. No other journalists followed me as I shuffled outside afterward—the story was mine to tell.
I didn’t write anything, though, because I realised, too late, that this was likely to be another crime of contested narratives. And so, in a room full of important, first-hand experiences that attested to an ongoing and widespread crisis, there was no story.
Instead there was just the bulky shape of institutions—the media, the justice system, the police. The commanding presence of these big blunt instruments crowded out almost all vision of the people—the victims of crime, mostly women and girls—who offered up their trust, hoping that one of these enormous, churning mechanisms would make things better, not worse.
