Your Reference Ain’t Relevant: Dark secret behind teen’s school photo
Harrison James looked like a normal, happy teenage boy. But behind closed doors, he was hiding a horrific secret. Warning: Distressing
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WARNING: Distressing
After his parents split when he was 10, Harrison James didn’t see his father for three years.
Their divorce was “very messy”, and his dad had been difficult to live with.
“But by the time I was in eighth grade, I was longing for that father figure. I reached out, wanting to get to know my dad again and [to] see if we could rekindle that relationship,” the 23-year-old survivor-advocate tells news.com.au.
To his delight, the pair “hit it off” – so much so that Harrison went to live with him.
“It was really positive, and it was really nice to be seen as his son and be accepted. I was just loving it.”
Before they reconnected, his father had remarried to a woman from the Philippines. When Harrison first moved in, his stepmother “was just sort of in the background. I didn’t have much to do with her”.
But a month into his living there, she suggested the two hang out.
“I just saw it as her wanting to build a stepmother-son relationship with me, just trying to be nice,” Harrison recalls.
“Obviously I had my mother and father who were going through this messy divorce, and I felt neglected, and all of a sudden there was an adult who saw there was a void that needed to be filled.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m actually being seen, and appreciated, and loved’. I thought that’s what it was.”
Harrison, who was just 13 at the time, couldn’t have known what would happen next.
‘I thought I was complicit in it’
It started with physical touch – hand-holding during a trip to the cinema. But, very quickly, Harrison says it led to kissing – his stepmother, who was 25 at the time, “breaking the barriers down, bit by bit” – until eventually, it became sexual. He was molested “every day, before and after school” from the age of 13 until just before he turned 16.
“The only reason I stuck around and wanted to stay there was because I thought I was in love with my stepmum. I thought that’s what love was, and I wanted to protect her,” Harrison says.
“I was told things like, ‘Nobody can find out’ and ‘If you say anything, we could both go to jail’. These awful, awful things to tell a young boy. She’d say, ‘You’re the man in this relationship’. I thought if I came forward and spoke up, I’d be seen as not manly enough.
“I thought I’d be giving up my relationship – not [revealing] that my stepmother was a bad person. That was my thinking at the time – because I was complicit in it, in my mind.”
The abuse stopped when his daughter – who “we had to pretend was my sister, because if my father had found out, I would have been really badly hurt” – was born.
His stepmother fled Australia suddenly in 2019, taking his daughter with her. In a bid to deflect from her leaving, she falsely accused Harrison of rape in an email to his father – a “punch in the guts” that forced him to come forward with the truth: that he had been taken advantage of as a young boy.
His stepmother remains overseas. No charges have been laid against her.
‘I really did reclaim my power’
In the wake of the ordeal, Harrison thought “the only answer was to take my own life”. He checked into a mental health facility at the height of Covid in 2020. After two months of treatment, Harrison left with a renewed purpose: to help others who had had similar experiences.
On March 31 last year, he made the brave decision to share his story publicly in a video on Instagram that’s since been viewed 54,000 times and has resulted in thousands of messages, both of support and from fellow survivors.
“I was so angry at being told, ‘You cannot talk about this’. It was burning in me. I was sick and tired of being told I couldn’t speak about it. When I made that video, I took ownership of it,” he says.
“It was empowering. It was like I was doing it for little Harri, because he didn’t have a voice then … I really did reclaim my power with that one video, and I continue to do it with every little project that I do. After being suppressed and silenced and told all these things for so long, I displayed strength. I didn’t reveal weakness with it.
“I don’t want to be defined by the fact I was molested. I want to be defined by what I do now – and by helping people as best I can.”
Your Reference Ain’t Relevant
Harrison and fellow advocate and child sexual abuse survivor Jarad Grice are now fighting to help protect victims of this horrific act. Earlier this month, the pair teamed up to launch Your Reference Ain’t Relevant, a campaign urging the NSW Government to amend section 21A(5A) of the Sentencing Procedure Act 1999 (NSW) so that character references can no longer be used when sentencing convicted perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
Character references are a mitigating factor applied to all criminal offences – including sexual assault.
Regardless of being found guilty, someone convicted of an offence is able to seek members of the community to attest to their “good standing” or “character” to potentially minimise or suspend their sentence.
As it currently stands, the degree to which a character reference can be used in child sexual offence matters is limited. If a judge decides that a perpetrator being “a person of good character” helped them commit an offence – for example, the perpetrator’s authority in their community caused the child’s parents to trust the perpetrator and leave their child in the perpetrator’s care – the judge cannot consider a character reference to reduce the offender’s sentence.
But, the fact a character reference can be considered at all in an instance of child sexual abuse, Harrison says, “makes me sick to my stomach”.
“These people – child sexual abusers – by the definition of their crimes do not have good character. They’re predatory by instinct,” he explains.
“They’re not only grooming the victim: they’re grooming [the victim’s] families, their friends, their schools, their churches, their communities. It’s part of their standard method. We can’t separate good character from the evil they perpetrate on children, [who are] the most vulnerable victims of all.”
He and Grice are fighting to have the final 21 words of the current legislation removed, in what will hopefully be the first step in a nationwide push to better protect child victims.
If their petition is successful, the amended provision would read: “In determining the appropriate sentence for a child sexual offence, the good character or lack of previous convictions of an offender is not to be taken into account as a mitigating factor.”
“[The current legislation] is just not tight enough. We want to make it more black and white – that if you are caught doing this to a child, you will serve your due course,” Harrison says.
“[Offenders] should be sentenced according to what they did and the harm it caused, uninfluenced by the benefit of the doubt regarding their character.”
Their petition has been presented to NSW Parliament by Greens MP Abigail Boyd, who told news.com.au the current “sentencing procedure for convicted child abusers is so clearly broken”. Ms Boyd is due to present a notice of motion to Parliament today.
“It is shocking that we allow convicted child abusers to exploit the very thing that allowed many of them to perpetrate their crimes in secret – positions of influence and good standing in society – to obtain more lenient sentences,” Ms Boyd says.
“A victim-survivor’s suffering is not mitigated by the fact that their abuser has been held in high regard; in fact, it often aggravates their experiences. Every time a good character reference influences a lenient sentence for a child abuser, it belittles the experience of their victim.
“It also sends a message to broader society that child abuse is simply some kind of aberrant behaviour from otherwise stand-up citizens of society, instead of what it really is: cruel and calculating behaviour by those in positions of power and authority that inflicts lifelong scars on their victims.”
Acting CEO of Full Stop Australia, Tara Hunter, has also thrown her support behind Your Reference Ain’t Relevant, telling news.com.au that character references “have no place in child abuse matters … one of the most shocking crimes”.
“The unique nature of child sex offences – whereby perpetrators commonly rely on an outwardly good reputation to perpetrate heinous crimes; and a person’s public reputation has very little to do with their propensity to offend behind closed doors – justifies a legislative amendment altogether removing the ability of character references to be considered in their sentencing,” she says.
“In addition, the current law in NSW is resulting in inconsistent outcomes for child sex abuse survivors, with some denied justice simply because of the context in which the offending occurred. Character references can still be considered by a court if the offender’s outwardly ‘good character’ did not help them commit the offence.”
Removing character references from consideration altogether, Ms Hunter says, “would recognise that the specific nature of those offences makes character evidence irrelevant”.
“We know how many people are reluctant to come forward and [who] feel concerned about being believed. This change will be a step towards an acknowledgment that victim-survivors will be believed and that, regardless of who caused the harm, they will be taken seriously. This amendment would give survivors more faith that the justice system recognises the particular evil and harm caused by child sex offences.”
Harrison hopes Your Reference Ain’t Relevant will help the public to understand that “child sexual assault is when a sexual act against a child takes place in the absence of consent, not the absence of good character”.
“It’s a terrifying reality. But society has to learn that perceived good character is not actually a protective factor when it comes to sexual assault against a child,” he says.
“Someone being good in some areas of their life does not preclude them from being extremely harmful in others.”
You can sign the Your Reference Ain’t Relevant petition here
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