From hero to scapegoat: Margaret Cunneen led the prosecution of the 2000 gang rapes. Now she is painted as a villain

A PACK of youths led by Bilal Skaf terrorised young women in a series of violent attacks across the parks of Sydney in 2000. This prosecutor stood up to them.

They were the sickening gang rapes that outraged the nation.

A pack of youths led by Bilal Skaf terrorised young women in a series of violent attacks across the parks of south western Sydney. Four teenagers were raped and degraded in the serial attacks over 20 days in August 2000 as the rest of the city prepared for the Sydney Olympics.

Ringleader Bilal Skaf received a 55-year jail sentence, the harshest non-life sentence ever handed down in Australia, although it was subsequently whittled away in a series of appeals.

Standing up in court for the community and prosecuting this gang who showed no remorse was Margaret Cunneen.

It shot her to prominence as the country’s highest-profile and respected champion of the rights of sexual assault victims, earned her the Director of Public Prosecutions Service Excellence Award and a promotion to deputy senior crown prosecutor.

But now, more than a decade later, she is being targeted as a scapegoat in the decision by Queensland prosecutors not to prosecute former national swim coach Scott Volkers for a series of alleged assaults at the other end of the criminal spectrum on three of his swimmers.

Cunneen’s advice - that there was not enough fresh evidence to warrant recharging Volkers with seven indecent assault charges involving the women because there was no reasonable prospect of a jury convicting him - has consumed five days of the eight-day hearing in Sydney with a blow-by-blow critique of her 16-page report.

Sitting as head of the commission is Justice Peter McClellan. He is seconded from his usual job as a Supreme Court judge and a member of the Court of Criminal Appeal who banned Cunneen from prosecuting a retrial of one of the Skaf gang rapists because she had showed empathy for the victim and had given a lecture about the case.

McClellan had been critical of her public show of support for the 17-year-old known as Miss C who had been raped 25 times by 14 men in four locations over six hours. When Cunneen was forced to withdraw, Miss C refused to give evidence again and the rapist was acquitted. He remained in jail for other attacks.

The commission and its counsel assisting have steadfastly adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to all witnesses other than victims however the tension in the commission’s hearing room in Sydney while Cunneen sat in the witness box was at times palpable.

‘The tension in the commission’s hearing room in Sydney while Cunneen sat in the witness box was at times palpable’

At one stage, Sarah McNaughton SC, who is representing the State of NSW and the NSW DPP’s office, accused the commission of firing questions at Cunneen that “had the whiff of a personal attack”.

There has been no acknowledgment in the commission that Cunneen had been appointed to head a parallel state commission of inquiry to investigate sex abuse claims in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese. She handed down her report into that last month.

Justice McClellan, who has acknowledged that he has never sat on a rape trial or heard the evidence of a victim until he was appointed to this royal commission, told Cunneen that the commissioners had learned through talking to thousands of victims how common it was for someone abused as a child to turn their back on the situation where they were abused, referring Volker’s alleged victims who gave up swimming.

“You understand that?” he asked Cunneen.

Cunneen: “I do. I have seen thousands of victims too. I too was siting in a commission of inquiry listening to very large numbers of victims saying the same.”

Cunneen, who joined the DPP’s child sexual assault unit in 1986, also prosecuted notorious paedophiles Phillip Bell, Colin Fisk and Dolly Dunn and the St Gerard Majella priests, who preyed on their novices.

The background to Cunneen appearing before the royal commission goes back to late 2003 and early 2004, in the wake of not only the Skaf trials but just a month after she had successfully prosecuted a second gang of serial rapists, four Pakistani brothers who reference the Skaf gang in their attacks.

Her then boss. the former NSW DPP Nicholas Cowdery QC, had asked her to prepare the legal advice regarding Volkers following a request from the then-beleaguered Queensland DPP Leanne Clare.

Ms Clare, now a Queensland judge, was under fire for her decision to drop the seven indecent assault charges involving three women who had been coached by Volkers as teenagers. She had sought independent advice about whether to recharge Volkers, whose protegees include Sam Riley and Susie ONeill, following a police reinvestigation and criticism from the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission.

The commission’s 15th public case study had eight points to investigate including the response of Swimming Australia to allegations of child sexual abuse against two swim coaches and the response of Swimming Australia, Swimming Queensland and Queensland Academy of Sport to the allegations of child sexual abuse against Volkers.

They also said they would look at the response of the Queensland Commissioner for Children and Young People and Child Guardian to the application by Volkers for a ‘blue card’ to allow him to work with children - and the response of prosecutors in Queensland and NSW to the allegations of child sexual abuse against Volkers.

Head coach Scott Volkers: Allegations of child sexual abuse

As it has turned out, most of the time has focused on Cunneen’s legal advice, which she said she had written in “prosecutor’s shorthand” because it was meant solely for other prosecutors, but her blunt phrases and conclusions about the lack of credibility of the three women who claimed they were assaulted by Volkers devastated them.

“I never envisaged that my advice would be provided to any person outside the Offices of the

DPPs in NSW and Queensland,” Cunneen said.

“It causes me extreme disquiet that my frank and forthright discussion of the credibility issues, viewed through the harsh lens of the manner in which, from my experience of trials, they would be raised in a courtroom, would be presented to a complainant.

“I stress that the advising does not contain my personal view of the credibility of the complainants, which is irrelevant. Had it been my job to convey the subject decision to a complainant, I would have done so in a sensitive and compassionate way.”

Cowdery, now retired, has backed her advice overall but said he would have used different language. For example, instead of describing the claims of massaging their breasts and in one case touching a vagina, as “relatively trivial”, Cowdery said he might have said they were at the lower end of the criminal scale.

Judge Clare said she had agreed with Cunneen that the claim of one of the women that when Volkers touched her at the age of 13 beneath two tight swimming costumes and a paid of shorts, she had experience an orgasm was a “significant feature of the allegation” and would have gone to the plausibility of the evidence if it had gone to trial.

What all the legal witnesses were in agreement with was that in the decade since then, sexual assault trials had changed almost out of all recognition with defence attacks on victims restricted and juries who had woken up to the complexities of the attacks and were more willing to believe them.