Joe Hildebrand: Twitter’s latest firestorm makes mockery of justice for child abuse victims

Just because you dislike somebody does not make them a rapist. Just because someone is a conservative does not make them a criminal, writes Joe Hildebrand.

We all know Twitter can be a toxic place, but even the most hardened souls must have had an involuntary intake of breath at the latest firestorm to beset the social media site.

This involved a prominent political journalist and a prominent advocate publicly arguing over whether or not the former had really been sexually abused as a child.

Yes, really.

Now, I certainly don’t want to name any names or apportion any blame over this exchange. Anyone sufficiently obsessed can form their own opinion from the exchange itself or the news reports that inevitably followed.

My only question is whether a social media flame war over whether or not one participant genuinely suffered child sex abuse is what we really want public debate to be in this ­country.

Because the worst part of the whole thing wasn’t that it was shocking or came out of nowhere.

It was that it seemed to be just the latest result of an escalation in politicising sexual crime that has been building for years, fuelled by social media.

Perhaps the most infamous genesis of this trend was the case against George Pell, an archconservative as well as an archbishop, who was a lightning rod for the discontent of progressives both inside and outside the Catholic Church.

Allegations against Cardinal George Pell became twisted into political affiliations. Picture: Victor Sokolowicz

But this understandable frustration and criticism — much of which I shared — jumped the tracks when it came to the criminal case against him.

Suddenly the question of Pell’s guilt or innocence of the most heinous crime of child sex abuse seemed to come down to whether or not you agreed with him politically – as if political leanings had some correlation with paedophilia.

Of course Pell’s guilt or innocence was ultimately determined by the High Court in the most emphatic way possible – a unanimous verdict that he had been wrongly convicted.

Meanwhile the more serious problems of his and the Church’s failure to adequately address a culture in which such crimes were possible – as well as the need for the Church to better reflect mainstream values – were largely swept away along with the guilty verdict.

By politicising the personal – associating Pell’s political decisions as a Catholic leader with his supposed personal guilt – Pell’s detractors ended up having the political argument forgotten when the personal charge was quashed.

The other obvious trial by Twitter was that of Christian Porter, who was literally outed on the social media platform as the subject of a historic rape allegation that was withdrawn by the complainant just before she made the awful decision to end her own life.

An unproven historical rape allegation against former Attorney-General Christian Porter quickly snowballed into a political pile-on. Picture: Martin Ollman/Getty Images

Too much has been said about this already. Suffice to say it is an undoubtedly tragic case and one that has never been tested in a court of law, in accordance with the complainant’s last wishes.

But this did not prevent a social media pile-on that became a political pile-on that ultimately resulted in Porter’s decision to withdraw from public office – not that he ever really had much choice once the pile-on had begun.

Once more a wholly personal matter which ought to have been resolved by the criminal justice system – or not, as the parties decided – became a public political slugfest in which guilt or innocence of a terrible crime was proclaimed only by a partisan mob.

And of course we have the belated concerns raised now by the publicisation and politicisation of an alleged sexual assault at Parliament House which legal experts fear could result in the failure to produce a fair trial and potentially a default acquittal.

Late Senator Kimberley Kitching made allegations of bullying within her own ranks before her death.

Once more those so loudly demanding justice for victims may have inadvertently denied them that very same thing by making the allegedly criminal the overtly political.

Throughout all of this is the sense that there is no longer any distinction between personal and public life. That every allegation, no matter how intimate or extreme or tenuous, is political fodder.

And this feeds into the even more dangerous notion that somebody’s political leanings are an indication of their innocence or guilt – something that strikes at the very heart of the separation of powers that protects the independence of our judiciary.

Just because you dislike somebody does not make them a rapist.

Just because someone is a conservative does not make them a criminal.

And as the late Labor senator Kimberley Kitching and her Coalition colleague Concetta Fierravanti-Wells have shown, claims of bullying are rife on both sides of parliament.

The election hasn’t even been officially called yet but already there are signs it will be a deeply personal campaign, with each side attacking the character of the other’s leader — not to mention the Liberals attacking the character of their own.

Politics is obviously high stakes and emotions run high accordingly but surely it is brutal enough without weaponising some of the worst crimes imaginable – let alone unproven allegations of them.