Sexual assault perpetrators put on notice with dramatic police reforms

Public outrage over the treatment of women subjected to abuse has been heard loud and clear, with sweeping reforms to hit the police force to ensure justice.

Perpetrators of sexual and family violence have been put on notice, with police committing to changing the way officers respond to victims.

Sex assault cases that never made it to court will be reviewed and frontline police retrained on cyber-stalking and harassment, under sweeping reforms to better protect victims of domestic abuse.

In an exclusive interview with the Saturday Herald Sun, Assistant Commissioner for Family Violence Lauren Callaway said Victoria Police had heard loud and clear the public outrage over the treatment of women subjected to sexual abuse, and would introduce major changes to ensure those women got justice.

The force has set up an independent panel of experts to re-examine closed sexual assault cases to determine if police did enough during the initial investigations or if further work could be done to dig up new evidence and lay charges.

Ms Callaway said sex assault investigations were extremely complex because the crime often occurred in private without witnesses. But police recognised they must do more to hold the perpetrators to account.

Assistant Commissioner Lauren Callaway. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

“We have seen on a national and state level the community outrage at how women are treated through the sexual assault process – and police are part of that outrage,” she said.

“We want to work with victims and hear their stories so we can identify ways to do better.”

The pilot, known as the “brief authorisation program”, will run for the next 12 months and involve a specialist lawyer from the Office of Public Prosecutions and an experienced detective not involved in the original sexual assault investigation.

“We think it’s really important to go back and give victims that option. We want to give every brief the best chance it can to go through to court if the evidence is there,” Ms Callaway said.

Family violence is Victoria’s most disturbing and profound crime, affecting countless victims and resulting in a shocking number of preventable deaths.

On average, one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner in Australia. Alarmingly, in Victoria police respond to an act of family violence every six minutes. Ms Callaway said fighting the scourge was the “most important job” she had been given in her 27-year Victoria Police career and that the next few years would be crucial in reforming the justice system’s ability to better protect victims of such crimes.

“This is not just a women’s issue anymore,” she said.

Among the new reforms is a plan to enhance the investigative response by frontline police to the alarming rise in stalking and harassment of women by abusive partners and ex-partners through the use of technology.

Ms Callaway said it was extremely important that police were clued up on the civil and criminal actions that could be used to stop such crimes – which are strong indicators of more severe violence.

“We know that harassment offences have gone up in the past 12 months and that many people are using phones and devices to surveil, track, harass and abuse women online.”

Ms Callaway said only a tenth of sexual assaults are believed to be reported to police - meaning almost 150, 000 could be occurring every year.

“Consent is an issue that people are grappling with,” she said. “Establishing consent once is not good enough. Being silent does not mean consent either,” she said.

“I think a lot of work needs to be done in sections of the community, particularly among young males, to ensure consent is present throughout the entirety of an intimate experience.”

Ms Callaway said the force had also looked inward in its fight against family violence. A specialist unit has been established within Professional Standards Command to investigate acts of domestic violence committed by Victoria Police members.

Ms Callaway said this was an important step to gain the trust of family violence victims in the community.

“We acknowledge that just like in the community, there are people within our organisation who experience family violence and, on the rare occasion, perpetrate it,” she said.

“We have a zero tolerance of that type of behaviour.”

FACING UP TO ABUSE: PAST CASES REVISITED

A specialist team of cold case detectives are delivering justice to historical abuse victims by going after the state’s worst serial offenders.

The Family Violence Command Taskforce is reopening decades-old police files to track down abusers who have repeated a pattern of violence and control over multiple partners without consequence for a lifetime.

The taskforce – run by 16 detectives and two intelligence experts – crosscheck daily family violence reports with historical reports involving the same perpetrator where the original allegation was not progressed through the justice system.

Detectives then reach out to victim-survivors to investigate the historical crimes, providing them a chance to finally tell their stories and secure convictions in the courts.

Detective Senior Sergeant Benjamin Gordon, the head of the taskforce, said some women were being contacted up to 30 years after reporting violence and were often more willing to open up because they were no longer under the perpetrator’s control.

“Often they are motivated to assist us in an investigation to stop their former perpetrator from offending against a current or future partner,” Sen Sgt Gordon said.

The taskforce has conducted more than 140 investigations since its establishment in 2015.

The investigations have resulted in hundreds of charges related to decades-old rapes, serious assaults, kidnappings, false imprisonments and violence toward children.

Sen Sgt Gordon said the worst family violence abusers – some with upward of 10 victims – were predatory and selected partners based on their vulnerability.

“What we have identified is that a leopard never really changes its spots. We see time and time again pattern of offending is often quite the same,” he said.

“The way they gain and keep control over victims to either stop them reporting or make them do whatever it is they want them to do is often the same.

“They keep repeating it because it’s worked for them in the past.”

A serial abuser who never faced justice for serious assaults on multiple partners over a 30-year period was locked up earlier this year following an investigation by the task force.

Detectives identified eight victims abused by the perpetrator from the 1990s to 2020.

“He moved from relationship to relationship and continued to cause harm for almost 30 years. It was a systematic pattern of abuse that may have started off on the lower scale of severity but increased and became part of his normal life,” Sen Sgt Gordon said.

Investigators raided his property, locating a firearm, taser and other weapons.

The 49-year-old was charged with family violence-related assaults, weapons offences, damages to property and intervention order breaches and was sentenced to three-and-a-half years prison in March.

The taskforce also helped jail a serial sex stalker who kept an Excel spreadsheet containing the personal details of 800 women and girls he would taunt over phone and text.

The 38-year-old scoured his victims’ social media pages for intimate details about their lives and used them to “make inappropriate sexualised comments or describe things he was planning to do to them”, Sen Sgt Gordon said.

“These were violent sexual acts which is obviously extremely distressing for the victim, especially when it comes out of nowhere,” he said.

He pleaded guilty to 35 counts of stalking last September and was jailed for 12 months and put on the Sex Offenders Registry for eight years.

Historically, perpetrators who have abused partners and gotten away with it have done so because the violence went unreported or reports were not dealt with by police as seriously as they are today.

Sen Sgt Gordon said this past treatment can make it challenging to engage and gain the trust of historical abuse ­victim.

“We are looking for gaps in previous processes where there is still scope to investigate matters and hold perpetrators to account for what they have done in the past,” he said.

The taskforce is investigating 21 serial offenders.