One of them, Ellen*, is a rape survivor, her alleged attacker sitting just metres away in the dock, innocent until proven guilty.

Next to her is Jodie*, a close friend who has been granted leave by the court to be by her side for the harrowing cross examination to come.

Ellen will leave the court after giving evidence, but for the next two weeks, Jodie will have a front-row seat to proceedings, first from here in the witness box and then from the public gallery, taking copious notes so she can report back to her mate who can’t bear to watch.

Months on, Ellen is still too traumatised by the assault and the ordeal of being forced to relive it in court to speak publicly.

But she has given her friend permission to speak on her behalf, to shine a light on the ways in which the justice system continues to fail victims of sexual violence.

“Each day of the trial was horrible, she found giving evidence very difficult and it was incredibly difficult to watch her go through that as well because she just seemed so helpless,” Jodie says.

“She said to me at one point ‘if I knew it was going to be this bad I don’t know if I would have gone through with reporting it’, because sitting there and being cross examined … was more traumatic than perhaps having to live with it for the rest of her life.”

Jodie says after the alleged assault — the details of which cannot be published for legal reasons — Ellen was just starting to recover emotionally when the trial process sent her straight back to square one.

“She struggled with suicidal tendencies and had healed in a lot of ways but in the days just before the trial all of that hard work was undone because she was immersed in that trauma once again,” she says.

“My friend who I’d seen work really hard at getting better was in worse shape than she’d been six months before, even before she got to court.”

■ ■ ■

SAMANTHA Chung is a co-ordinator at Darwin’s only non-government sexual assault counselling service, Ruby Gaea, and she says Ellen is not alone in feeling let down by the justice system.

Ruby Gaea’s sole counsellor sees up to 70 clients once or twice a fortnight from throughout the Greater Darwin area and Ms Chung says “very few” of them take their complaints as far as trial.

“It can be quite soul destroying, we’ve seen clients come through and go through court and it’s pretty much triggered them again and all the counselling or the help that they’ve received has gone out the window and they pretty much have to start again,” she says.

“We’re talking about people having anxiety attacks and not wanting to leave their homes, it’s very triggering so anything like that’s going to re-trigger them.”

Ms Chung says while the centre does what it can and never turns anyone away, even if it means long days seeing clients out of hours, more support is needed.

“We have to give them back the power, we have to give them a choice, this has happened to them and they were powerless as to whether it happened to them or not,” she says.

“Sexual assault is a power play so for us at Ruby Gaea we give them back that power to make decisions on what they want to do themselves and we support them on what their decisions are.”

But no matter how much support is available to victims in the lead up to trial, it’s once they enter the courtroom that the gloves come off and they’re left to fend for themselves against an often highly intimidating cross-examination by a defence barrister.

Jodie describes the process her friend had to go through as “an interrogation”, saying “if you walked into that courtroom you would very easily think that she was the one on trial”.

She says Ellen was grilled on what she was wearing, how much she had to drink and her behaviour in the lead up to the rape and even directly accused of lying, all of which veered dangerously close to victim-blaming.

“I understand that it’s meant to be an integral part that involves the lawyer grilling you over every word, trying to confuse you, trying to trip you up to get to the truth but watching her be cross examined was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve witnessed because he was talking to somebody who had been raped,” she says.

“She was minimised to this one act that happened to her that was outside of her control and everything else to do with her life doesn’t exist.”

■ ■ ■

RMIT gender violence and community safety researcher, Michelle Noon, says part of the reason such victim-blaming happens in courtrooms is because survivors are not considered a party to the proceedings in law.

“The main evidence does come from the survivor so they’re called as a witness but they kind of become like a piece of the file and they become objectified through that process,” she says.

“What this means is that if there’s not really an official place for a survivor or a victim of violence they’re often left out in the cold by the system and they don’t necessarily get the justice that they deserve.”

Dr Noon, who has qualifications in both psychology and criminology, says it’s past time politicians changed the law to ban defence counsels from using tactics that reinforce narratives that blame the victim for the assault.

“It’s widely unacceptable but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen and we often hear about it happening,” she says.

“We’re living in a world where it’s no longer acceptable, and it should never have been acceptable, to blame people who’ve experienced violence for that violence.

“We hear it working with people who commit these offences, where they say things to us to blame their victims and that gives them permission to behave in these ways and we definitely shouldn’t be reinforcing these messages though the courts.”

For her part, Jodie says she also wants the law changed to make it harder for accused perpetrators in cases where the trial rests on the issue of consent to rely on a mistaken belief that their victim was “up for it”.

“It felt like (the barrister) was using rape culture, normalising the sexual assault, describing it as an easy mistake, focusing the jury on his client’s intention,” she says.

“I just think it’s really geared toward the defendant instead of trying to get justice for a victim, and I think the nature of these crimes where you’ve got vulnerable witnesses who’ve suffered so much and then they have to go through this whole process of being assaulted again on the stand and then the law falls back on their attacker’s frame of mind — I just don’t think that’s really justice.”

Another approach advocated by Ruby Gaea’s Ms Chung, is to come at the problem from a different angle by educating the general public, and thereby jurors, as to the nature of consent so the victim-blaming narratives relied on by some defence lawyers no longer have currency.

“I really think we need to move with the times and there’s a lot to be said about consent with young people, I don’t think they’re still clear on what that is,” she says.

“What we’d really like to see is a whole generational change so that potential perpetrators don’t even think that it’s an option.”

It’s a position backed by Dr Noon, who says recent public discussions around the prevalence of sexual assault, including the #MeToo movement, may already be working to change attitudes within the legal system.

“It has been changing where it’s moved from whether or not someone themselves believed there was consent and it’s now about whether or not a reasonable person would have believed there was consent,” she says.

“This is what I think is so exciting about things like the #MeToo movement, the whole community’s understanding of what is consent and what isn’t consent now seems to be shifting and people are having these conversations.

“The reasonable person is actually changing, so a reasonable person 10 or 20 years ago might have said ‘well that person was drunk and therefore they assumed they had consent’, whereas now maybe a reasonable person would say ‘no, even if you’re drunk you should know that you don’t have sex with another drunk person’ because of the societal changes we’re seeing.”

■ ■ ■

IN the meantime, Ms Chung says the small number of survivors who do confront their attacker in court are still in for a rough ride.

“It can be hard, it can be very wearing, I think mentally they have to be ready to do it and to have the support systems or networks around them to be able to do it and not really lose it mentally,” she says.

“I take my hat off to those women that do because they’re strong, they’ve been assaulted and then they’ve relived it I don’t know how many times as they go through the system.”

And Jodie says while her friend still doesn’t regret her decision to press charges against her attacker, she now knows just how much strength it takes and just how much work remains to be done.

“Probably the most chilling moment of the trial was when the barrister was talking about her behaviour and something that she did and he was openly laughing,” she says.

“He’s a learned man of the law and he’s laughing … and you just wouldn’t see that happen to a (male) assault victim, someone who’s been coward punched, anyone else who was assaulted.

“For me it felt so gendered and her experience was minimised constantly and the assault was shrugged off and rationalised, it was all about making this a rational thing and I think the issue with sexual assault cases is that because they are so personal and there’s sex involved I feel like the victims don’t get the same amount of respect, it’s like their character is up for grabs.”

*Names have been changed

For support, call Ruby Gaea in Darwin on 8945 0155 or 1800 RESPECT and in an emergency, call triple-0