THE nation's governments are considering a radical overhaul of the criminal justice system aimed at improving the conviction rate in cases of child sexual assault.

If the plan goes ahead, specialist courts would be established to ensure sexually abused Aboriginal children are not intimidated into silence by the formality of traditional courts.

New rules could also be introduced to ensure that convicted pedophiles would not be able to rejoin society unless they had completed rehabilitation programs.

The reform plan has been produced by the National Child Sexual Assault Reform Committee (NCSARC), which is made up of some of the nation's leading lawyers, judges and academics.

It members include outgoing NSW director of public prosecutions Nick Cowdery, Victorian Supreme Court judge and former Victorian director of public prosecutions Paul Coghlan and former Queensland crime commissioner Tim Carmody.

The committee's tough stance on rehabilitation soon after the United Nations human rights committee criticised laws in Queensland and NSW that permit courts to order sex offenders to be detained for treatment after their sentences expire. Similar laws are in force in Victoria and Western Australia.

Legal academic Annie Cossins, who convenes the NCSARC, said the report had been distributed to all state and territory attorneys-general.

It recommends the "attachment of mandatory treatment programs to custodial sentences, including an assessment of the prospects of rehabilitation of the offender".

But Dr Cossins goes further. "Releasing people back on to the street with no treatment whatsoever is a really big problem," she said.

"I think governments are negligent in sticking guys into prison for maybe four years and then releasing them and thinking that putting them on a sex offender register is actually going to cure their desire to have sex with children."
Of the committee's 40 members, just one disagreed with the call for the introduction of mandatory treatment programs for pedophiles.

Mandatory treatment programs exist in the US, Britain and Canada, but Dr Cossins said the cost of such initiatives would be a deterrent for governments.

She said national sex offender registers were not an adequate means of combating recidivism.

"It might be a very good policing tool. But there's absolutely no way of saying it does stop offenders from offending once they get out of jail," Dr Cossins said.

The committee recommends dedicated child sex offence courts be established in all jurisdictions to improve prosecution outcomes and ease trauma encountered by victims.
Dr Cossins said the idea of specialisation was not new.

"Nearly every jurisdiction in Australia has specialist family violence courts. We have got drug courts," she said.

"If we're going to have specialist family violence courts, then it's only a short step to saying we could have specialist courts for sex offences, because they are also difficult to deal with.

"The data from Canada shows the introduction of specialisation did increase the conviction rate and did increase the number of cases going to trial."

The committee recommends that indigenous cases be broken out of the traditional system and handled within separate courts in recognition of cultural and language barriers.

"There was a view in the committee that child sexual abuse in indigenous communities had to be dealt with in a different way," she said.

She argues that a version of the Family Court inquisitorial model could be adapted to more appropriately manage cases involving sexual assault of indigenous children.

"I don't see how we can hope to encourage children and their families to go into a completely different cultural set-up, and to be able to give the sort of evidence that adversarial trials require," she said.

"Indigenous kids sometimes just can't do that. They don't have the language and they don't have the cultural skills to perform in the way we expect witnesses to perform," Dr Cossins said.

Other trial reform measures suggested include the use of intermediaries to weed out intimidation tactics in the examination of child witnesses.

http://www.ezinenewsarticles.com/plan-for-special-courts-to-hear-child-sex-cases/





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