'I was insulted and dismissed.' I was raped and it went to trial. This is what it was like.

This is not going to be an easy story to tell because it isn’t kind. It isn’t kind to the people who thought they were protecting me and supporting me. It isn’t any fault of their own, but it paints a very sad picture of the justice system - or the 'just-is' system, as I now refer to it - and its many arms that work to 'support' victims of, in my case, sexual assault.

Here are a few points I'd like to make from the start:

1. 'Victim' is a horrible word. It creates a very small box, and those tasked with supporting you sit around ticking boxes of 'how a victim acts and feels'.

2. 'Survivor' isn’t much better if it isn’t how the person feels or how they want to be referred to. 

3. Empathy and sympathy are not the same thing. They are wildly different, and the confusion is really distressing. This is true in literally every situation.

4. Saying things that imply that you are somehow better off than someone else because of whatever reason - “Oh that’s awful BUT AT LEAST (insert unnecessary comment here), or “Oh I know how you feel (insert story or comment that is infuriating)” - because you think you can empathise, but you never, ever know how someone else feels, and assuming that you do is not helpful.

5. Sometimes, it’s just better to shut up and listen. Your opinion is neither desired nor required in every situation.

I’m not a wallflower. I’m not shy. I will make friends with the back leg of a chair if that’s who is around to chat. I am opinionated, happy to drag any conversation into the gutter to have a good laugh, and I don’t take offence easily. But what really gets me, every single time, is assumptions of how one should act in any given situation.

Who the f**k is anyone to decide how someone else feels, or what they want?

Watch: Sarah Strong broke her silence and reported she was raped at 14, But it wasn't easy, not only emotionally, but also because she believes there is room for major improvements in the system. Story continues after video.

I was raped. It went to trial - a two-week trial (I was told) that went for five weeks. I was on the stand for seven days, and the less I said the meaner it got, and the meaner it got the less I said. I was insulted, lied to, dismissed, bullied, and by the time it was done, I had a knuckle print on the inside of each thigh from squeezing my legs together on my clenched hands, trying to stay calm and give my three responses 'yes', 'no', and 'I don’t understand the question'. 

There was one week of jury deliberations which all ended in an extremely anticlimactic hung jury – so as far as I’m concerned, he might not be guilty, but he certainly isn’t innocent.

But this isn’t about what happened, it’s about all the things that shouldn’t have.

Victim services are under-staffed, under-funded and under-resourced, but that is not my problem. I don’t need to be told that they must put their name on a pen, so it doesn’t get taken. I shouldn’t have been told that someone else was going to come to Court to support me because the case went longer than expected - a new stranger every day. How fun to explain the story over, and over, and over again to women who were tasked to show up. 

I voiced my opinion when asked if I wanted to take the stand in the courtroom and said I absolutely did - I made the accusation because I wanted the 'not found innocent' a**ehole to hear it directly from me. This was met with “you can change your mind”, “don’t feel pressured”, “it’s ok if you are afraid”, when the response should have been “we respect your choice and here is how we will support it”.

I know the detectives are overloaded with cases but sitting in a room, in the middle of being torn apart on the stand, while the detective involved constantly reiterates how busy he is, is not my problem. When I didn’t want to go back and take the stand, I was told that I didn’t have a choice which I learned, after the fact, was absolutely not true.

Two of the defence lawyer’s interns sat in the back laughing as the defence lawyer described sexual acts in deplorable terms. Although the judge had a better view than I did, he did nothing. I had to tell my 'support person' (who I didn’t know from a bar of soap) what happened. They told the Crown’s solicitor, who then told the Crown’s barrister, who told the deplorable defence lawyer. It was never conveyed to the jury. Yet, the (normally Supreme Court) judge gave the jury a 10-15 minute explanation of why they should disregard the disrespect to the Court of the defence lawyer when he didn’t wear his robe properly (slung disgustingly off one shoulder) - and forgot to wear his wig after a break, so it didn’t 'damage' his image. 

The priorities here are so questionable that there is no reasonable explanation.

Ironic in a system based on reasonable doubt.

I was asked two-in-one questions by the defence and when I said “I don’t understand the question”, was met with aggression and bullying. How can you give one answer to two questions? When the defence said “you can trust that this happened at this time”, and I replied “I suppose” it took some time for the crown to point out that the defence lawyer was wrong in the “facts” when he was asking me to trust him. He pointed out that books I was reading made me a feminist, and that this somehow had something to do with the accusation. Oh, and we can add their sneaky attempt to get sealed medical records released without my proper knowledge or consent for which I had to involve legal aid.

The door of the room in which I was told to wait was left open, and the accused managed to find a way to walk past while 'looking for the bathroom'. My support had only one job - to shut the door for me so I felt safe, which I certainly did not. 

After the trial resulted in a hung jury, as it was December 20, I was told the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) would be in touch in three weeks to let me know if they were going to retry the case. After numerous calls, emails, and trying to remind ANYONE I had contact with that I existed, they finally got back to me… at the end of May.

Don’t get me wrong. I was under no illusions about what I was doing when I went forward with the trial. I knew I was going to be in the firing line and that the entire job of the defence lawyer was to destroy my character. I was simply going to be collateral damage in the Crown’s case for 'justice'. But what the Crown forgot, is that in these cases, in this case, the 'evidence', had feelings.

Oh, and let me add that I was called for jury duty less than 12 months after this court case. Talk about lack of communication, and not caring about the people who have been traumatised.

As I said, I’m not shy. I was broken, and I was angry, and I wanted to find a way to let the system know what is wrong with it, so I applied to sit on the NSW Victims Advisory Board, but I was rejected. All I can assume is that the truth from a 'victim' might be too confronting for those who only see the justice system from the sidelines. It would be too harsh for them to feel uncomfortable with the very real truth of what they are trying to change yet know nothing about. That’s like asking a GP to comment on the best way to perform a lobotomy.

All I wanted was a minute to give a victim’s impact statement because all this trial did was silence me. What did I want to say? Here it is:

“You are a coward; you are a pathetic excuse for a human being. What do I get from taking this to Court? Nothing. You are no one. I am no one. I stood up because everyone needs to be held accountable for their actions. I stood up for every person who didn’t want to come forward. The world isn’t a free pass of excuses. You did this. You admitted I said “NO”. So grow up. Stand up and admit you f**ked up. You don’t get the change the truth, no matter what a judge or jury say, you know what you did. You know it now, you’ll know it tomorrow, and you’ll know it every time you look in the mirror, and I hope it tortures you.”

No one can take back what happens, but you can at the very least, hold yourself accountable and make the conscious choice to do better. And that goes for the system too.

That I fought tooth-and-nail for over 12 months for a remuneration payment of $5000 which was finally received with a letter that said they hoped it helped me to move on. Ha–are you joking? They wouldn’t even cover the PTSD treatment because I had paid my psychologist for more than the 22 free sessions they offered by this point, because their, quite frankly, underqualified counsellors, just wanted to talk about what happened and call me brave and inspiring – which is not how I felt. I had a life I wanted to move on with, not a past I wanted to incessantly relive.

After three years, every November I still must remind myself it’s over. Three years and I’m still trying to explain to myself that I did the right thing standing up in a system that doesn’t care. Three years and I still almost cried driving through the city to a work Christmas party this year. Three years that I don’t get back, that I worked through, that I fought through. Three years that I hurt myself physically so that maybe, just maybe, I could show people my mental pain because they couldn’t see it, so to them it wasn’t real.

Listen to this episode of The Quicky where we look at how the criminal justice system is not set up for victims of sexual violence. Story continues after podcast.

Do you remember when you were a kid and were asked in art class to use oil pastels to colour over a page, cover it in black, then draw a picture with a sharp object and see all the colours come through? 

That’s all I’ve done. This is so big, so vast. The thin lines I’ve drawn here leave so many injustices in the dark. So many things I want to know, that now I have more questions than I have answers. 

The colours will all show through. That’s why I’ve shared this. That the power we have. This whole journey started because I refused to be quiet, and that the only way the shadows cast by the powers that be to cover the truth, and it’s far too calculated.

All the things that shouldn’t have happened covered up by a system that is just too busy to remember that people are not just collateral damage in a game of chess.

Where they are the pawns, 'my learned colleague' is the knight, and reasonable doubt is the queen – checkmate!

History has deemed that man is the king and the most powerful player. But gender doesn’t matter. 

F**k that. 

But that’s a story for another day.

Feature Image: Getty.