When a coffin is a soapbox

Some assertions, if you have an agenda, are just too valuable to be questioned. Take the opening paragraph in today’s Age opinion column by Jerril Rechter, who heads VicHealth and seems keen to take her place in the vanguard of the current crusade to promote awareness of domestic violence:

Three years ago this week, Jill Meagher was raped and murdered while walking home after a night out. Her brutal murder was a wake-up call for us all, but there were still some who questioned why she was walking alone, what she was wearing or whether she’d been drinking. As if it was relevant. As if she was somehow to blame for what befell her that night.

Really? Who are these people of whom Rechter writes, the scolds who blamed the victim rather than the serial rapist, petty criminal and thug who did her in? Where did they say and publish such heartless sentiments?As someone who followed the Meagher (above) case very closely at the time — indeed, briefly negotiated with a leading publisher to write a book about yet another shocking failure of the courts and legal system — I have a voluminous file of clippings and web references. Having just dug them out and checked, I can find just a single example of blame being sheeted to anyone but Meagher’s killer, Adrian Ernest Bayley (above). It was the opinion of an unnamed priest who told an audience of primary school kids that she “should have been home in bed”. Roundly rebuked by his superiors, neither he nor his foul appraisal was heard again.

Mind you, I can find lots of stories and references to activist sorts alleging that victim-blaming was going on all over town, but just that one example of the concrete article. It shouldn’t surprise, as the current narrative is better served by phantom villains. “We must cure men, all men, of their violent tendencies,” the line goes, “so please deliver as much funding as possible to those who are making careers out of promoting just that goal.” The myth that a wide body of opinion held Meagher responsible for her own death meshes neatly with that objective. How can men be cured of maleness when such excuse-makers, notional as they are, cloud the issue with patriarchal nostrums?

As I wrote here at Quadrant Online, the real villains of this tragedy — apart from the low-life Bayley — are those who have given us, at enormous expense, a court system that sets vile miscreants free, a probation system that throws open prison doors and, to be blunt, a feminist establishment that spies a coffin and recognises a soap box. Here is some of that Quadrant Online essay:

When Magistrate Saines sentenced Bayley in 2012 for the Little Malop Street assault, the penalty was three months, but the spike-haired thug with the biceps swollen to Popeye proportions by all those years lifting prison weights never saw the wrong side of a jailhouse wall. His client intended to appeal, the defendant’s lawyer told the court, and should therefore be allowed to enjoy his liberty until a higher court upheld or dismissed.

Saines agreed, a decision that must strike those citizens not immersed in the judicial-industrial complex as obscene. Given the typical delays in shuffling defendants before the courts, there was a bizarre logic to the decision that returned Bayley to the streets: had he been taken into custody, the habitual thug likely would have served his three months before his appeal could be heard. Were he then to be found innocent – unlikely but possible – there would have been claims for unlawful imprisonment and, it goes without saying, the payment of substantial damages.

So one of the most dangerous men in all Australia, a creature habituated to violence who might have been locked up there and then, was returned to stalk the same society that so generously funds the court system which had just turned him loose.

For the full essay, follow the link below. And bear in mind that, after his conviction, Victoria’s legal aid system mounted an initial appeal on Bayley’s behalf. Then get angry, not at a single, solitary fool of a priest but at a legal system that holds the rights and safety of the citizens who underwrite it in little better than contempt. That would be all of us, by the way, not only women.

— roger franklin

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