Beaumont Carol: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 27 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18381. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise and speak on the legislation arising from the Victims of Crime Reform Bill. As others have eloquently outlined already we over on this side of the House are supporting this legislation. We have no doubt that the situation of victims in law and otherwise has greatly improved since Parliament first dealt with the issue in 1987. As I said we do not oppose this legislation but although most of the evidence that we have seen indicates that the reforms it will enact will be helpful to a greater or lesser extent we do think there is theneed to do more than just put in place further incremental change. Probably in no area is that more obvious than around victims of crimes like sexual crimes and domestic violence where there is a need to do a lot more than just put in place incremental change. Certainly those types of crimes—crimes against the person—are very often crimes committed by somebody known to and in fact close to that person. They are crimes that have significant costs to the individual to their family to our community and to our country. We need to be looking at whether there are fundamental changes that need to be made—changes in terms of trying to prevent those crimes changes in terms of how our police deal with those crimes and changes in how our court systems deal with them.Actually we need to effectively be acting in concert to make changes that are of a cultural nature—changes that mean that we have fewer victims of those crimes because we challenge and we get acceptance that those kinds of crimes are not acceptable in our community. That starts by recognising that we have a problem that the level of offending in terms of sexual and domestic violence in this county is extraordinarily high and that there is a culture of violence that we need to challenge.Just going back to the basis of this particular legislation the Justice and Electoral Committee conducted an inquiry into victims’ rights in 2007 which highlighted some of the issues that have finally been addressed by this legislation. In fact I think it might have been Lynne Pillay actually chairing that inquiry as I recall.Chris Auchinvole: Lynne Pillay?CAROL BEAUMONT: Yes. So that is how long this has been around. It has obviously taken quite some time to actually address the matters that are in this legislation. The Law Society has expressed some reservations about some of the initiatives presented by the Government particularly the expanding role of victims in the courtroom which might move the courts away from the dispassionate dispensing of justice. However it does support moves in the legislation to give adult victims the right to read their statements in court. I do think that it is an important thing that victims of crime should have the right to have it made absolutely clear to all concerned what the consequences and the impact of the crimes that have been perpetrated on them have actually been for them because often the consequences are very significant.I have been involved in the Inquiry into the Funding ofSpecialist Sexual Violence Social Services. The Social Services Committee heard submitter after submitter outline the consequences of crimes on those victims. The submissions traverse a whole range of different possibilities certainly around mental health issues substance abuse and self-harm. We had a very sad and moving submission from a police officer who came with a picture of his family—his wife and his children. His wife had killed herself as a consequence of the crimes that were perpetrated against her and the fact that she was unable to get the support that she needed. The consequences of crimes against the person can be very very significant and that sort of sexual and domestic offending often causes additional harm because of the nature of the relationship between the person who has had the crime committed on them and the person committing the crime.It is disappointing to us that if victims’ rights are supposedly a priority of the Government it took more than a year and a half since this legislation came back from the select committee for it to have a second reading. That does seem an awfully long time if the concerns around victims are matters that are of serious consequence to the Government. I do not know what the reason given for that was.Certainly in our report back from the Law and Order Committee we noted that since 1987 Parliament has dealt a number of times with the rights and interests of those who suffer as a result of criminal offending. There has been an attempt certainly under Labour Governments to put in place initiatives to deal with crimes. The Victims ofOffences Act 1987 and the Victims’ Rights Act 2002 were both Labour initiatives and both adopted a broadly similar approach to this legislation: incremental amendment to the existing system to try to make it more responsive and more sensitive to the victims of crime and of course to their families because often with the kind of offending that I have talked about the families are the people who suffer as well. In the example I gave of the police officer who came to our select committee very clearly it was the family who ended up suffering. They were the ones who lost their mother and in his case his wife and had to see her suffer for some considerable period of time before she did kill herself. That is the extreme obviously but families are also victims of crime.We certainly think that we need to look at things like our current adversarial criminal justice system particularly in terms of whether there needs to be in cases like sexual offending a different sort of approach. Labour I think will be much more interested in looking at the work that has been undertaken by the Law Commission in this regard. Although there are some fairly fundamental changes made we do believe that this warrants investigation into how we do deal with getting to the bottom of the crime finding out the truth and obtaining justice for people.Let us not forget that in the end with sexual offending there is one conviction in every 100 cases. So there are a lot of people not being brought to justice for their offending. That says a lot. It says a lot about the culture and it says a lot about how difficult it can be for people to lay complaints but it also says that when they do there are often then impediments for them to continue with that—impediments in terms of finding the necessary evidence and impediments about not wanting to go through our current adversarial system. The fact of the matter is that people know and people hear about the way that people are treated in the court system. It was not that long ago—within the last few months—that a Wellington defence lawyer said about a woman in a rape case: “Well she should have kept her legs closed.” If people are going to be put through that sort of treatment in our court system clearly it will put people off taking a complaint and pursuing their right to justice and their right to have the person who has perpetrated a crime against them held to account.There are fundamental changes that we need to make to ensure that we change that kind of system. We even have to look at the recent Roast Busters case and the first report on it coming out of the Independent Police Conduct Authority. This report is supposedly around the communication but what was the message sent to young women when you get a senior police officer standing up there saying “We can’t do anything until somebody lays a complaint.” when in fact some young women had made a complaint? They were being dismissed. They had been brave enough to make that complaint and then what they were hearing and what was going out into the public domain was that that complaint was dismissed. So there is a real need and although we support this legislation we do believe that it is incremental and does not go far enough to protect victims of crime.