Beaumont Carol: Victims of Crime Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Victims of Crime Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 16 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17356. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): I rise to speak on Part 1 of the Victims of Crime Reform Bill. In doing so I want to note that this is a step forward for victims of crime that it has taken a long time to get to this point and that some of these steps probably do not go as far as this side of the House would like to see. But along with my colleagues we are speaking in support of this bill. I want to pick up in Part 1 and talk about the impact of crime and the importance of victim impact statements for a particular group of victims and that is victims of sexual crimes. But before I do that I just want to make a couple of general points. There certainly is a need for victims to have a greater role in the criminal justice process and to ensure that there is more information and more weight given to their concerns and the impact of crime upon those victims. That is not just victims of sexual crime; that is all victims of crime.One of the issues though is the particular needs of victims of sexual crimes. For me to be speaking this afternoon on this is quite important having spent several hours this morning on the Social Services Committee dealing with submitters and dealing with the inquiry into services around sexual violence support. Can I acknowledge the member across the Chamber Melissa Lee who I think is doing a very good job of chairing that inquiry. We have heard some terribly moving traumatic information as part of that inquiry. It is an inquiry that is looking at a crime that in the end has very low conviction rates a very low level of reporting in the first instance very low levels of charging people who have committed those crimes and then very low conviction rates of those who do get into the court system. In that case the victims of sexual crime are in a particularly difficult situation because often they are the only witness to the crime.Also the impact of sexual violence is very very significant. Today a number of submitters were talking about it as a form of trauma—that it was a deeply traumatic experience. Being able then to ensure a couple of the things that are in Part 1—first of all information about the proceedings of the court system and making sure that both the victim and their support person where they have them are fully cognisant of what is happening and how it is going to happen are really important in a situation where they are talking about a crime that is so so personal and so traumatic. Also one of theparticular areas that has come up when looking at the issue of sexual violence is making sure that the support people are specialised people. Victim Support is a great service that is provided but actually in this area we need to have people who are specialist and people who particularly understand the nature of this crime and how it is then going to play out through the court system.We were given an example today by Louise Nicholas who talked about having in her court proceeding situation a very helpful person from Victim Support trying to do their best but actually all that person did for her was cause her further anger and grief because she was unaware of the trauma that had been suffered by Louise and was using language that in fact those who had perpetrated the crimes on her had also used to her. So there is a need for very specialist people in this space.In terms of victim impact statements in this bill it talks about the purpose of victim impact statements: “to enable the victim to provide information to the court about the effects of the offending; and assist the court in understanding the victim’s views about the offending; and inform the offender about the impact of the offending from the victim’s perspective.” It is particularly important in cases of sexual violence where those consequences the impacts can be of a physical nature can be around the person’s health can be about injuries they have suffered and can also be of an emotional and psychological nature. Those impacts can be around an inability to trust people they can be around nightmares and they can be around reliving—constantly reliving—a crime that is so fundamental so invasive and so personal that the level of impact at a psychological level is often very significant.Of course one of the particular aspects around sexual offending that is important to understand and why the victim impact can be so severe is that often these are people who are very well known to the victim—members of their own family people they potentially were friends with or even people they were in a relationship with. They are not people who are emotionally neutral to the victim. They are people whom the victim often knows well. Again that can have a particular impact and can make that trauma more significant. Those are all important factors in what might be covered in a victim impact statement in sexual violence cases.The bill goes on to talk about the information to be ascertained from victims and goes through some of those things around physical injury or emotional harm; loss of or damage to property—again that can be relevant in these cases—and any other effects of the offence on the victim. The information that we have been provided with in the Social Services Committee is that those other effects can actually be quite significant. They can be around drug and alcohol abuse and substance abuse. They can be around self-harm. Again we were being given examples of that today. All of those things need to be out in the open and the person who has offended needs to hear directly about the impact of their crime on that victim. I think as Scott Simpson has said the ability of others to read a victim impact statement in the court is an important provision. I think there would often be situations where it would be far too difficult for the person to do that themselves. Again the need for specialist support in the court system is really important.I note that at the moment there is a lot of effort going into raising concerns about better outcomes for victims of sexual violence. There is the inquiry. We have waited a long time to get improvements for victims of sexual violence. There was a task force under the last Government. It did report in 2009 over 70 recommendations most of which have not been actioned. Some of those are around the support services some of them are around prevention and some of them are around the court system itself. We are talking in this part about court processes but can I say something that would seem self-evident: preventing crime in the first instance is the best way to ensure that we donot actually have victims of crime. Every submitter to the inquiry—submitter after submitter after submitter—is saying that we can prevent sexual violence in this country. We actually have to decide that we are going to do that and we have to resource that.I will come back to court processes. The Minister Judith Collins—a Minister who is in a lot of hot water at the moment for her own behaviour—when responding to the Hon Phil Goff about issues for victims of sexual violence talked about this particular bill and said that reforms in this bill would assist victims of sexual violence. Well yes they will but certainly not enough. There is a need to ensure as I have said already that there is effective support in the courts. That is going to require specialist sexual violence support services of a greater extent than we have currently and we need to look at a whole lot of processes around how the court is conducted.