Perverting Justice

Behaviour like:

• Making no attempt to leave the unlocked motel room over an 8-hour period, even though the police station was only two minutes down the road.
• Having a shower in the motel room before she left the next morning and kissing her sleeping assailant goodbye before exiting the room. Wyatt claims this trauma-informed "fawn" response aims at keeping the perpetrator on side to avoid more violence.
• The day after the alleged rape, sending a text message to another man she'd been chatting to online saying "Hey, Handsome xxx."
• Continuing to go out and meet men after the alleged assault. She met her current partner 20 days after the event.
• Stating to the police four days after the event that she was "not even sure a crime had been committed."

Wyatt argues she was "slut-shamed" and "victim-blamed" in court due to the defence revealing that she'd had sex with another man the night before, that she'd agreed to have this first date in a motel room because she was "100% after casual sex", and she arrived with 2 bottles of wine and 4 rum/coke mixed drinks plus ended up sharing the man's marijuana. Wyatt was contemptuous of her alleged perpetrator's behaviour, a man ten years her junior, sobbing in the patrol car after being arrested and breaking down in distress in court.

A former social worker, Wyatt has been on a disability pension due to PTSD since the event but is very actively working to change rape laws, speaking at the March4justice and promoting her new book. At the launch, local labour party MP Tom Smith enthused about her writing: "I absolutely love this book" and supported all her recommendations for change to the justice system. Our wimpish political class invariably kowtows to such women, however outlandish their claims.

Now Wyatt is to speak at the charity event at St Luke's school. Having received a concerned letter from parents at the school, Mothers of Sons (MOS) has written to the school principal and board, questioning the appropriateness of a guest speaker who is intent on undermining the justice system and misleading the public about the effectiveness of our juries. The MOS letter also raises questions as to whether Trish Wyatt's behaviour really presents an admirable role model for an Anglican school. The letter sent to the school will also be circulated to the school board and local press. We'll see whether MOS gets a response.

It would be great if many of you reading this could also write – here are draft letters and contact details for the school principal and board, and Tom Smith MP and the Opposition MP. (To edit the draft letters, go to file and then download, to obtain a word document you can use.) The feminist juggernaut is intent on utterly undermining our justice system unless we show people in authority that there's active resistance to their plans.

Make no mistake, the push is on. Last year, during the media hubbub around Brittany Higgins and Christian Porter, we saw repeated calls for independent courts for rape cases – secretive kangaroo courts which would undermine legal protection for accused men. Affirmative or enthusiastic consent laws are being introduced across the country and no doubt juries in rape cases may be for the chop.

It's all driven by ideology, rather than reason or science. The debate taking place in Scotland is based on the assumption that juries are subject to "rape myths", which Scotland's top prosecutor, Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC describes as "prejudicial and false beliefs about rape that affect their evaluation of evidence presented at trial." Although Bain claims there's "overwhelming evidence" that juries are affected by such beliefs, this is simply wrong, as Rick Bradford explains in his excellent recent blog, Rape Trial juries and the Erosion of Justice.

Bradford shows Bain is relying on jury studies cooked up by feminist law professor Fiona Leverick based on self-selected volunteers judging pretend rape cases. Yet definitive research studying real juries immediately post-verdict (involving a total of 771 jurors) was conducted in 2018-9 by Cheryl Thomas, Professor of Judicial Studies, at UCL. This showed hardly any real jurors believe such myths.

Thomas' report concluded: "The overwhelming majority of jurors do not believe that rape must leave bruises or marks, that a person will always fight back when being raped, that dressing or acting provocatively or going out alone at night is inviting rape, that men cannot be raped or that rapes will always be reported immediately. The small proportion of jurors who do believe any of these myths or stereotypes amounts to less than one person on a jury."

So, the first-ever empirical research on actual jurors serving on real cases showed the feminist propaganda is wrong. Most jurors are not influenced by rape myths and are quite capable of proper judgements about guilt or innocence in rape cases. But just as the Scottish government is choosing to ignore this vital fact, Australian governments are likely to also charge ahead with their goal of ousting juries from rape trials – unless the public makes it very clear this is not on.