Time to educate our judges

This facility, which is used at the “discretion” of judges, has resulted in many accused pleading guilty on advice from their lawyers who now know that without the hectoring and humiliation that undermines the confidence of child witnesses, they are much less likely to get off.

It must be so heartening that you are able to facilitate such wonderful and important changes, I said.

There was a male magistrate standing next to us when I asked if she felt that the under-representation of women in the judiciary was the reason more and greater changes in this area of child protection were not being made.

She cast a furtive, if fleeting glance in the direction of her male colleague. Then, it was as if I hadn’t spoken. As if she didn’t hear the question. Chief Judge Wolfe changed the subject and led me along a corridor to see the remote child witness facility.

When I asked for her card, the male magistrate, from a distant country jurisdiction, said I could contact her through him. Why I thought, did a less senior, rural, male judge feel he had to mediate my contact?

Walking back to the hotel that night, I couldn’t help wondering if it had flashed through Her Honour’s mind, as it had mine, the treatment of a Chief Justice in Queensland a few years ago that shocked a nation: a woman who made it to the top, by the grace of her male colleagues, and who was toppled and jailed for a minor misdemeanour, by those same men, when she got too big for her boots or didn’t tow the line.

At the time, you just couldn’t help thinking of the abuse of power and flaunting of the law of so many judges in their courtrooms, called “discretion”, with no accountability whatsoever.

The now Supreme Court Chief Justice Higgins using his “discretion”, by telling the jury to discount the evidence of a psychologist because he said the confession of an accused was one day earlier than he had claimed.

Or a judge who recently dismissed DNA evidence saying it was “nonsense” and therefore inadmissible. It showed a 99.9 per cent certainty that the man accused of fathering his underage daughter’s child, was in fact the father. He was acquitted, of course.

So, yes, the conference in Brisbane was enlightening.

I came away feeling that the sooner this profession introduces mandatory education on child sexual abuse matters, accountability of judges and affirmative action to get more women into the job, the more ruined lives will be spared.

But, as one famous social activist once said, trying to get people to understand a need when their salary (I’d add “and power”) depends on them not understanding it is a difficult task.