In Pursuit of the Guilty, We Must Not Snare the Innocent
By Martin Flanagan
We were warned this week that the royal commission on child sexual abuse will unleash a ''tsunami of trauma''. I suspect this is correct. Indeed, I suspect we'll be a different country in one year in the way Britain is a different society one year after the Jimmy Savile case came to light. I have stated previously in this column that I gave evidence that helped convict a priest in a sexual assault case and resulted in him going to jail. I was aged 16, in a boarding school. I witnessed the aftermath of the assault, saw physical evidence of what had occurred and the trauma of the victim, a boy of 12. Thirty-one years later, I was rung by a policeman and asked if I wanted to make a statement. Over the years, I had thought of trying to locate the boy - by then a man - and assure him of my support. But I didn't. Once, as a journalist, I was on the edge of a story about a gang rapist in a country town. Three women stepped forward to speak about it. The journalist in charge of the story told me there were other women who had been raped by the leader of the gang but they did not want to step forward because they had never told their husbands or children. It taught me not to presume in such matters. In relation to my court appearance, the question was: how did I know my memory was true? Journalism teaches you the frailty of memory. So many times you go back to an old story and find the facts are subtly different from the way they had patterned into your brain. Some people can rigorously separate imagination from memory but it is far from being a general rule of human practice. But what I found in this instance was that no matter how many times I replayed the memory, it always appeared the same - same sequence, same dialogue. Not once did I wake in the night, as I am wont to do, with the awful realisation that I had got something wrong. If asked in the witness box if I could be sure my memory was correct, I was going to say: ''All I can say is that is my memory of the event, no matter how many times I recall it, is unchanging.'' Because I knew the defence counsel was arguing that the prosecution witnesses had colluded, I took special care to speak to no one in the case before giving my testimony. The one person I read my statement to was an older brother. He had believed me at the time (and it is desperately important that one person believes you). When I finished reading it to him, he strengthened me by simply saying, ''that's what you told me when you were 16.'' I was impressed by the judicial process in some ways. I didn't have to judge the accused man, I didn't have to sentence him - I merely had to deliver my testimony and withstand cross-examination. But I also beheld the risk in trying people for crimes they are accused of having committed decades before. I was satisfied justice was done in my case but not all the evidence tallied. People's memories of events are so different, so partial, so personal. The victims of sexual abuse deserve and need to be heard and the guilty need to be punished. But when a tsunami of trauma hits a country, one that will be amplified relentlessly by the media, we need to beware of the risk of the innocent getting swept up along with the guilty
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