Of all the upsetting details that have emerged this week at the plea hearing of Adrian Bayley, who pleaded guilty in Australia to the rape and murder of Irish woman Jill Meagher, the most horrible has to be the fact that when he killed Ms Meagher, he had already been found guilty of committing more than twenty rapes and had been freed from prison pending an appeal of an assault conviction against a man.
I 'll just let that sink in. He had committed MORE THAN TWENTY RAPES. And he was now free to rape and kill someone else.
As the Irish Times reported,
The court was told that Bayley has previously been found guilty of more than 20 rape offences and was on parole for attacking five prostitutes at the time of Ms Meagher’s death.... Bayley was responsible for a string of sexual and violent offences over the past two decades. The first of more than 20 rapes by Bayley was a violent assault on a 16-year-old friend of his sister, when he was 18-years-old. In 2002, Bayley was convicted of raping five prostitutes in Elwood. Initially sentenced to 11 years in prison, he was released on parole in 2011, which would have lasted until March this year.
However, in February last year, he was accused of assaulting a man, with Geelong Magistrates Court sentencing him to three months in prison. Bayley appealed against the prison term, freeing him from custody and ultimately allowing him to drag Ms Meagher into a laneway off Brunswick’s Hope Street to rape and strangle her....
The pre-sentence hearing was told that four months after his first rape, Bayley attempted to rape a 16-year-old hitchhiker he picked up in his car. He was sentenced to five years in prison for these first two assaults in 1991, but was released after two years.
In 2002, he pleaded guilty to 16 counts of rape committed between September 2000 and March 2001.
Bayley would drive prostitutes to a laneway behind a string of shops in Elwood, where he would park his car close to the wall so they couldn’t open the passenger door to escape.
And yet a few years later he was out, and he raped and murdered Jill Meagher.
This wasn't, alas, the only appalling news from a court room this week. In Dublin, a man who was convicted of raping his then-14-year-old sister in law was given a seven year suspended sentence.
A suspended sentence. FOR RAPING A CHILD.
Apparently judge Garrett Sheehan decided that the man had "self-rehabilitated", whatever that means. Considering how much work professional psychologists have to put into rehabilitating child sex offenders, it's remarkable that this man supposedly managed to do it himself, but there you go.
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The man also has two severely disabled children, and the judge decided that sending their rapist father to prison would cause too much hardship to his family, though as Mary Flaherty, chief executive of Cari, an organisation that supports abused children, pointed out, "There must be issues for the HSE whereby a man can be let out of jail to go back to take care of vulnerable children."
I am not a legal expert, but I know there are legal reasons for some limited sentences. I know that life doesn't always mean life, and in some cases that's fair enough. But in the case of Adrian Bayley, here was a serial rapist who was clearly not rehabilitated. And despite what the all-knowing judge at Niall Counihan's trail may believe, his victim said that “He never showed any remorse. He had four years from when I first went to gardaí and he has never admitted what he did or apologised to me."
The fact remains that all of this sends out a message that sexual violence and domestic violence against women isn't really a big deal. If you can brutally rape over 20 women and you're out on the streets at all, something is very, very wrong. If you can be convicted of raping a child and yet not go to prison because your disabled children would supposedly be better off living with a child-rapist, something is very wrong with our whole society. If you can brutally sexually and/or physically assault a woman and get off with a few months in prison and a fine, something is totally and utterly fucked up.
Over the last years, Irish courts have seen those convicted of rape and sexual assault receive short prison sentences or orders to pay their victims a few grand as some sort of "compensation", adding a new dimension to our appalling situation: pay your way out of raping! (Read: the appalling case of Anthony Lyons).
At this stage, all would-be rapists are probably thinking they might as well give it a go, because the chances of a rape being reported are so low and the chances of a serious sentence even if you're actually convicted seems to be non-existent. Counihan's victim said, "If you commit a crime you should be punished and you shouldn’t get off just because your circumstances have changed. This is not justice." It sure isn't. And you shouldn't get off just because you can afford to pay out a few thousand.
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Luckily, there has been rising outrage over these appalling sentences. Fiona Doyle, the enormously brave abuse survivor who won widespread sympathy last year when her elderly father, who pled guilty of raping her more than 16 times, was freed on bail, backed a new report from the Law Reform Commission on Mandatory Sentences for rapists. Perhaps things will change.
But in the meantime, we'll have to keep watching as various legal systems from Ireland to Australia essentially tell rapists and abusers to go ahead. Because even if the worst comes to the worst, they'll be out in a few years, or just a few months. Any protesting appeals against their tiny sentences will take years. And brutal violence against women and children still won't be taken very seriously.
