We believe Louise Nicholas!

Protests at the start of John Dewar’s trial – be there!

(Please forward to your networks. Apologies for cross posting.)

In the early 1990s John Dewar persuaded Louise Nicholas not to make a formal complaint against Bob Schollum, Brad Shipton and Clint Rickards.

He has now been charged with attempting to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice. His trial will begin on Tuesday 24th June.

Come along and protest this cover-up and show your support for Louise Nicholas and other survivors of police rape.

Wellington
Rally 12pm, Tuesday 24th July outside the High Court, Molesworth Street (opposite parliament)

Organised by Wellington Action Against Rape. For more information contact gracemaiamillar@gmail.com

Auckland
Picket 5pm, Tuesday 24th July outside Britomart

Contact Ruth Amato on 021 253 0118

Christchurch

Information and interactive street theatre 12pm, Tuesday 24th July outside Police Centre, Cathedral Square.

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Who is John Dewar?
John Dewar was the head of the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB) of Rotorua police in the early 1990s.

What is he being charged with?
John Dewar is being charged with four charges of attempting to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice between 1993 and 1994.

When is his trial?
His trial will begin on Tuesday July 24th.  He has pleaded ‘not guilty’.

What are the charges about?
In the early 1990s John Dewar persuaded Louise Nicholas not to make a formal complaint against Bob Schollum, Brad Shipton and Clint Rickards.  He did not investigate the complaint properly.  Judge Lance criticised his conduct: “I am of the view [John Dewar's] failure to record and detail these allegations was not only remarkable, it was utterly incredible. [...] After all, here was an experienced detective inspector investigating allegations of serious sexual offending. During his interview with the complainant, he is told of allegations of potentially serious sexual offending by three other named and currently serving police officers.”

Weren’t Clint Rickards, Bob Schollum and Brad Shipton found innocent?
They were found not guilty – there wasn’t enough evidence 20 years later.  If John Dewar hadn’t tried to protect his mates, and investigated the complaints properly the trials might have gone very differently.

Why does this matter?
Women who were raped by police in Rotorua in the 1980s didn’t make complaints, because they thought no-one would believe them.  What happened when Louise Nicholas tried to make a complaint showed that they were right.  When the police protect their own from accusations of rape, as John Dewar did in this case, then you are giving police a license to act with impunity.

What can people who believe Louise Nicholas do?
There will be pickets outside the High Court in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch on the first day of the trial, Tuesday 24. The details are:

Wellington
Rally 12pm, Tuesday 24th July outside the High Court, Molesworth Street (opposite parliament)

Organised by Wellington Action Against Rape. For more information contact gracemaiamillar@gmail.com

Auckland
Picket 5pm, Tuesday 24th July outside Britomart

Contact Ruth Amato on 021 253 0118

Christchurch

Information and interactive street theatre 12pm, Tuesday 24th July outside Police Centre, Cathedral Square.

The power of words

This post isn’t directly about the media, but the issues raised carry through into that domain.

From Slate:

Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.

Safi’s first trial resulted in a hung jury last November when jurors deadlocked 7-5. Responding to Cheuvront’s initial language ban—which will be in force again when Safi is retried in July—prosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—sex—to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they’ll just have to read the witnesses’ eyebrows to sort out the difference.

The article also highlights the different ways rape is thought about and handled compared to other crimes:

The real question for Judge Cheuvront, then, is whether embedded in the word sex is another “legal conclusion”—that the intercourse was consensual. And it’s hard to conclude otherwise. Go ahead, use the word sex in a sentence. Asking a complaining witness to scrub the word rape or assault from her testimony is one thing. Asking that she imply that she agreed to what her alleged assailant was doing to her is something else entirely. To put it another way: If the complaining witness in a rape trial has to describe herself as having had “intercourse” with the defendant, should the complaining witness in a mugging be forced to testify that he was merely giving his attacker a loan?

The fact that judges are not rushing to ban similarly conclusory legal language from trial testimony—presumably one can still say murder or embezzlement on the stand—reflects not just the fraught nature of language but also the fraught nature of rape prosecutions. We as a society still somehow think rape is different—either because we assume the victims are especially fragile or because we assume they are particularly deceitful. Is the word rape truly more inflammatory to a jury than the word robbery? Yes, the question of the victim’s consent surely makes a rape trial more complicated than some other kinds of criminal trials. But the fact that the evidence may be more equivocal hardly makes the underlying word more likely to incite blind juror outrage.

‘Our’ language is often lacking in appropriate terms for rape survivors to describe their experience in, as it is for most groups who lack power or general acceptance. Likewise, ‘our’ legal system is a model that they must frequently adapt their experience and reactions to suit, rather than the other way round.

This case (which makes me very, very angry) is an obvious example of that, but I think it’s important we don’t ignore the instances which are so ingrained we don’t think to question them.