Читать книгу Nolle Prosequi - Ingrid Irwin - Страница 4

In 2001 I was invited to visit my old school, Ballarat Grammar, to witness the raising of the “Time Capsule.” I proudly took my husband and our first born, baby William, in his sparkling new pram to this exciting event, recalling when the big white capsule was buried back in 1981, when I was in grade 2 and only eight years old. One of my classmates was the son of a brick maker, who donated the bricks used to cover up what looked like a gigantic white tic-tac.

Thanks to my parents, I still have my old brick. Back in 1981, while the clay was still wet, I carved my name into it and drew a picture of a girl, me, with a big happy smile and round oversized cheeks standing next to a flower and a butterfly. There were many precious things uplifted that day; a cassette tape of me playing my violin and speaking with my oma and opa on grandparent’s day, pieces of my early writing, drawings, a newspaper, and a few photographs. I suspect though that if a child psychologist had assessed my childhood drawings back then, at the time I was being sexually abused, they probably would have concluded that I was a happy child with no hint of trauma, certainly no hint of sexual abuse. And they would have been dead wrong. I look at the drawings sometimes used as evidence in my family law matters and say that they are mostly completely unreliable and can be very misleading, often prompted by a manipulative parent. Any child can draw a rainbow, a flower, or a sunset on demand. Or a gun shooting a person!

I’d like to think that if I put this book Nolle Prosequi, and my first book Doli Incapax, into a time capsule, or simply left them on a book shelf for twenty years, that the pressing issues they contain will be nothing but a sordid historical tale of battles largely unknown to my future grandchildren and certainly unheard of to my great grandchildren. But for this to happen, the issues they hold need to turn from the content of feminist lawyer’s writings and oft ill-described 'feminist rantings' into majority political action and change. Real legislative change, not legal tinkering and political grand standing. But it's up to you, every reader, to be a leader and make a fuss to our political leaders whenever you possibly can. Bombard your local members. Protest and march for #MeToo, transparency and equality. No one can afford not to be a feminist.

Clearly, our legal system must change before faith can be restored in it. Scandals like ‘Lawyer X’ tell me there’s a very long way to go, right to the top, and she is less a scandal than the corrupt and powerful people who set her up, used her and protected her at every turn. They can try to separate themselves from her and her behaviour and demonise her all they like, but there will always be someone willing to abandon their ethics for money. Every royal commission has shown this. It's the powerful systems we need to attack; the police/OPP/DPP, the Victorian Bar Council, the Legal Services Board and our senior politicians and members of the judiciary who knew about her and kept her there. In my view, anyone involved in propagating 'Lawyer X' is as bad as, if not worse than, Lawyer X. She's persona non grata to the legal profession, but she's no lone wolf. She flew under the radar because those concerned wilfully adjusted their site.

Surely I wasn’t always this cynical, or maybe I was but kept it in check until my secret about my own childhood sexual abuse reached its expiry date in 2013. It was the year 2007, six years before my sexual assault disclosure. I was happily working in the thick of things at the family violence coalface, working as the applicant duty lawyer in the Magistrates’ Court Family Violence division in Ballarat. Usually 20 to 30 names on the daily list, I spent four days each week passionately giving voice and validation to abused women and children, with men also seeking safety on the odd occasion. I did this for two years solid. My work meant no lunch and no breaks unless Jon kindly dropped off sandwiches and coffee that I’d consume in front of clients, chewing and talking at the same time. Charming! Mrs Sjogren would be horrified! Otherwise court breaks were filled with more women on repeat, telling me how frightened they were. I would often need to ask security to give a stern warning to the defendant, who could be reliably found death-staring my clients in the court foyer or where they were seated and waiting in the Applicant area.

Court security staff were living in the real world – they understood the cycle of violence even if majority lawyers and magistrates pretended not to back then, particularly when their legal career started at legal aid where one often witnesses an unshakable bias towards the defendant. Few magistrates took family violence seriously back then, and our local beak was more concerned about the immediate impact of intervention orders on defendant’s property rights. Sigh. The truth is that I liked the security staff, the cleaners, and the court network ladies more than my colleagues. But one Magistrate who specialised in family violence was exceptional and making a huge difference, giving the defendants’ excuses (and their lawyer’s tired old narratives) a thrashing. Meanwhile barristers were delighted with all the new work that the increase in contested intervention orders was bringing – the new bread and butter of the legal profession working in the Magistrates' Court.

One day at work I received a lovely bunch of flowers from a client with a card saying: “Thank you Ingrid - you are the first person who believed me.” This was from a beautiful lady in her forties who appeared as emotionally fragile as butterfly wings and whose voice trembled with fear as she told me her most intimate life details. Her entire body gently shook like a phone on vibrate, as she spoke with a gentle air of desperation, her sisters by her side. She had been sexually abused as a child by her girlfriend’s parents; a vicious pair I had known through other client matters and a couple well known in legal circles. Now this poor lady was being persecuted by her abusers through another legal forum, decades later. Her current presentation was a result of her childhood sexual abuse, less about the concerns of her legal matter. Long ingrained PTSD symptoms competed with her beautiful soul, but that shone out to me like a beacon.

Ironically, the community legal centre I was working for at that time, which caused me to act for her, prevented me from representing her at court when her matter was next mentioned simply because her matter was accidentally listed by court staff on a Wednesday morning, a time that clashed with our weekly staff meeting about trivialities like “who moved the broom?” and other OH & S emergencies! Apparently, my time was better served participating in a brainstorm, spending a good three hours with coloured markers and a whiteboard, listening to unqualified theorists contemplating the best adjectives for justice and literally designing a ‘justice bus.’ Apparently, there was no time for this needy client and my boss literally forbade me from going to court when I vehemently protested, leaving the client unexpectedly unrepresented and me undeservedly reprimanded. But there was time for my boss to take a photo of my flowers and log the event in the CLC Comments Book, have no fear. My eyes rolled. Seriously, the small-minded thinking, dishonesty and cover up that went on in that organisation led to my boss being sacked and literally locked out of the building, albeit with determined resistance at the threshold, and the entire Board of Management was also sacked and replaced after an independent workplace investigation; her cronies gone too. But my job as duty lawyer continued unaffected, now hosted by a local law firm instead, with an inspirational boss, a new computer delivered for me, and a refund of the $10,000 that Victoria Legal Aid discovered my boss had stolen from me, unbeknown to me at the time, siphoned off for her own personal use out of my allocated pay.

Before her sacking, I remember this boss calling me into her office one day, saying she had something urgent to discuss with me. She purposefully closed the door and went on to tell me that I looked “too corporate” and complained that my high heels made too much noise as I walked on the legal centre’s wooden floorboards. I asked her how she knew that my footsteps were disturbing, and she told me that clients had complained about it. Most unlikely, I thought to myself, whilst my imagination superimposed 80s shoulder pads onto her jacket to match her power-hungry tongue! This was coming from a woman who we'd discover asleep at her desk in working hours and who used a barristers case each day to wheel in her food, not briefs, for she wasn’t a lawyer and had no law degree.

One other equally memorable day, she strongly suggested that I “dress down” and remove my suit jacket and wear a knitted cardigan down to court instead that was hanging on the back of her door; large mauve loops of wool with duffle coat buttons were no “invitation to treat” - very op-shop! I politely refused and tried to spell out to her how clients expect their lawyer to look the part – professional in a suit. She flapped her gums and her batwing arms reverberated the stupid din as she gesticulated at me. According to my boss, a community lawyer, as was my title, needed to look a tad “downtrodden.” That night after work, my ex-husband Gallus looked at the CLC AGM Booklet, and commented that it seemed that I was working at a sheltered workshop, a long way from my commercial litigation days in Collins Street!

Another interesting time in my career involved being the lawyer for DHHS; bringing protection applications for children deemed ‘at risk of harm.’ This was a real eye opener to the chasm between departmental rhetoric and systems abuse. Monday was Children’s Court Day and so the matters listed for mention needed to be ready. However, most of the time, matters were not ready to proceed, in fact far from it, nor was I even briefed on the current status of the matter by the “worker,” let alone having the workers court report ready. This forced me to work on Sundays, unpaid, to bring the matters to a stage where I would have something half intelligent and current to say to the parents, lawyers, grandparents, children, the Magistrate and Registrar all assembled at court on Monday morning, waiting to hear what our protective concerns were.

My husband Jon always says DHHS social workers are called ‘workers’ because they don’t do any work, reminiscent of his experience of some staff in the ministry of education. Certainly, I saw managers there condone a culture of cover up and then a sort of lackadaisical departmental malaise sets in. Mix that together with severe lack of funding and you get unallocated files and excuses. Too often parties are assembled at court but nothing substantive happens as court reports aren’t written in time and the “workers” are away or the file is 'unallocated.' In the meantime, parties are assembled together at court, their stress and anger rising by the minute while they often wait for nothing to happen. Bureaucracy, red tape, laziness, entrenched departmental thinking, belligerence hiding incompetence, nepotism – out comes the armour whenever I see it! And whenever I get tired, I think of how tired my clients are and where they would be without me, and then I’m not tired anymore.

I saw private lawyers rort the system, only working substantively on a matter once they’d used up the number of paid adjournments permissible under VLA guidelines. My aim to help stop further stolen generations of Aboriginal children was far from fulfilled too, to the point of near absolute failure. I know Rudd and Morrison have both said ‘Sorry’, but I don’t often see ‘Sorry’ in action in the Children’s Court despite politically correct policy like ‘Aboriginal Placement Principles.’ The shocking findings of the Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory strongly supports the reality of my experience.

At times during my career I have had lies made up about me and brick walls built in front of me every time I get close to the truth of my client matters. All that does is let me know I’m on the right track. I’m not perturbed! This is what happens to injustice collectors though, we are silenced just like our clients. Apparently, my clients are attention seekers and I am a trouble-making bleeding heart. Whatever! We fight on, marching on the road to truth but at times I do see glimmers of hope. However, I am sick of seeing the investigative journalists doing the job that police do so poorly and then see the cold case reopened through media shaming or the long-criticised ‘trial by media.’ But truly, I still wonder how a 25-year-old journalist can solve a cold case that an entire police department couldn't for 40 years, and again and again? It’s ridiculously telling. Without the media there would often be no charges let alone a trial.

Over time, some of my clients trusted journalists more than they did me as their lawyer, which says a lot about the law, not me. As their lawyer I was stymied by draconian laws and procedures. The police, well that’s another story all together. Many cops don’t like me and in one high-profile case imposed great pressure and undue influence on my clients to stay away from me, their lawyer, during pre-trial court hearings in relation to a significant trial, to the detriment of the police complainants and their families. What is puzzling is that some victims and their family members still complemented the police on their work and stated that they were not upset with the police withdrawing the charges when the matter was dropped, which to me screams of self-preservation, not the truth. These responses are simply unfathomable to me and I believe are not in the victims’ best interests, nor is it a true reflection of how the majority of victims really feel when the police case fails, whether it fails in the High Court or back at the start in the Magistrates’ Court.

As discussed in Doli Incapax, I also wait for our scientists to invent the vaccine against male violence and then for the government to put this drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Surely, I’m not the only one sick of hearing about the death and mutilation of women and children by men on the news each week and sometimes each day. Surely men have worked out that there’s something wrong with many of them genetically that gives rise to the alarming code-red-alert statistics and their unfailing ability to just “snap” in an instant?

The fabricated client stories that follow certainly reveal a sad trajectory for the protective mother, the abused wife, and the gutsy girl! Legal whistle-blowers like me cannot afford to stop making noise because it’s worse than ever and there’s nothing ever “vanilla” about sexual assault, as Part 1 will reveal.