What’s the fallout from a false accusation of rape?

THE accusations are ­gruelling to read, the details bitterly sad.
You can’t help but feel for the teenager describing the abuse which began, she wrote, when she was just 10 years old. The family friend had seemed “nice and pretty genuine” when she first met him. Then he started abusing her, ordering her to remove her clothes, running his hands over her body, silencing her with the words: “I will hurt your mum if you make a noise.”
Within a year, she wrote in her police statement, the abuse had escalated to rape. On some occasions he was at the house while her mother was out. He would shut her in her bedroom and assault her, even though her brothers and sisters were in the house and could run in and out of each other’s rooms at will. Sometimes, she wrote, the abuse took place when her mother was home, oblivious to what was happening in her oldest daughter’s bedroom. The abuser’s actions, even his words, are repeated throughout the statement; he did the same thing to her each time he attacked her and he verbally abused her with the same obscenities every time. These assaults, she said, continued for years. “It almost became a bit of a routine,” the teenager wrote with seemingly weary resignation.
The statement of any abuse victim is painful to read and this is no exception. As I scan the 21 pages of accusations, the man sitting opposite me in a western Sydney cafe watches me closely. “You know what makes me angriest?” he says eventually, his finger jabbing at the statement. “This bit.” The first paragraph. The paragraph that reads: “The statement is true … and I make it knowing that … I will be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything that I know to be false.”
“The statement isn’t true,” says Stephen Black. “None of it. I can disprove every point she made but I was never given the chance. I was just sent to jail.”
Black, 46, spent 10 months in prison on remand, charged with sexually assaulting the girl from the time she was 10 until she was 14 years old. He was freed 10 days before he was due to stand trial, when the Director of Public Prosecutions re-examined his case after a separate allegation by the then 17-year-old girl against a number of other men was found to be false. “If it wasn’t for the other rape case falling apart, I would probably be serving 15 years in prison,” says Black. “As it is, everything in my life has been destroyed.”
Rape is a despicable crime, rendered even more vile when the victim is a child. Historically, this has been one of the hardest of crimes to prove because the evidence of children was often regarded as too unreliable to prove a case in court. Sometimes children were not believed by their families or the institutions tasked with protecting them. Sometimes the allegations were years old with no corroborating evidence aside from faded memories. Now, thanks to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the brave people who have stepped forward, more victims are speaking out. They are being listened to. Believed.
But what if an allegation is false? If police are not rigorous enough in their investigation – or the system is so determined to give the victim a voice that crucial evidence that could prove a person’s innocence is overlooked? And what if, because of such miscarriages of justice, the old cynicism towards rape victims returns, along with the tired and much disproven claim that women who “cry rape” are probably making it up?
Black, a commercial landscape gardener who is suing the police for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution, believes the pendulum has swung too far in favour of people who allege rape. “There used to be a time when women were never believed when they made a rape claim, and that was a terrible thing,” he says. “Now when a woman says she’s been abused the person she has accused is immediately regarded as guilty and that’s ­terrible too. The pendulum has swung too far. It has to come back somewhere in the middle.
“Doesn’t a case like mine hurt women? Shouldn’t the police be more rigorous when they’re investigating cases like mine so that genuine rape victims will be taken seriously?”
His lawyer Greg Walsh, who has acted both for victims and high-profile defendants in a number of sexual assault cases, says he is concerned that, since the royal commission began, the potential for false allegations is greater than ever. “It’s a terrible climate,” he says. “There is a preoccupation with sex abuse in the community and I’m concerned that the ­climate is now so pervasive that it is extremely difficult for a person who has been accused of sexual assault to get a fair trial.
“We cannot tolerate sex abuse, but the ­community has become so conditioned to believe that as soon as an allegation has been made it must be true, there is a very real risk of miscarriage of justice. That has, very clearly, been illustrated by Stephen Black’s case.”
The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research recently found that the royal commission had encouraged more victims to report historical abuse and contributed to a rise in sexual assault statistics. Nationally, reports hit a four-year high in 2013 with just under 20,000 cases recorded by police, according to ABS figures. Two-thirds of those who reported sexual assault in 2013 were aged 19 or younger.
The issue of false rape allegations is extremely sensitive – not least because genuine victims of sexual abuse must often fight to get their voices heard, to have their case taken ­seriously by the police and courts. False allegations are also very ­different to claims that have not led to a conviction, or those that have been dropped before they reach court. Very many rape victims have seen their attackers go free thanks to a poor police investigation or a jury who believed the wrong version of events.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten recently outed himself as the target of a rape allegation. He described the historical allegation that he’d raped a 16-year-old girl in 1986 as “untrue and abhorrent” after Victoria Police concluded their investigation, with the Office of Public Prosecutions advising there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. But the alleged victim has insisted she was telling the truth. She has previously told The Australian she felt “really really angry” after hearing about the decision not to proceed with the case.
Other cases are more clear-cut. In January Ben Kooy, 34, spent four days in jail before ­allegations that he’d raped a teenager in a Sydney train station toilet were dropped by police. In 2012, Sydney woman Stevie Bamford was jailed for 15 days in Thailand after admitting that she’d made up claims she’d been raped by a tuk-tuk driver because she was afraid her boyfriend would be angry that she’d stayed out late.
Then there was the infamous case in March 2013 in which a teenager claimed she had been kidnapped and raped by a car-load of five men as she left a party in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills. She gave a detailed statement to the police, which included a description of her chief attacker and of the car, a green sedan. That case stunned residents of Baulkham Hills, where women were advised not to go out after dark and dozens of men were interviewed by police, some of whom still have the stench of the accusation hanging over them. Eventually, police declared that the “victim” had made the whole thing up. She was also Stephen Black’s accuser – and it was the collapse of the Baulkham Hills case that led to Black being freed, 10 days before his trial.
Shortly after he was freed, the girl was admitted to hospital and scheduled under the Mental Health Act. Police have said they do not intend to charge her. I ask Walsh if he will press for the girl to be named, or even charged. “No,” he says. “She suffers from a significant psychological disorder. To publicise her name could be catastrophic.”
But Black, whose anger suffuses him as we talk, is not forgiving. He would like to see the girl charged, her name publicised, if only to make her realise what she has done to his life. But he reserves his real fury for the police, whom he says were negligent; in his statement of claim, he alleges that they knew the allegation was probably untrue but persisted in treating him in a “high-handed, calculating, humiliating and oppressive manner.” He says: “I want everyone to know how they treated me.”
To rewind to the start of Black’s ordeal: on the evening of June 6, 2012, he was sitting at home when he got a call from the girl. “She started saying strange things like, ‘You had a choice’,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what she was talking about. I thought she was referring to an altercation I’d had. Then I heard her say, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ and she hung up. I wondered what was going on. I didn’t know then that she was at the police station and this was a set-up call.” Soon after, the police knocked at Black’s door and told him he was being arrested on ­suspicion of sexually abusing the teenager. “They took me to the police station where I had a three-hour interview. Then I went straight to jail. I couldn’t get out. I had no idea what had happened to me.”
During the interview, the police officer had the teenager’s statement in front of him; Black says he could answer all the allegations that were read out to him but there was one claim that he was not questioned about that night. If he had been, it is highly likely he would have been freed. In her statement, after stressing that she knew the ­difference between a ­circumcised and an uncircumcised penis, the girl had written: “I remember Stephen’s was circumcised.” Black is not circumcised. His statement of claim states: “At the time of [his] arrest he was subjected to a strip search in respect of which [the investigating officer] closely examined his genitals.”
“He could see that part of her statement was completely false,” says Black. “Wouldn’t you then question all her other evidence? But they never told me about it.”
In fact, Black first read his accuser’s statement a week after he was jailed. He says he was advised to keep the discrepancy to himself until his trial. “If I alerted her to the fact that she had got something so wrong, she could have changed her story,” he says.
Black reached his lowest point when, days later, dressed “in my prison greens”, he stood in court for his committal hearing and heard the charges read against him. “All these people in court looking at me as if I was some kind of ­pervert,” he says. “I was filled with anger and hatred. I had trouble controlling myself.”
We go through the statement and Black refutes point after point; times, places, home addresses, even descriptions of what he was wearing or the jobs he had at the time of the alleged abuse are incorrect, he says.
Then I read the girl’s mother’s statement. While defending her daughter’s claim, she ­contradicts a number of details, some of them important. Most crucially, she gives a completely different description of how the then 16-year-old disclosed to her that she’d been raped. The girl claims it was after she’d been out for the night and, drunk, had blurted it out to her mum. The mother claims it was during an evening in together when, alerted by her instinct that something “was not right”, she coaxed the awful accusation out of her daughter.
And yet, despite this and other discrepancies between the two statements, despite the ­obviously inaccurate description of Black’s “circumcision” and the lack of corroborating evidence, I am pursued by a nagging doubt; the doubt that will always persist when a child accuses a grown man of a terrible crime. As I read and re-read her statement, I ask myself: Why would she make these things up? What if I am, by writing this article, defending a rapist?
Once it was easier to pretend that the victim had made it all up, rather than accuse a man of such brutal deeds. Today, in a more enlightened atmosphere, the opposite is true: it is almost ­easier to believe that the accused must have committed the crime; to damn him rather than his accuser, to let his life crumble rather than hers.
Experts on violence against women and ­children agree that the statistics on false rape allegations are notoriously unreliable. The ­figure commonly quoted in ­Australia and overseas is two to 10 per cent of all rape allegations reported to police. But, as Liz Wall and Cindy Tarczon pointed out in a paper last year for the Australian ­Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault, “The commentary around the origin of this figure largely discredits it due to the lack of supporting evidence…”
This is partly due to the inconsistent classification and definition of what is a false report. The issue is also muddied by the fact that eight out of 10 sexual assault victims don’t report the incident to police in the first place, according to an ABS study. Some of those who work in the area believe this is because the male-dominated culture of the police is still likely to regard accusations of sexual assault with scepticism. There is also still a perception among victims of sexual assault that they will be put on trial rather than their abusers, although this is far less likely to be the case than it was even 10 years ago.
Although reports of sexual assault have reached a high in the wake of the royal commission, the conviction figures remain low. Data in NSW shows that about 74 per cent of sexual assault cases that proceeded to the higher courts resulted in acquittal, and about 61 per cent of sexual assault cases against children were acquitted; the rates are similar across Australia.
So why, when the odds are stacked against genuine victims of rape, and campaigners are still struggling to get their voices heard, would someone make a false claim?
A major British study by Alison Levitt QC found that nearly half of the women making false claims were aged 21 and under, and many had mental health problems. More than half of those who were under 18 had not contacted the police themselves, the initial report being made by someone else. “It was a feature of these cases that the ­suspect later reported that the whole thing had spiralled out of control and he or she had felt unable to stop the investigation,” Levitt writes.
Black grew up in Sydney’s west with his brother and two sisters. Their Croatian parents had come to Australia from the then Yugoslavia in the 1960s, fleeing the tyranny of communism and bringing with them the old ­European ­values that they instilled in their children: respect women, look after children. “My parents brought us up well,” says Black’s brother, Lou. “We didn’t have much money, but we were taught respect. None of us ever doubted that Steve was innocent.”
I ask him how the experience has changed his brother. “He’s completely different,” Lou says immediately. “He used to be really ­easygoing, and nobody had a bad word to say about him. But this has made him very angry and ­bitter. He’s jittery all the time; we have to walk on eggshells around him.”
The toll on the family has been immense. Black’s father, who had been ill before Black was arrested, died shortly after he came out of prison and his mother still hasn’t got over his arrest. Black’s family rallied around to help him: his sister and brother-in-law sold their car to try to raise the $20,000 bail and Lou went around his friends asking for money. In the end, bail was refused.
“This has changed us all,” says Lou. “My wife and I have a two-year-old son and now I refuse ever to be alone with the babysitter. My wife even has to drive her home. I wouldn’t have thought about it before, but if this kind of ­accusation can be made against someone like Steve, it could happen to any of us.
“Once you’ve been accused of something you are always tarred. Some people will always think, ‘Maybe he did it.’ You can never erase it: you’ll always have that badge on your shoulder.”
Since he was freed, Black hasn’t got his life back on track. He lost his job and hasn’t worked since. He says that all he can think about is the injustice done to him; it eats away at him. He spends his days riding his bike and trying to keep fit. And waiting until his case against the police goes to court in November.
Carol Ronken, a criminologist with the ­campaign organisation Bravehearts, would not discuss this specific case but defended police investigations into child sex abuse as being “incredibly thorough”. She says: “There certainly are cases where usually young people rather than children have made false allegations, but usually this is discovered early on in an investigation. We know that the majority of ­disclosures are real, we know that victims find the process of speaking out incredibly difficult and we know that ‘speaking out’ is seldom straightforward.
“It is never OK for an innocent person to spend time in jail and this is one of those incredibly difficult areas when the system tried to balance the rights of an accused with the protection of the community. While the rarity of this occurring is no excuse, we also understand the underlying need of the criminal justice system to protect children and young people.”
Walsh believes Black’s case is an important one because it illustrates that “the onus of proof has been lowered – a case no longer has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt,” he says. While this is not strictly true, of course, Walsh’s point is that such cases are not being investigated stringently enough. “The laws… have gone too far in favour of the ­victim and I think this is a serious matter for debate,” he says.
Black says he’s looking forward to his day in court. “If they offer to settle beforehand, I’ll probably refuse,” he says. “I want to be in court, I want their negligence out there for people to see. It’s not about the money. My life has been destroyed. And you have to ­wonder, how many other people are there out there like me?”

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/whats-the-fallout-from-a-false-accusation-of-rape/story-e6frg8h6-1227099500714?nk=703d85f5f0a80e9bd7fa66346ab2e835