In my experience, the more someone vociferously insists that they never tell a lie, the greater the reason to be suspicious. Jacinda Ardern’s assertion that she never told a lie in politics is right up there with Richard Nixon’s declaration that he was not a crook.
Yet, we’re expected to swallow feminists’ vehement protests that women never lie. That is, after all, the direct corollary of the feminist injunction to “believe women”. Ah, the feminist might qualify, we really mean that women never lie about rape.
Except that, too often for comfort, they do.
Imagine a sexual encounter involving a woman shagging a man, sitting on top of him, bouncing cheerfully. How could she be a rape victim?
“Peter”’s ex-wife told police that he had raped her, after they split up in 2015. Fortunately for him, the whole thing was recorded on video — including his wife pausing her enthusiastic cowboy impersonation to ask if he was okay.
Still, it took five years, a month in prison and over $350,000 in legal costs before Peter was cleared. He has since won a $1 million malicious prosecution case against NSW police and prosecutors.
Yet his maliciously false accuser has suffered no consequences for her lies.
Peter’s efforts to have her charged with perjury have received persistent knock-backs from police, the DPP, and other relevant complaints bodies.
That’s our justice system. Women accusing men of rape or violence have absolute license to perjure themselves in our courts and concoct elaborate mistruths which, even if proved false, will very rarely bear any adverse consequences.
This is no mere coincidence — it’s official policy.
The official policy of our police and prosecutors is that women can lie with impunity. This week I canvased police officers across the country who all reported they are told never to take action against a woman caught out making false violence or rape allegations, lest punishment of false accusers deters genuine victims from coming forward.
This has been the seemingly irrevocable course of our legal system since the 1960s: less and less onus on the accusers, less and less legal rights for the accused. All in the name of “fairness”, the fundamental precept of law and logic, the burden of proof, has been willfully cast aside.
The only government in recent decades to try and tackle this deplorable state of affairs was the Howard government in 2006.
Howard’s path-breaking new family law legislation included advice to courts to make cost orders against persons who knowingly made false allegations in family law proceedings – a measure stated to address concerns about widespread false allegations in The Family Court.
A year later, the Howard government was gone and suddenly all the talk was about risks to children from violent dads. A Chisholm Review into violence and family law dutifully concluded that the cost orders provision might deter vulnerable parents from disclosing family violence and by 2011 Julia Gillard’s team had changed the legislation to ensure there were no longer any consequences for perjury.
Not even do perjurers not face any consequences, no-one even bothers to check. In five years, not one family law-related perjury matter was investigated by Commonwealth prosecutors. Yet we know that there’s a whole lotta perjurin’ goin’ on.
Research show[s] family court judges determined that only 12 per cent of the child sexual abuse allegations involved in contested cases were found to be true. Accusations of abuse that were deliberately misleading were found to be twice as common as true allegations, according to the study by Webb, Moloney, Smyth, and Murphy, which reviewed family court cases from 2012 to 2019.
Think about all those wrongly accused fathers, deliberately alienated from their children by such horrendous lies, children forced to suffer through embarrassing, damaging interviews from experts attempting to weed out the truth. Not one of these mothers faced legal consequences for what she did.
The same unwritten rule applies in magistrates’ courts dealing with the weekly flood of false domestic violence allegations and the criminal courts handling sexual assault. Everyone knows that police and prosecutors will accept the most preposterous allegations and even if they ultimately get thrown out in court, the instigator gets off scot-free.
But, surely we must do everything to encourage genuine victims to come forward?
The argument about perjury charges deterring proper victims is spurious nonsense. Perjury charges would never be applied in cases where the allegations simply failed to be proved in court. Actual victims, or women who mistakenly believe they are victims have nothing to fear.
Spectator Australia
In fact, the people who really have a great deal to fear are the men who can be accused of the most heinous crimes at any time. Not only will they then face an almost insurmountable task of proving their innocence (contrary to the supposed bedrock principle of presumption of innocence), but they know that their false accusers will never face a single consequence for their lies.