August 1999 Volume 80 Number 8 "serving the protectors"
Bringing the Horror to Light
By Brett Williams

“He got her out near the sinks and digitally raped her - she was a six-year-old girl.”

fter a depraved attacker abducted two women and forced one to rape the other in 1993, Constable Joy Gregory had to unearth the atrocity’s every detail.

In delicate, painstaking interviews of the innocent victims, she learned of the unspeakable horror which the attacker had inflicted upon them on a deserted road.

“One actually had to shove her fist inside the other’s vagina at the offender’s instructions,” Gregory remembers.

But in a later bid to protect the woman who’d been forced to rape her, the older of the two managed to punch the offender in the face and knock him out.

“Both ran naked to their car,” says Gregory, “and drove right up to the front door of a police station.”

Gregory never allowed hatred for the offender to consume her. Rather, she was filled with admiration for the older woman’s courage and ability to “hold it together for the other”.

In another case two years ago, Gregory was equally outraged by the case of a six-year-old girl routinely sexually abused by her father. Separated from his wife and aged in his thirties, he had been using his daughter, Gregory discovered, as a “sexual substitute”.

He had repeatedly raped her in local parks and public toilets for the disabled. Gregory also learned that he had never been dissuaded from his inhuman acts by the presence of his girlfriend.

As Gregory interviewed the brutalized child she found her “very open” and without true understanding of her father’s barbarity.

“This little six-year-old girl,” Gregory laments, “was telling me about all sorts of sexual positions. She said: ‘Sometimes we do it on the side, or sometimes I hop on top’.

“(But) in a matter of about a month, she’d obviously comprehended the seriousness of everything that had happened to her, and she just clammed up. She couldn’t talk about it. I was upset that she couldn’t go on.”

Early this year, Constable Sue Lunn had to draw an equally horrific story from another six-year-old girl. This one had been raped on the floor of a primary school toilet. Her cold-blooded, parolee attacker had previously committed sex offences against children. The child’s tragic dilemma struck at Lunn’s heart.

“He got her out near the sinks and digitally raped her - she was a six-year-old girl,” says Lunn pleadingly as she strains to comprehend the attacker’s psyche.

Gregory and Lunn are members of SAPOL’s Sexual Assault Section. Listening to reluctant, shattered victims tell their stories of gruesome rapes and humiliation forms only part of their 24-hour-per-day role.

They also:

• Organize medical examinations - as much for victims’ health and welfare as for forensic evidence.
• Collect exhibits such as victims’ clothing and receive specimens obtained during medical examinations as evidence.
• Ensure the integrity of crime scenes.
• Liaise with other government agencies such as Family and Youth Services, Child Protection Services and hospitals.
• Arrange counselling for victims.
• Accompany victims to pre-trial conferences and subsequent court hearings.

Section members’ expertise is enlisted for victims of rape, attempted rape, incest, indecent assault, and unlawful sexual intercourse. Gregory, Lunn and their colleagues also interview children under 12 who, after being physically assaulted by family members, require medical treatment for their injuries.

At the outset, of course, they must establish whether, in a legal sense, a sexual assault has been committed.

But it’s their skilled construction of highly-detailed victim statements which is vital to the successful prosecution of sex offenders. For that reason, they must draw shocking, intimate details which victims, amid their shame and intense embarrassment, find so painful to utter voluntarily.

But without those details - which the section’s nine highly-trained female police officers elicit so skilfully - attempts to prosecute offenders would fail.

“When you feel yourself getting too involved, you pull back and stop yourself from going any further.”

And those invaluable statements rarely take fewer than three hours to complete in the section’s ninth-floor interview rooms in the Angas St police building. In many cases, statement-taking may carry over to a second day.

During that process, interviewers have to ask victims about penetration; when ejaculation occurred; whether they were anally raped; what their thoughts were during the assault; and how the sex felt.

“Females don’t like speaking about anal rapes,” says Lunn. “There have probably been cases where they haven’t told us that it has happened.

“And if someone (an attacker) has touched somebody’s breast, you’ve got to know how exactly - whether they squeezed it or fondled it. It’s right down to the nitty-gritty, because these are the questions they’re cross-examined on in court.”

But how do interviewers bring themselves to ask seemingly merciless questions, which they know cause victims such intense distress? Lunn, 33, admits to feeling sorrow about making victims “relive the whole incident again”.

“You’ve got to be very careful about how you ask questions,” she explains. “(You) try to put them at ease so that they are willing to give you this information - without you having to pressure them.”

Gregory, 38, stresses the importance of developing a good rapport with victims. Then, she insists, one can feel confident about “asking anything”. “You’ve got to be willing to give of yourself,” she says, “that’s why I think it’s so important to have one-on-one.

“And if we can talk in a fairly uninhibited way, the victims take their cue from us. If you seem up-front with them, quite often they seem to be too.”

But family dynamics, extra-marital affairs, and teenaged girls desperate to conceal their pre-lost virginity make drawing information infinitely more difficult.

Gregory, a 10-year veteran in her field, has often had to respond to parents’ demands to be with their children during interviews. Diplomatically, she explains the added embarrassment which she knows children are often caused by their parents’ presence. Some parents, she says, require more convincing than others.

And Gregory once had to interview a victim raped by the lover with whom she’d been having an adulterous affair. The victim didn’t want her husband - who sat in a waiting room during the interview - to learn of the affair.

“We managed to keep that from the husband,” says Gregory, “but it was very awkward.”

Because rapists’ twisted minds know no bounds, section members must ply their craft with the mentally disturbed; the poor; the very young; the elderly; and even the physically disabled. One rape victim interviewed in recent years was a woman in her eighties.

Gregory once interviewed a young disabled boy who was too embarrassed to reveal the horrific details of all that he’d suffered. She showed him a storage room filled with video tapes of other children who had “had bad things happen to them”.

“He was fine to talk about it then,” Gregory remembers, “because he realized he wasn’t the only one.”

Lunn says that drawing statements from the intellectually disabled can be “very hard”. “You know that something’s definitely happened,” she says, “but trying to get enough evidence for court - that’s the hardest part, because they do change their stories and lose track of time.”

Both Gregory and Lunn concede that, at times, they shed tears for the victims they so diligently serve. “You try not to,” says Gregory, “but a lot of the time you’ve got to fight it back.”

Lunn once shed tears with a mother who believed that a sexual assault on her seven-year-old daughter had been only minor. In an interview, however, the child revealed that she’d been the victim of a lengthy series of digital and penile rapes. Lunn broke the devastating news to the mother.

“She just couldn’t understand,” says Lunn. “She felt so guilty and was blaming herself that it had happened. That sort of thing can really affect you.”

Lunn also recognizes the ever-present risk of personal involvement. “When you feel yourself getting too involved,” she says, “you pull back and stop yourself from going any further.”

“When you come out of something horrific like that (an interview), you will just talk about it with the other girls.”

And section members rarely indulge in offender-focussed hatred. Gregory says she and her colleagues are too victim-orientated to “focus a lot on the offender”. “I think that they’re sick (and) depraved, and wonder how they can do the things that they do - especially to children,” she says.

“(But) you’re more concerned about your victim, and that might be a good safety mechanism for us.”

Nonetheless, Gregory believes in capital punishment for rapists whose cases leave no doubt of their guilt.

Despite listening to graphic details of abhorrent sex crimes every day of their working lives, Gregory and Lunn remain intensely committed. With uncommon modesty they even say they don’t regard their work as tough.

“Other people will tell you it’s tough,” says Gregory. “They’ll say: ‘How can you do that (kind of work)’, but you just do it.

“I’ve seen people who can only last about six months. I think it’s a job where you soon work out whether you can cope. People who can deal with it are usually there for quite a few years.”

But surely in quiet moments, even seasoned operators must ponder the option of moving to less stressful areas of police work? Says Lunn calmly: “You have your days.”

To survive the endless stories of horror with their emotional wellbeing intact, section members simply rely on each other. “When you come out of something horrific like that (an interview),” says Gregory, “you will just talk about it with the other girls.

“I think there would be a danger if you didn’t have that (because) you can come out and be yourself. So if someone comes out of an interview and she’s upset, you just take five minutes off and listen to her.”

But the job also brings great satisfaction to Gregory. She feels rewarded - in a way she never expected - when victims leave with gratitude for what they say is a weight lifted off their shoulders.

So their work has turned neither Gregory nor Lunn into hardened cynics or haters of humanity. But they admit that some aspects of their every-day lives can’t escape their work’s powerful influence.

Gregory can’t bring herself to watch film or television that depicts rape. She says it’s something from which she must protect herself; that for her it’s “too real”. At home and in her car she’s acutely security-conscious, and ensures that the doors to both are always locked.

Lunn’s security consciousness is equally acute, and she admits to over-protectiveness of her two young children. “When I’m at home by myself, I sleep very lightly and hear every noise,” she says.

“I suppose you’ve always got in the back of your mind a statement that you’ve taken from a victim.”

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