BONUS: No more ‘good blokes’: Inside the fight to scrap character references

**Chris Spyrou** (0:04)
Hey, a heads up before we get into this deep dive. It does contain discussions of child abuse, sexual assault and rape. If that's not for you, we totally get it. We'll catch you on the next one.
Hey, it's Chris Spyrou with you and welcome to this Sunday episode of The Briefing. In case you missed it this week, the Victorian Government announced a suite of new laws with victim survivors right at the heart of them. The changes are looking to make coercive control a standalone criminal offence, strengthen family violence intervention orders so victim survivors don't have to keep going back to court, rein in suppression orders so convicted rapers can't hide behind them, and take good character references off the table at sentencing. Now, that last one, good character references, is something we've been covering for a while here on the podcast. We last dug into it back in August with award-winning activist and survivor Harrison James, and that was after the New South Wales government passed its own laws to scrap them. I sat down with Harrison at the time, and here's that deep dive for you now.
Australia's criminal legal system is built on a fundamental idea that you are innocent until proven guilty. That means when someone is accused of a crime, it's the prosecution's job to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. And they typically use evidence like DNA, CCTV, eyewitness accounts, expert testimony, and so on to do that. If the accused is found guilty by either a judge or jury, the case moves to sentencing. That's always the job of a judge, and they'll look at the maximum penalty for the crime and work out where this particular offender sits on that scale before deciding whether they should, for example, pay a fine, complete community service, or spend time behind bars.
What pushes a sentence higher tends to be the use of violence, premeditation, and offending against children. What can bring it down is things like pleading guilty early, showing remorse, or cooperating with police. Judges can also consider things like victim impact statements and character references. Now, character references are written testimonials from people vouching for the convicted person's good character. You might remember former Prime Minister John Howard wrote one for Cardinal George Pell ahead of his sentencing in 2019
Multiple were also submitted during the sentencing of one of Australia's worst child sex offenders, child care worker Ashley Paul Griffith. Now, that's something a campaign led by survivors of child sexual abuse have been working for years to have banned when sentencing child sex offenders specifically. And earlier this month, they were handed a massive win in one state. Harrison James is one of those survivors, and he joins me now. Harrison, welcome back to The Briefing. Talk me through the Your Reference Ain't Relevant campaign and your latest milestone.

**Harrison James** (2:51)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on today, Chris. The Your Reference Ain't Relevant campaign has been working with Attorneys General across the country, and we've seen the law pass or be announced and set to pass in four jurisdictions. So New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT. The Your Reference Ain't Relevant campaign passed the New South Wales Parliament, and it really is a win for victims and survivors of sexual violence. And essentially, what's been abolished is the provision of good character references in sexual violence cases. So essentially, if someone is convicted in a court of law in New South Wales of either child sexual abuse or rape or any other act of sexual violence, they cannot present a reference from their friends, family, colleagues or anything like that, to attest to their so-called good character.
I've sat in courts before with victim survivors and have had to hear as a survivor of child sexual abuse, and the person who lived through that trauma had to hear their perpetrator be lauded as a champion of young people. And it's so disheartening to hear things like that, and it's a gaslight of victims and survivors and the pain that they've gone through. And four years ago, this was just a conversation between survivors, but now it's law in New South Wales. And it honestly feels surreal to say that out loud. And that's what the campaign was striving to do because we think there should be absolutely no opportunity for a convicted child sex offender or a rapist to have those good attributes presented to a court. And there's a myriad of other things that a judge can take into account as well. Things like prospects of rehabilitation, whether they plead guilty or not. So that there is factors where the judge is still able to see the whole person that they are sentencing in front of them. But also it creates a more trauma-informed system for victim survivors who don't have to sit in court and hear their perpetrator lauded as that. And the campaign and us as survivors, we have held up a mirror to the country and asked, when we are confronted with horrific violence, why is it that we reach for language that wants to soften it? Why are we calling child sex offenders champions young people? Why are rapists being described as top blokes?