“I laid there dead because I was so numb inside,” the woman told the court. “I was crying the whole time.”
The next day the alleged victim turned up at work “distracted” and looking puffy,as though she had been crying,her then-manager told the court in the second trial.
The manager testified that she said:“They wouldn’t let me leave last night,I didn’t want to go back,they tried to take my shirt,” and “I think I was raped”.
But de Belin and Sinclair testified the woman enthusiastically participated in the sex.
Under NSW’s proposed affirmative consent laws,announced on Tuesday,a person will be deemed not to have consented to sexual activity unless they said or did something to communicate consent.
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Importantly,an accused person’s belief in consent will not be reasonable unless they did or said something to ascertain consent.
Under existing law,if an accused rapist has “reasonable grounds” to believe there was consent,it can override whatever the alleged victim says about their own consciousness of their consent,even if the accused did nothing to find out if the person was consenting.
The proposed new laws require active steps to be taken.
The laws will also affirm a person’s right to withdraw consent at any time and clarify that if a person consents to one sex act it doesn’t mean they have consented to others too.
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Would these laws have changed the outcome of the de Belin case? Perhaps not but they might have seen it framed in a different way.
If the law is a guide to behaviour,then football players on group-sex benders might have to become more proactive in ensuring they have the enthusiastic consent of the women they take home.
Their clubs will no doubt include the new laws (once they’re enacted) in the tutorials they give their players on how to respect women,tutorials that have had decidedly mixed results so far.
The other aspect of the de Belin verdict is the increasingly thorny problem employers and institutions face when dealing with sexual misconduct allegations against employees and members.
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Do they stand them down after an allegation is made? A formal report? Or only after charges are laid?
The NRL uses the latter as a yardstick but in other settings it seems ludicrous,particularly given how hard we know it is for victims to make a police complaint,let alone get their allegation to trial.
Brittany Higgins’ alleged rapist lost his job (although we are told it was for a “security breach”).
Former attorney-general Christian Porter,accused of a historical rape when he was a student,which he strongly denies,eventually lost his portfolio. But not because the allegation against him was believed by the Prime Minister,only because the matter morphed into a conflict of interest and a political distraction.
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This week we learnt that 19 claims of sexual assault and other misconduct by federal MPs and staff have been referred to police since February. No one has been stood down as a result of them.
The presumption of innocence is a founding principle of democracy but increasingly it is in tension with victims’ rights and our evolving perceptions of consent.
As to why these cases keep cropping up in the forums of football and politics?
Call it a coincidence,I guess.