So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture. The young women, and girls as young as 14, were "sluts" and "Aussie pigs", the rapists said. So now that some of the perpetrators are in jail, will those people who cried racism and media "sensationalism" hang their heads in shame? Hardly.
The journalists, academics, legal brains and politicians who tried to claim last August that the gang rapes of south-western Sydney were just a run-of-the-mill police blotter story being beaten up by racists, scaremongers and political opportunists don't ever want to acknowledge the truth about that ugly episode in Australian history. They don't want to acknowledge the fear and tension that ran through a part of Sydney they rarely visit and can never understand.
This newspaper was the first to report the story, which had been common knowledge in police and media circles, and it has never censored the race element.
Even last week, with the conviction of two brothers for their part in the gang rape of Miss D, who was 16 when she was held at gunpoint in a Greenacre park, there were media outlets that downplayed the story and air-brushed race from it.
Yet the victims have been crying out for the truth to be told. In court on Friday, one victim gave another a card on which she had written
Truth is Justice".
In August, when Judge Megan Latham handed out laughably lenient sentences to three men in one gang rape case, which were later more than doubled on appeal, she made a special point of debunking the race link: "There is no evidence before me of any racial element in the commission of these offences," she said. "There is nothing said or done by the offenders which provides the slightest basis for imputing to them some discrimination in terms of the nationality of their victims."
Except that later one of the victims complained her victim impact statement had been "censored" of any "ethnic" references by prosecutors intent on a plea bargain. She was convinced she was raped because of her ethnicity. "You deserve it because you're an Australian," the rapists told her during the five-hour attack.
It's just so inconvenient of the victims to insist on telling the truth.
"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," one 18-year-old victim, codenamed Miss C, told the court, remembering one of the 14 men who called her "Aussie pig", gang raped her 25 times over a six-hour period in Bankstown and Chullora, and then turned a hose on her. "I'm going to f*** you Leb style," he said.
Fourteen gang rapists have been convicted, or pleaded guilty, thanks to the courage of seven victims who testified for days in court as their tormentors smirked nearby, the men's families threatened them and defence lawyers suggested they had enjoyed the rapes.
"They're very brave, very strong and very courageous young women," said Salvation Army Major Joyce Harmer, who held the hands of many of the victims through the trials. "They knew this was something they had to do."
There were encouraging signs by the end of the week that some Muslim community leaders were talking of "Muslims accepting responsibility that they may have failed to do things that would have prevented these things from happening", as Amjad Mehboob, chief executive for the Federation of Islamic Councils, told ABC Radio on Friday.
Keysar Trad, vice-president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, said: "It is certainly a disgrace to our community that people who were born to a Muslim family would commit such heinous crimes." But he went on to say it was "rather unfair" that the rapists' ethnicity had been reported "because these boys themselves have completely disaffiliated themselves from their culture or their religion".
Yes, it is unfair that the vast bulk of law-abiding Lebanese Muslim boys and men should be smeared by association. But their temporary discomfort may be necessary so that the powerful social tool of shame is applied to the families and communities that nurtured the rapists, gave them succour and brought them up with such a hatred of Australia's dominant culture and contempt for its women that they think of an 18-year-old girl, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, sitting on a train reading a book, as a slut.
These were racist crimes. They were hate crimes. The rapists chose their victims on the basis of race. That fact is crucial to this story. If the perpetrators had been Anglo-Celtic Australians, the furore would have been enormous. No newspaper would have left out that fact and you can bet the guilt and shame would have been spread far and wide.
No more excuses for the culture of barbarism
The age, Terry lane, July 14 2002
Murder is something that poor people do to poor people. For those of us who feed the imagination with a diet of snobbish English crime dramas and flash Hollywood lawyer soaps it is easy to form the erroneous impression that murder is what the rich do to the rich, usually motivated by lust, jealousy or greed.
In Melbourne, the most liveable of cities, the facts are these: in the years from 1989 to 1999, 75 per cent of male murderers and 88 per cent of female murderers were unemployed. Of their victims, 60 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women were out of work. And "the number of homicides also appears to be disproportionately high among some ethnic groups", says the Defences to Homicide issues paper of the Victorian Law Reform Commission. This is getting into touchy territory and the commission takes a less-said-the-better attitude to such unpalatable news.
However, the higher homicide rates among migrant groups cannot be overlooked. And it has a bearing on some of the issues relating to defences to homicide.
When the Victorian Law Reform Commission, abolished by Jeff Kennett, was resurrected by Steve Bracks, the Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, instructed it to look at the homicide laws and consider whether "it would be appropriate to reform, narrow or extend defences or partial excuse to homicide, including self-defence, provocation and diminished responsibility".
Self-defence and diminished responsibility - as, for instance, when the murderer is mentally ill - are excuses to a homicide charge that will not get a heated argument, but provocation is problematic. The various defences to homicide developed against the background of capital punishment, so it was appropriate to look for any excuse to diminish the charge and save a life. But, in our more enlightened situation the excuse of provocation looks pretty shabby. And that is one of the issues being considered by the commission on which it invites public comment.
Case study 8 in the issues paper concerns a migrant man who murdered his 16-year-old daughter because she was having sexual relations with a young man with whom she wanted to live. The father found the two together in the boyfriend's bedroom and he stabbed his daughter to death. He was found guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter because, as a "traditional Muslim", he was understandably angry at his daughter's affront to his patriarchal authority. The judge said that in this case the "ordinary person" the jury imagined had to be "an ordinary man of Mr Dincer's [the defendant's] origin, background and beliefs".
The case study says "ordinary man" and I am assuming that the words are chosen with care. What would an "ordinary woman of Mr Dincer's origin" feel about the verdict? Unless she was the victim of cultural brainwashing, she might feel betrayed by a new country and legal system that she expected would afford her greater protection from male violence and arrogance.
"The commission will be looking at ways to negotiate the difficulties of framing the [ordinary person] test in a multicultural and heterogenous society." I wish it wouldn't. Or, at least, before it does so, it should familiarise itself with what the Koran has to say about women and ask itself if we want to bend our perceptions of the value of female life to fit with this: "Men have authority over women because God has made one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient . . . As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them."
Before well-meaning and soft-hearted people rush to make the law of homicide culturally relative, they had best ask themselves how they feel about standing aside while men beat their disobedient wives. Cultural relativism has no place in a civilised society. We are not bound to make room for barbarism, even when it dresses itself up in the fluffy rhetoric of multiculturalism.