This presentation discusses alternative reporting pathways for victim-survivors of sexual violence in Australia. Alternative reporting pathways are typically written informal reporting options or self-administered interview questionnaires (SAIs) for victim-survivors of sexual violence to report or disclose without having to engage directly with police. They are confidential documents and can be completed anonymously. Alternative reporting pathways have existed in the USA, UK, and Australia for over a decade – some are policing tools, while others are hosted by support services (such as rape crisis centres) – yet there has been very little research investigating how they work and what outcomes they generate for victim-survivors and police. In this presentation, we discuss our research findings examining the purpose, use and potential of alternative reporting options in Australia, drawing on interviews with police and support services and focus groups with victim-survivors. The findings suggest alternative reporting options operate as an “in-between” pathway to reporting sexual violence, that victim-survivors value the opportunity to tell their story in their own words using alternative reporting tools in ways that are meaningful to them, and alternative reporting options also assist police with intelligence gathering. However, completing an alternative report can be triggering for victim-survivors, and questions have been raised about the potential conflicts between law enforcement needs in collecting and making use of data versus the needs of victim-survivors. Despite these concerns, we present data on how these challenges can be managed by shifting away from police hosting alternative reporting tools to support services that are still able to provide police with important information to assist in their responses to sexual offending in the community, and at the same time offer a supportive environment in which alternative reports can be safely completed.

In 2017, constabularies in England and Wales began to implement a risk-based approach to managing sex offenders. The goal of this approach was to prioritise resources toward the most dangerous sex offenders and reduce the risk posed to the public. Under this new approach, offenders who had consistently been assessed as low-risk, and who had not reoffended, for more than three years were considered for reactive management. Reactively managed offenders did not receive home visits but remained subject to annual notification requirements and continued monitoring. Despite this significant change, almost no research has examined how reactive management is being used or evaluated its effectiveness nationally. This study addressed this research gap through the analysis of pseudonymised data extracted from the Violent and Sex Offender Register (ViSOR) by five police constabularies in England and Wales.

The study drew on this data to develop a typology of reactively managed sexual offenders. It found that although actively and reactively managed offenders were similar in terms of their personal, offending, sentencing, and lifestyle characteristics, there were some important differences. Specifically, offenders on reactive management tended to be older and have more historic offences than those on active management. They were also more likely to have been assessed as low risk for a long period of time, have no Civil Orders, and be on ViSOR for life. Moreover, offenders on reactive management were more likely to have been convicted of contact offences and offences involving adult victims than those on active management. Many of these characteristics correlate with low recidivism rates, suggesting that police officers in England and Wales are moving offenders at a lower risk of reoffending onto reactive management.

This paper will explore the professional understanding of the ISVA role amongst criminal justice partners and stakeholders involved in the reporting and investigation processes for rape and sexual violence. The 21st century has arguably seen several considerable changes with regards to the treatment of survivors in the criminal justice system in England and Wales. In 2005, the Home Office introduced the Independent Sexual Violence Advisor (ISVA) to provide specialist tailored support to survivors of sexual violence and abuse. Despite the salient presence of ISVAs throughout the criminal justice process, they are underrepresented across the academic literature and are inconsistently supported in practice.
Interviews and online observations will be carried out with ISVAs and criminal justice professionals, such as the police and registered intermediaries, to address the gaps in knowledge surrounding sexual violence advocacy services. In addition, interviews with survivors will aim to assess the influence of advocacy support on the survivor’s justice journey. This paper will present the preliminary findings to date and a detailed overview of the project.

Responding to sexual violence in Fiji is challenging. Historic iTaukei (the Indigenous peoples of Fiji) customary justice mechanisms have been excluded in favour of colonial and western justice institutions, and the archipelagic geography of the islands (alongside difficulty accessing the rural interior of the larger landmasses) limits access to justice for many survivors. This switch to a colonial and western criminal justice system has also failed to recognise that traditional iTaukei culture, and its associated forms of customary justice (bulubulu), are embedded in these difficult to access villages. As a result, current responses to sexual violence in Fiji can exclude a survivor’s culture, and act to disempower important traditional actors and ceremonies that form the basis of village life. This paper draws upon interviews with legal practitioners (including Magistrates, solicitors, and police officers) and survivor advocates to highlight innovative methods of responding to sexual victimisation, including the need for a vernacularised justice process in Fiji (See Merry, 2006). Through this vernacularisation, a survivor can operationalise their culture to create a justice process that addresses their needs, and ratu’s (village leaders or chiefs) can be empowered to recapture their traditional roles as first responders in cases of sexual violence. Such an approach would address the historic exclusion of cultural practices that are important to the survivor’s wellbeing, and create greater access to justice across Fiji.