'I'm forever the girl who was raped. He got 300 hours of community service'

A former University of Wollongong student whose rapist was given community service instead of a jail sentence has started a campaign to call for stronger sentencing for sexual crimes.

"As the survivor of this, as the victim, you get the life long sentence, you get the trauma and the PTSD and the being branded as the girl that was raped," the woman leading the campaign, Emily Campbell-Ross, said.

"That's something that follows you for your whole life, and to have that responded to with just community service is a slap in the face."

When she lived in Canberra working in the parliamentary service in 2021, the now 23-year-old International Studies graduate was raped by a man she trusted in her own home while she was asleep after a night out.

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The man, Thomas Earle, 26, was convicted of one count of rape and for committing an act of indecency, and was acquitted of two further counts of sexual assault without consent in the same trial.

During sentencing last month the judge decided against jail time, instead requiring him to complete 300 hours of community service and 20 hours of counselling by 2026.

In handing down this sentence, ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum pointed to evidence of Earle's "good character", including several character references and said he was from a "loving and supportive family" and had little to no chance of re-offending.

This devastated Ms Campbell-Ross, who says she has been given a life sentence of trauma.

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"A sentence like this says to victims that your story doesn't matter," she said.

"It says that someone can take away the right to your own body and that all they have to do is go and do a little bit of volunteering every Saturday for a couple of years, and that's justice. That's not justice."

She said lenient sentencing also sent the wrong message to perpetrators.

"I aggressively believe that with sexual assault, if they're convicted... jail time is a must," she said.

"You can't inflict this trauma and this harm upon another person and not see the inside of a prison cell.

"Not only is there a huge need for punishment for their actions, there's also a really big need for general deterrent - not sending a convicted rapist to jail sets a really scary tone for the community.

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"It gives an idea of you can do the crime and not do the time. You really want to be setting a tone that sexual assault will be taken seriously and, and that's what jail time would be doing."

Through her new campaign - No Justice In Community Service - Ms Campbell-Ross also wants to highlight the contradictions which allow people "of good character" not to serve time.

"I think, when they are someone who supposedly has good character and has come from a great education and a good background and had all those privileges, it's worse that they've offended because they've had every opportunity to understand that this is wrong and to not involve themselves in this behaviour," she said.

"So we are looking to have sentencing considerations reformed to not include character as as a consideration when sentencing sexual assault cases, as we don't think it's relevant to say somebody of good character would not assault someone."

The campaign is focused on the ACT courts, which Ms Campbell-Ross says has some of the weakest sentencing considerations and guidelines in Australia,

However, she says she hopes to broaden its scope to get justice for victim-survivors all over Australia.

"This happens a lot, it's not rare," she said.

"I did a quick Google search when I first started looking into whether or not I had had the grounds to kind of push against this sentence, and within five minutes, I was able to find four other cases from the past year where convicted rapists have been sentenced to community service or, in one case, where the offender was just sentenced to a good behaviour bond."

Another rape survivor Karen Illes wrote an opinion piece in the Mercury this week about the uphill battle victim-survivors face.

Like Ms Campbell-Ross she is campaigning for change, but where the former is focused on sentencing, Ms Iles is targeting the initial police investigations.

Last year, Ms Iles, who is also , a member of the Illawarra Women's Health Centre team responsible for the establishment of the Women's Trauma Recovery Centre, spoke publicly for the first time about the multiple aggravated sexual assaults committed against her as a 14-year old child.

Despite reporting these crimes to police in her early 20s, investigations did not progressed.

Now, through her Make Police Investigate Campaign, she wants create a legally enforceable duty of care, for police to investigate aggravated sexual assault and other serious crimes to a minimum standard.

Using a litany of shocking statistics about the state of Australia's police and judicial system, her opinion piece highlighted issues which exist across all stages for victim-survivors.

"Police in this country do not have a legally enforceable duty of care towards victims of sexual assault - they do not have a legally enforceable duty to investigate," she said.

"They get to pick and choose who they will help, which rapists to charge and which to ignore. In my local government area 78 per cent of sexual assault reports to police go "unsolved".

She said one in four women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime and that "alarmingly, the picture is getting worse, not better".

"Young women are now more likely to report experiencing sexual violence in their lifetime with 51 per cent of those born between 1989 and 1995 having experienced sexual violence," she said.

"Police reports of sexual assault have increased 33 per cent for women in the last five years. It is the only crime that is growing in Australia."

Currently only 13 per cent of women report their rapist to police, she said, and only 14 per cent of reports to police result in legal consequences for the perpetrator.

"For women whose perpetrators and rapists do see the inside of a courtroom, who do have to face a jury, albeit sitting silently without going into the witness box themselves, only a fraction get found guilty, and only a proportion have a custodial sentence handed out," she said.

"For a victim the experience of trying to hold your rapist to account is gruelling. Many report that our police and criminal trial process is more traumatising than the rapes themselves."

"And after all of this in total - only 0.5 per cent of men who rape women ever face a conviction."

Using the 25 per cent statistic, she said there were over three million women "expected by our society to 'get over it' to 'put it behind you'," while men who rape women carry on unchecked.

"Yet many of these crimes carry maximum sentences in our criminal code," she said.

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