Scales of injustice

In the final part of a three-part series, Conor Ryanlooks at the case of a 13-year-old girl who a court ruled consented to sex with her 41-year-old abuser.

AT JUST 13-years-old, Angela Gibbons felt exposed, frightened and let down. She was the target of a predatory paedophile, a charismatic man old enough to be her father.

From being her first employer he later became her first kiss, her first sexual experience and the father of her first child.

She was innocent and helpless to understand what was happening, so outwardly she protected him — took the flak when people asked questions of their relationship.

When eventually she stood up to expose him, he warned her she would never get justice. And, although he was jailed for what he did to other children, a protracted legal battle left Angela feeling he was right — he will never be punished for the crimes he did to her.

As a teenage victim and an adult seeking justice Angela fell into a blind-spot in Irish society where the laws on strict liability are blurred by the assumption that this type of relationship can somehow be consensual.

“The judges, the barristers and everyone else all saw this mature woman standing before them, talking about something that happened more than 20 years ago, they didn’t see the child I was when he did that to me.

“I had thought there was a chance of justice for me after all these years, that for the first time I would be proved right but it failed me. That was my lowest point,” she admits five-years after she went into court thinking he would be found guilty of statutory rape.

His name is kept private to protect other potential court proceedings which Angela accepts she will not be a part of — even if her child’s birth certificate, with her abuser’s name listed as the father, was cut-and-dry evidence that they had sex before she reached the age of consent.

Instead, he was able to use the legal system as years before he had manipulated a 13-year-old girl who had come to work for him.

GROOMING

“I see now what he was doing. Before he ever touched me, he talked to me for six months. He confided in me about his marriage and found out a lot about my own family and my relationships with my parents. He gained my trust.

“He was 28 years older than me but he treated me like an adult and, of course, I lapped it up. He asked what was going on in school. He told me I was so clever.

“I went working for him in May and he didn’t touch me until October. He started to take me and my friend out for meals, after a while he would drop her off at discos, but he kept me with him and we would go to eat, he didn’t touch me at that stage. I thought he was just a nice man, my friend.”

Angela did not discover his intentions until she was asked to dance at a disco by a boy her own age. She said no but when the boy persisted she relented to avoid hassle.

“I had a dance, one dance, and he [her abuser] went ballistic. When I went outside he was in a rage and then he actually kissed me.

“I had never even kissed a boy before. I was in a whirly gig. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. My friend came out but I didn’t tell her and I went home and cried my eyes out but I told no one, how could I at 13 make sense of what had happened?”

At 13 years old she thought she would be fired from her part-time job, especially after she lied about her age to get it in the first place.

She decided to tell her boss she was not 15-years-old, expecting him to say he was sorry. Instead, he told her he loved her and he needed her. She did not know how to deal with that. But even in her innocence, Angela knew there were other things on his mind.

“I didn’t know what he wanted but I knew he wanted something more. My friend and I had read True Romance and things like that but didn’t know what happened beyond the bedroom door.

“I thought if I avoided him and stayed away from where his house was it would be okay because I knew if something was going to happen, it was going to happen there, in private.

“I avoided him as much as I could but sometimes he would get me alone, then he would try to get me to do things, I didn’t do them, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to say leave me alone.

“I was a first-year in secondary school, I am looking at the pictures now and I am thinking how would I have known at that age how to deal with somebody so much older.”

EXPLOITATION

In May, it will be 30 years since she joined his company, she remembers the job interview, but her memory has blocked out the first time he had sex with her. At the time it was a crime under statutory rape law with a maximum punishment of life in prison.

She cannot remember the build up or how he got her into his house but she knows what date it was — they celebrated it as their anniversary throughout her teenage years.

All she could do was convince herself everything was normal but she had nothing to measure normal against.

Within a short time he convinced her he loved her and she began to love him, how else could she make sense of what was happening to her.

She told her family the relationship was platonic, echoing the phrase he kept impressing on her.

She worried about the gardaí arresting him because she was underage so she was careful to protect him. After all, he kept telling her he couldn’t help himself.

“There were lots of people, my own family included, who for lots of reasons would not say ‘hold on he is not getting you out that door’.

“There were lots of rows about me working there but they didn’t really have an idea of what was going on.

“This man came into my home when I was 14 years old, he would get me to leave the door open so he could have sex with me in my home.

“I can tell you, I was not some sneaky 14-year-old who was just dying for him to come to me in the middle of the night. I was frightened.”

DENIAL

The day after her 16th birthday her boss drove her to the Well Woman clinic in Dublin for a pregnancy test. She had prayed to God for a negative result.

Her prayers were not answered but once her son was born she refused to consider this new part of her life was anything other than her pride and joy.

“I was ashamed when I was pregnant, I wore big jumpers for a whole summer and thinking once I had a baby in the pram nobody would mind and everybody would just leave me alone.

“When my son was born he was very much my baby, I did not involve him [her abuser] and I never thought of my child as his baby. He was mine.

“It is difficult for me to say I wish it [getting pregnant] didn’t happen because I had my son and I love him, but I do wish it was different, that he [her abuser] didn’t do the damage he did to me and to other people.”

Angela was the youngest of her siblings and was close to her mother but recognises her family did not know how to deal with the situation. They buried a daughter when Angela was six and there was a lot of sadness and her abuser knew and exploited this.

Her family was not equipped to face what was going on and she knows that because she never explained her turmoil she appeared brazen.

When she became pregnant her boss was privately proud at his age to have fathered a child, but did not acknowledge it was his baby until after she gave birth.

She had left school and continued to think of him as her partner not knowing what else to do.

Before she became pregnant Angela was too embarrassed to look for contraception and he refused to use any. She was ashamed to be seen with him in public.

“He was always dirty. He was not an attractive 40-odd-year-old man, he was manky. I had to believe he loved me, it was very important for me to believe my child was conceived in love. I didn’t know he was preying on other people as well.”

SEEKING JUSTICE

When she eventually cut ties with him, at the age of 19, the levels of violence and threats got extreme but she never allowed herself to consider the relationship as sexual abuse. She describes that as her survival mechanism.

“It was not until my daughter [her second child] got to the age I was when it started and I saw how innocent I must have been.”

The impact has been great and throughout her adult life she would get enraged very easily. Her family relationships suffered and when she eventually was sent to a clinical psychologist by a pretrial judge, Angela was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.

This was made worse by her experience of the courts.

At the pretrial hearing her explanations of the relationship failed to gain traction, particularly because she admitted loving her abuser.

Her case was grouped with other charges brought against her abuser — the other victims were younger when it happened.

She was a teenager and, as is often the case, the court is slow to consider sexual relationships as abuse once puberty has set in. Eventually the trial of her abuser continued without her and he was jailed. Although she supported the other victims she descended into depression.

Angela has pulled herself back, moved from Dublin and focused on her family.

RECOVERY

Now she is ready to speak out and show while anonymity protects victims it means their plight remains faceless.

And hidden in the shadows of the justice system, vulnerable people can have years of abuse and torture compounded by legal technicalities and bewildering proceedings.

Her experience shows left out of the tiny minority of sexual abuse and rape cases which result in a conviction are straightforward allegations with documented evidence but they fall victim to the legal system.

In Angela’s case, her son’s birth certificate, which proved she conceived at 15 years of age to a man older than she is today, was still not enough to see justice done.

“The horrible thing is I would have to think hard about telling people to come forward. You are just not aware of the enormity of it or the toll court takes. And then to see it is not about right and wrong but about something very convoluted and complex.

“The scales of justice in Ireland are not equal, they tilt way over in favour of the accused. The system used in Belguim and France, where a judge has to investigate themselves and where victims have legal representation of their own is much fairer,” she said.

Angela also knows that victims who suffer similar ordeals today will face an even more tortured ordeal if they try to seek justice.

Since the Mr C case struck down the 1935 statutory rape legislation two years ago underage victims cannot enjoy the benefit of strict liability.

The onus is on those who come forward to not only prove that sex took place they must also convince a jury that their abuser knew their age and did not make an “honest mistake”.

If not they must endure the same torture as adult rape victims who must prove they had not consented to sex — that they were not willing partners.

For Angela, the 2006 emergency legislation strengthened her belief that society thinks teenagers are somehow to blame if they are exploited by predatory adults.

Helpline number

IF anybody has been the victim of a sexual assault or knows of somebody in need of help, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre runs a freephone helpline on 1800-778888.

Recently, the DRCC ran a campaign to ensure women take adequate precautions particularly when alcohol is involved.

Rape Crisis Network Ireland has a full list of local support centres at www.rcni.ie.

* Cosc, the National Office for the Prevention of Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence facilitates joined-up action across Government bodies and non-Governmental Organisations funded by Government for the prevention of these crimes, the protection of victims and the provision of services to those affected.