More than just ugly

Issue 

By Nigel D'Souza

MELBOURNE — David Roff killed his Aboriginal de facto wife, Wendy Ann Noble, by hitting her over the head several times and then strangling her. The incident took place in their home on July 15, 1990, in front of their two young children, aged three and four at the time. Both Roff and Noble were drunk.

Sixteen months later, on November 4, 1991, Roff was sentenced to two-and-a-half years, having been found guilty of manslaughter. With remissions and other reductions, Roff is now a free man on parole a matter of days after the conclusion of the court case.

The case highlights the role of the legal system in minimising and thus sanctioning the levels of violence against women. It raises further questions about the adequacy of the Victorian government's media campaign, whose slogan says rather insipidly and non-committally that "violence is ugly".

There has been a trend in cases involving the killing of women in "domestics" for the perpetrators to be charged with manslaughter rather than murder. The ramifications are that the killer is liable to a sentence of considerably reduced severity.

In the Roff case, the Victorian director of public prosecutions saw fit to reduce the charge from murder to manslaughter. Combined with a guilty plea, this meant that much of the evidence about the long history of violence by Roff on Noble was not considered. This may have made it possible to view the incident that led to the killing of Wendy Noble in isolation, as the unfortunate outcome of a drunken brawl rather than as the culmination of frequent assaults.

This is not an isolated case. A few months earlier in a case involving the killing of a Filipina by her European husband, the judge handed down a similarly lenient sentence.

Judges' attitudes, and the gender-biased nature of the law, create a system that does not provide adequate legal protection for women. The government must, if it is serious about the violence against women in Victoria and elsewhere, recognise that inane messages like "violence is ugly" are inadequate in fighting what is institutionalised.

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