KEY POINTS:
To stand up and speak in public is one of the toughest things you can do.
I've been doing it for more than 20 years and, even now, I still get heart palpitations and shaky hands before I go on. And that's just for silly tits and teeth, after-dinner speaking.
I can't imagine what it would take to stand up in a courtroom, as a victim of a heinous crime, and try to explain to a room full of strangers just what the offender's actions have cost you and your family, to try to put into words how physically, mentally and emotionally devastated you are.
And to learn last week that victims have to be nice when they're preparing their victim impact statements, that they have to neutralise and water down their language to the emasculated Orwellian Newspeak that seems to be the only kind acceptable in court, is appalling.
According to Ministry of Justice guidelines, you are able to say that, as the result of an attack, for example, you are fearful for your safety and your-day-to-day living arrangements have irrevocably altered. But you are not allowed to say that you doubt whether you'll ever get the stench of your attacker out of your nostrils or that every time you close your eyes, you see his fist coming towards you, or that you question the efficacy and justice of a system that allows a man parole when he's already been convicted of several brutal assaults.
In short, you're not allowed to give a victim impact statement at all.
If legal niceties prevent the victim being able to read out their statement in front of a jury, then the opportunity should be afforded to victims of crime to read out their statements to the offenders in another forum, whether the offenders want to hear them or not.
This current system is a nonsense.
To have a man like Kevin McNeil taking two days off work to write out exactly how he felt about his mother, teacher Lois Dear, being murdered, and to have it returned with instructions to do it again - as if it was some poorly written fourth-form English essay - is cruel and nonsensical.
The system needs to be changed to allow victims to tell it like it really is.
