KEY POINTS:
Women will march on the Auckland police station on Thursday to demand changes to the way sex offending cases are dealt with following last week's acquittal of suspended Auckland police chief Clint Rickards.
Spokeswoman Jasmine Gray said the group did not accept the verdict of a jury last Thursday that found Mr Rickards and two former police officers not guilty of kidnapping and indecently assaulting a 16-year-old girl in 1983-84.
"I don't think it's necessarily the facts that are being disputed. It's interpretations," she said.
Ms Gray said New Zealand's adversarial system "puts the victim on trial more than the person who has been accused".
Victim support groups backing the march are calling for a shift to European-style "inquisitorial" justice or restorative justice for sex abuse cases.
Mr Rickards' lawyer, John Haigh, QC, declined to comment yesterday, but Council for Civil Liberties president Barry Wilson said that unlike his two co-accused, Mr Rickards had no previous convictions and the public should recognise that a jury heard all the evidence and acquitted him.
"The jury is there to represent the community. They are well placed to do so," Mr Wilson said. "If you want to override their verdict by a kind of collective moral panic, then it's the community that suffers."
But as a lawyer he agreed that it was time to look at alternative justice systems for sex offences.
"As someone who has done a very large number of sex offence jury trials, I'm sure we need to look at alternatives to the adversarial system."
National Collective of Women's Refuges manager Heather Henare said yesterday that "mainstream New Zealand" was outraged that jurors in the Rickards case were not told that his co-accused, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum, had been convicted of rape in another case in 2005.
She said women's refuges were inundated with calls supporting Louise Nicholas, an earlier complainant against Shipton, Schollum and Mr Rickards, after the three men were acquitted of raping her in the 1980s. Many callers were older women who said they had also been abused in the past.
Refuges collected money for Mrs Nicholas "so we could send her on a holiday".
Auckland Rape Crisis educator Kylie Tippett said women had sent in money and messages of support for the victim in the latest case in the past few days.
This time the women's groups do not know the complainant's name and have channelled the messages to her through the police.
Detective Sergeant Max Taylor, victim liaison officer for Operation Austin, which investigated all three complaints, said the complainant was "most grateful" for all the messages.
Rape Crisis director Kim McGregor said the country's 12 rape crisis groups, other victim support groups and Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care were working with Ministry of Justice officials to investigate better methods for handling sex offending cases.
Dr McGregor said cases alleging historical offending turned on the credibility of the complainant because there was usually no other witness and the accused did not have to give evidence.
She said the European inquisitorial system allowed victims to give most of their evidence in their own words in written statements, and let judges question both the victim and the accused to establish the truth.
Another option was restorative justice for offenders who admitted at least partial guilt and could be helped towards making reparation to the victim and seeking treatment for their offending.
The protests
* The "march against police rape" begins with a rally in Aotea Square at 7pm on Thursday, International Women's Day.
* There will be a rally in Civic Square in Wellington at 5.30pm on the same day.
