THERE
were mounting demands yesterday for urgent changes to the law after the
collapse of a case involving the alleged sexual abuse of a woman with
an intellectual disability.
The judge presiding over the trial directed the jury
to acquit the defendant after ruling the law did not provide an offence
for the alleged circumstances of the case.
The 61-year-old accused had pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting the now 23-year-old woman on December 11, 2008.
The prosecution alleged the man had asked the young woman, who has an
intellectual age of 8 to 9 years, to follow him outside and then
repeatedly asked her to perform a "blow job".
The young woman
told gardaí during a recorded interview shown to the jury she had been
forced to perform the act and that she kept saying "no" when the man
said "go on".
Mr Justice Barry White said he "utterly
abhorred" the thought of an allegation of someone taking advantage of a
person with a mental impairment, but said "justice must be administered
in a cold, dispassionate and analytic way".
He told the jury
the accused had been charged under section 4 of the Criminal Law (Rape)
(Amendment) Act 1990, which does not have regard to any mental
impairment a complainant may have.
He said there was
legislation in place which makes certain sexual activity with a mentally
impaired person illegal, but it does not provide an offence for the
alleged circumstances of this case.
Cliona Saidlear of the
Rape Crisis Network Ireland said: "There are laws that specifically
address the vulnerability of people with an intellectual disability to
sexual crimes, but they only name a very few types of sexual crimes, so
there’s a huge number of sexual acts that are not included. The
legislation needs to be amended to include all the different forms of
sexual violence."
Fine Gael justice spokesman Alan Shatter
said this issue had been highlighted by a number of Oireachtas
committees, but claimed their findings had been ignored by the
government. He demanded that emergency legislation be brought in.
Inclusion Ireland, the National Association for People with an
Intellectual Disability, said the law must be changed to "make all
sexual offences, against people with an intellectual disability,
criminal".
A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Dermot Ahern
said the minister was not in a position to comment on individual cases.
But she added that "this area of the law" was again being examined by
the Law Reform Commission.
SIC: IE/IE