Reforming the Legal Definition of Rape in Victoria - What do Stakeholders Think?

Abstract

Internationally and in Australia, rape law reforms in recent decades have had mixed outcomes. As a result, when the Victorian government began consulting on another round of major reforms in this area, the authors designed a qualitative research project to investigate whether a proposed change to the definition of rape is likely to clarify and simplify the law, as intended. This article draws on a series of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders who have extensive practice- or research-based expertise in criminal justice processing of rape cases. We analyse their perceptions and interpretations of a proposed definition of rape, which would require an absence of ‘reasonable belief’ in c..