There is disquiet among some members of the public who perceive that offenders who abuse children are given lighter sentences than offenders who abuse adults. Their concerns were brought to the fore in October 2000 when a woman was sentenced to four months imprisonment for dousing her ten-year-old foster son in petrol and accidentally setting him alight.
Ministry of Justice researchers undertook a small project to compare the sentences imposed on offenders charged with physical assault with reference to the age of their victims. The research is based on data extracted from the Law Enforcement System (LES) and from court files for charges involving physical (non-sexual) assaults that were finalised in 1999.
Methodology
Permission was sought from the Department for Courts to undertake a search of files based in four court locations around New Zealand. These were the Christchurch, Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga courts (including both District and High courts).
Data were extracted for the four courts from the Case Monitoring Subsystem of LES for charges involving physical (non-sexual) assaults that were finalised in 1999. Using this data and the associated court files, the following information was derived:
• Demographic information of the victim – age, gender, ethnicity
• Demographic information of the offender – age, gender, ethnicity
• Details of the incident – the extent of physical injury inflicted on the victim, the relationship of the victim to the offender, the charge the offender was convicted of and the sentence that was imposed.
The data extracted from LES provided information relating to the offender and some of the information relating to the incident. All of the information relating to the victim of the assault was gathered from the relevant court files. Where possible, the victim information was obtained from victim impact statements, pre-sentence reports, and Judges’ sentencing notes.
The analysis was performed at a charge-based level because charges are related to incidents between a single victim and a single offender at a specified time. Thus, two offenders attacking a single victim would usually result in two charges, as would a single offender attacking the same victim on two separate occasions.