Notice that judges are getting a pay rise because 1. A lot of lawyers are refusing to do it when asked due to concerns about pay/conditions 2. 2% of judiciary think ministers respect the judiciary and 3. The volume of sexual offences cases is too gruelling.
Here's the story from the Scottish Legal News Bulletin from yesterday (would have linked to it but can't find it on the site)
^Judges are to be given a pay rise to stem the flow of what Lord Neuberger has called “refuseniks”, senior lawyers refusing to join the bench over misgivings about pay and working conditions.
The Lord Chancellor, Liz Truss, said yesterday that she ordered a review of judicial pay by the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB), saying the situation was “very serious”.
Only two per cent of the judiciary feel valued by ministers, a recent survey showed.
Ms Truss told the Lords Constitution Committee that “Some judges feel overwhelmed with the amount of work they had” and were finding the large number of sexual offence cases difficult to cope with.
The SSRB review will look at judges’ salaries across the UK a spokesperson for the Judicial Office for Scotland confirmed to SLN, saying: “The Review Body on Senior Salaries will carry out a review of the salary structure for the judiciary across the United Kingdom with the aim of submitting its advice to the Lord Chancellor by June 2018.”^
And that's with the current volume of sexual offence cases- imagine if all the rapes/assaults/abuse that goes unprosecuted was prosecuted, and all the incidents that go unreported where reported. It'd crumble.
I did read a while back that a lot of the officers involved in Yewtree ended up on sick leave/in counselling for PTSD as a result of the images they saw. To the extent that the number of therapists tarained to deal with police officers on that kind of thing was totally overwhelmed.
Also read, in the States, that there is some kind of programme for army/marine veterans who have lost limbs in recent conflicts, to retrain as online law enforcers. The US army has done a lot of research into PTSD recently, mostly about treatment, but also about assessing whether someone is more or less likely to develop it and in what circumstances (some people are more susceptible to PTSD from terror than physical injury) etc.
So they train former soldiers who have a) lost limbs and b) show higher resilience to psychological trauma and train them to investigate paedophiles online. One of the participants was interviewed (they've thought of some clever acronym for the programme like HEROES or STARS or similar). He said it was really gruelling work, but also really satisfying- when he lost his limbs and his ability to be a soldier he felt like he lost the ability to be a man, because to him the essence of being a man was the ability to protect those in your community more vulnerable than you. So working in online law enforcement catching paedophiles had been a huge part of his recovery from,losing his legs (and sight in one eye I think) in a suicide bomb attack. He still felt useful, like a man, like he was able to step up and protect people.
Anyway, I think there is probably something worth researching, about how people in law enforcement are able to cope with sexual offence cases, especially those related to children. If we understand that better, we might be Ina position to really see reporting/prosecution rates rise. I think people genuinely being unable to cope with that kind of subject on a daily basis is a big part (not the only part, but a big part) why we are so bad at dealing with it as society.