ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 commences by describing the circumstances of the ‘Stanford rape’ case and the victim’s powerful impact statement in that case, to highlight the importance and salience of the subject focus of the book, namely, empirical research on sexual offence victims’ impact statements conducted in Australia between 2014 and 2016. The chapter then provides the background to our research and an overview of the research. Specifically, the book presents the perspectives of six victims of sexual offences in Australia on the use of the impact statements in their case. This is supplemented by the findings from interviews with 15 justice professionals who work with victims and analysis of sentencing remarks in 100 sexual offence cases. The remainder of the chapter outlines the structure of the text, our research method, our research lens and the limitations of the research. We end the chapter with a vignette about Eve, one of the victims we interviewed.
