Dr. Susan Leahy:

I think my colleagues at the Bar would have better knowledge of that. I am not a practising lawyer. We know that a lot of defendants will know their victims, so they may have personal knowledge and know that someone has gone to counselling. There is a practice we need to be aware of. I will take the committee through the history of me discovering this. I have been working in this area for nearly 20 years and did my PhD on it. When I first looked at the rules of evidence around sexual offence cases, there was no book that spoke about counselling notes, but when I went out to interview barristers for my PhD research, they were talking about counselling notes. That is when I first became aware of this quite a long time ago. This practice has built up over the years.

Asking for counselling notes has just become part of the criminal justice process and it is very wrong. There is this perception that it is-----