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  • 6 weeks ago
A child sex abuse survivor has called for courts and police across the country to urgently address the way they treat people like him, after years of delays in prosecuting his case. South Australian man Mike Worsman has delivered a scathing victim impact statement in the ACT supreme court today targeting both his abuser and authorities.

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00:00Mike Warsman kept his secret for more than 20 years, until he learned his abuser had
00:08sexually assaulted someone else. Today he read a victim impact statement telling the
00:14court it was a monstrous crime which had a devastating impact on his life.
00:19I will never know a life free from this pain. He shattered my existence. His evil infected
00:27me. Earlier this year, a man pleaded guilty in the ACT Supreme Court to five charges related
00:34to the offences committed in Canberra over a five-day period in the 1990s. The court heard
00:41the attacks were violent and were accompanied by threats to kill, should Mr Warsman tell
00:46anyone. Mr Warsman finally went to police only to discover after a five-hour interview he
00:54was in the wrong place. The material had to be sent to Canberra.
00:5818 months later is how long it took him, me following up every month to see, hey have you
01:04sent that document that's, you know, about me being raped as a child over to the ACT.
01:10And when his abuser was finally released from a South Australian jail for the other offence,
01:15there was no legal avenue for extradition to Canberra.
01:18He pled guilty on the 19th of June last year. Why couldn't he be sentenced a month after
01:24that via remote video link? He was done, he was sentenced via remote video link for the
01:29other case. When the man was finally released from jail, he was told to make his own way
01:34to Canberra, which he did for today's court appearance. He has not been remanded in custody
01:41and will be formally sentenced by Justice David Mossop on Thursday.
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