COLUMN ONE : Rapes That Are ‘Not as Heinous’ : A light sentence for assault on a prostitute has put Australia’s male-dominated courts on trial. ‘Judicial sexism’ has women outraged.

Like many rapes, it happened at night and at knifepoint. “It was a time of degradation, complete degradation,” the woman recalled.

Unlike many rapes, the victim went to the police. And unlike most, she testified and a jury believed her. Heros Hakopian, a restorer of antiques, was convicted last August of aggravated rape, aggravated indecent assault and kidnaping--guilty on all counts.

There the sordid case of the Queen vs. Hakopian normally would have ended. But it has exploded instead into a storm of anger and outrage in this most staid of Australian states, touching a raw public nerve that many here compare to the U.S. furor last year over allegations of sexual harassment against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

The reason: The judge who sentenced Hakopian to 16 months in prison, and the state Supreme Court that increased it to 30 months, did so with a caveat. The woman was a prostitute and, under a 1981 case cited by an all-male panel of judges, “prostitutes suffer little or no sense of shame or defilement” when raped.

Under the same ruling, raping a prostitute is “not as heinous as when committed on a happily married woman,” nor does it cause “a reaction of revulsion which it might cause in a chaste woman.”

Whatever the merits of that reasoning, a number of emotional issues--including accusing women of encouraging rape, maligning or discrediting victims because of their sexual history, and considering rape less grave a crime when committed against prostitutes--go international this week.

Justice Elizabeth Evatt, president of the Australian Law Reform Commission, will raise those troubling topics before the annual meeting of a United Nations committee overseeing the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which Australia signed in 1984. “The idea that it is a less serious offense to commit rape against a prostitute is a dangerous concept for the law to take up,” Evatt, a member of the committee, said in a phone interview from New York.

“It suggests that one category of people is less entitled to the protection of the law than another.”

For the 200 women who demonstrated outside the Victoria Supreme Court earlier this month, and the hundreds more who wrote angry letters to local newspapers and jammed phone-in shows, that’s putting it mildly.

“You wouldn’t believe the judges in the Supreme Court could be so stupid,” said Dr. Jocelynn Scutt, a lawyer and author of books on violence against women. “It just shows how arrogant they are, how out of touch with reality they are.”

“This strikes me as the worst form of hypocrisy,” agreed Deborah Cass, a senior law tutor at the University of Melbourne. “The difference between chaste and unchaste is obviously archaic and offensive. It’s a 19th-Century moral judgment. Have you ever heard of a judge asking of a man being chaste?”

“It’s just the latest case of judicial sexism,” said Lea Corbett, spokeswoman for the Federation of Community Legal Centers. “It raises concerns that the law and the police make distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, and ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ women.”

In the United States, many states in recent years have overhauled rape laws to grant greater protection to victims. California is among the states that have enacted so-called rape shield statutes that substantially restrict the use of evidence of an accuser’s sexual history. Reformers contend that such evidence is irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial to accusers.

In the recent Florida rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, the judge refused to allow testimony on either the accuser’s sexual past or on alleged sexual assaults involving Smith and other young women.

Still, the outcry in Australia was not helped by Hakopian’s lawyer, George Traczyk. In his sentencing plea, he argued that since the victim testified that she gave up prostitution and a heroin habit after the rape, “one would think this whole episode has been a bonus for her.”

Traczyk also told the court that if a woman “puts on a lot of makeup and mascara” and wears “very seductive clothes” in a public housing car park at 3 a.m. “and is then raped . . . the community reaction would generally be, ‘What did she expect was going to happen there?’ ”

Stunned by the public uproar, Traczyk says he now regrets that statement. “Even my wife, when she read what I said, she asked how I could say that,” he said in an interview. But Traczyk insists that both he and the judges were misunderstood.

“It’s unthinkable to apply one law to prostitutes and another to chaste women,” he said. But then he added: “Prostitutes know the dangers of their trade. When they are violated, they can hardly complain as loudly as anyone else.”

Many in Melbourne are complaining, however. This is Australia’s second-largest city, after Sydney, and the self-proclaimed center of finance, fashion and culture. The capital of Victoria state, named for the British monarch who gave the world Victorian morality, has wide sweeping boulevards, stately old buildings, spacious green gardens and sleek racing sculls on the winding Yarra River.

Behind the massive stone columns of ornate court buildings, barristers wear flowing black robes and white wigs and call each other “my learned friend.” The bench is also tradition-bound: Every one of the 46 county court judges and 25 state Supreme Court judges, who hear all appeals and murder trials, is male.

To critics, that helps account for a controversial series of recent rulings. Two highly publicized rape convictions, including one against a doctor, were overturned on technicalities. And in 1990, a convicted rapist was given an 18-month sentence after pleading guilty to raping and assaulting a prostitute.

“The offense of rape on this occasion savored more of the offense of dishonesty than of a sexual offense,” the county court judge, Graham Fricke, said at the time. “You agreed to pay the prostitute for oral sex, and you exceeded the terms of your agreement by demanding vaginal sex.”

Public anger against such rulings led to a yearlong review of rape laws by the state’s Law Reform Commission. Last November, the group issued detailed recommendations to Parliament to increase penalties, clarify definitions of consent and improve treatment of rape victims.

The state attorney general has asked the commission to examine the Hakopian case as well. But David Brereton, a law professor and consultant on rape to the commission, said the toughest challenge is to change attitudes in the male-dominated legal fraternity.

“A victim may talk to the police,” he said. “But more often than not, she won’t meet the prosecutor until the day of the trial, and usually just five minutes before the trial--plus, many of them won’t talk to the woman afterward.

“There’s a real problem of confidence in the judiciary by women,” he added.

That’s especially true for Melbourne’s prostitutes. All but one of Australia’s six states and two territories allow some form of legal prostitution. Victoria has 64 licensed brothels, although most of the state’s estimated 5,000 sex workers illegally solicit on the street.

Many belong to the Prostitute’s Collective of Victoria, an advocacy and assistance center based in a shabby two-story storefront in St. Kilda, a once-gracious suburb that is now the city’s tawdriest red-light district. The front windows are filled with police photos and crude drawings of “ugly mugs,” men who have abused or attacked women.

Upstairs, Sheranne Dobinson calls it a “fluke of justice” that Hakopian was convicted. “Otherwise, the case isn’t unusual at all,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

Indeed, a recent University of Melbourne study of rape cases involving prostitutes found that their attackers tended to receive far lower sentences than other rapists. The men use greater force, including more guns and knives. Their victims suffer more serious injuries, but are also less likely to report the crime.

Hakopian’s 28-year-old victim testified, for example, that she had been raped two years before but did not report it because the man did not use a weapon. But the cold, rainy Sunday night of May 20, 1990, was different.

Hakopian, a 52-year-old Iranian immigrant, picked her up off a St. Kilda corner and paid her $70 for oral and vaginal sex. He drove her to his workshop several miles away and parked his van in the driveway.

In a statement to police, Hakopian said that after 15 minutes of oral sex in the van, the woman said she wanted to stop and offered him a partial refund.

“It just started to get a bit rough,” he said. “She wanted to get out of the car and . . . and I grabbed her from her hair and, ah, just pushed her down and, ah, I said, ‘Look, I’ve paid you a lot of money and I wanna get my money’s worth, that’s all.’ And then, ah, she started screaming.”

Hakopian said he continued to hold “fairly tightly” onto her hair “. . . so she couldn’t get away” as he drove off at high speed. After his car collided with another, he pushed her out, screaming and splattered with blood. He later burned her handbag and coat in his incinerator.

The woman’s testimony added more brutal details. During two days of grueling cross-examination, she insisted that Hakopian had held a knife to her neck during the struggle. “He said, ‘You bitch, if that doesn’t scare you, I’ve got a gun in the back,’ ” she added.

“I was totally terrified,” she said.

County Court Judge David Jones was sympathetic. But the fact that she was a prostitute “is a relevant consideration” in sentencing, he said, and the “likely psychological effect” on her “lessens the gravity of the offenses.” With a possible maximum sentence of 30 years, he ordered Hakopian incarcerated for 16 months.

Hakopian appealed his conviction. The prosecution appealed against the leniency of the sentence.

On Dec. 11, a three-member panel of the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction and increased the sentence to 30 months. That means, according to his lawyer, that he probably will serve about 14 months. The judges said Jones was “justified” in his reasoning, however.

The case cannot be appealed further. Instead, women’s groups are gearing up for the next battle in a society that routinely calls women “sheilas” and that is just coming to grips with issues of sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination.

“Sexual assault is finally on a mainstream agenda, where it hasn’t been before,” said Wendy Larcombe, who works with the Women’s Legal Resource Group. “People are finally recognizing that the system does not provide justice.”

Times staff writer Philip Hager in San Francisco contributed to this report.