In Queensland, for example, lawyers for the Women’s Legal Center and other activists have been lobbying the legislature to include victims’ rights in a bill that lawmakers are considering.

In Tasmania and in the Northern Territory, a campaign called #LetHerSpeak aims to overturn state laws that make it illegal to identify a victim of sexual assault even if the victim consents.

New South Wales is also studying how consent laws work, in the wake of outrage over the case of Saxon Mullins, who said she was raped in a Sydney alleyway, only to have the man involved be acquitted because even though she didn’t consent, he thought she did.

And yet, at this point, there has been little progress. Systemic change is slow, and some women told me that they aren’t sure how much to expect from a male-dominated system that is insular and often overconfident in its own rectitude.

In the case of Cardinal Pell, the issue was secrecy: One judge and a suppression order defined for the world how much could be known about the most senior Vatican official to ever be tried for sexually abusing children.

But, more broadly, the invisibility of the process can hide a multitude of sins.

What’s often invisible to those without direct experience of these kinds of cases, many women said, is that the courts often feel discriminatory rather than fair.

“I used to work at the women’s center in Cairns in the ’80s, and one of the things I’ve found was that the women were always ostracized once they went into court,” Ms. Prince told me. “It didn’t matter if it was domestic violence, rape, or a mom trying to get custody of the kids.”