"We cannot help him until he gets some consequences for his behaviour," was the simple assessment put to me many years ago by a specialist sexual abuse counsellor.

I had sent to their service a 16-year-old boy who had racked up numerous sexual assault victims.

His known career as a sex offender started at the age of 12, although we'd long held concerns about sexual behaviours between him and his much younger siblings.

He was soon to be charged and convicted of indecently assaulting a neighbour's young daughter and then quickly graduated to raping a girl from school (although he was charged, he was only convicted of indecent assault).

He was later expelled from his school after several similar complaints were made.

His desperate parents finally gave him up, unable to ensure their younger children (or indeed friends' children) were safe from him, and he went to live permanently at a youth shelter.

There he found a whole new population of victims, and shifted his modus operandi to raping vulnerable street girls (who no jury would believe).

He showed a glimmer of insight into his behaviour in the early stages, and I managed to get him into a highly specialised sexual assault counselling service for juvenile offenders.

On the advice of this service, I also pulled in an under-the-counter favour from a detective who gave him a stern warning about his behaviour and where it would lead him.

But here's the thing — where was his behaviour leading him?

Nowhere catastrophically negative for him, and barely even mildly inconvenient.

Where were the consequences?

And herein lies the problem: he simply wasn't facing any consequences.

He got a probation sentence (hence his involvement with me), and a tut-tut from a detective. And that was it.

He started to treat his sexual assault counselling as a joke — actually boasting about his "conquests" (by this time he was taking girls at knifepoint).

Whist education/rehabilitation, and in this case, highly specialised psychological intervention should be the first response (especially with young people), what happens when all of this fails?

When this particular young person finally appeared before our criminal justice system, he learnt a few key lessons:

1. You are innocent until proven guilty, and when the evidence rests entirely on his word against hers, chances are you will reap the benefit of the doubt.

2. In a rape case it is the female victim who goes on trial, and more often than not, she is found guilty. The perpetrator might begrudgingly be found guilty of a lesser charge, but only if he's seriously dodgy.

3. Vulnerable girls (such as those previously abused, living on the street and sex workers) already know the first two rules from personal experience, and will therefore rarely lay charges — they are an endless resource for sex predators.

A disturbing pattern

So how are we dealing with individuals who do not respond to reasonable attempts to curtail bad behaviour?

Over recent decades, a disturbing pattern has emerged in terms of how Australian society understands and responds to intractable "bad behaviour".

How are we dealing with individuals who do not respond to reasonable attempts to curtail bad behaviour? ( Unsplash.com: Tom Sodoge )

Rather than expecting individuals to take any responsibility for themselves whatsoever, we routinely see four core excuses:

1. Hand-wringing: this is barely one step above denial, and arises from a total disbelief that not everyone is inherently "good" or intrinsically motivated to do "right".

2. Externalise blame: he must be doing this because of society, genetics or the wrong coloured wallpaper in his nursery as a baby.

3. Educate/rehabilitate: of course he wants to change and be like the rest of us (why, what's in that for him?), therefore he will willingly and enthusiastically engage with us to change his ways (for what possible reason?).

4. Medicalise: since he still doesn't think like us, he must be "ill". Let's label his appalling behaviour a mental illness and treat him.

When all of the above fails, we need to go back to basics and realise that the environment needs to keep consistency with our rhetoric: if we say it's not okay to assault people, then we need to ensure there are immediate and meaningful consequences to back that up.

Finally, we are seeing this shift in Australia's attitudes towards domestic violence.

After all the futile measures to address the perpetrator's underlying problems are trialled, failed and exhausted, we are left with one woman per week being murdered by her (ex)partner.

Some are finally starting to realise that the only real way to stop this ghastly behaviour, is the strict and swift application of real consequences.

Whilst some dismiss punitive measures as primitive and crude, so are the motivations that necessitate their application.

Without consequences, at best we send mixed messages, and at worst we become complicit in enabling bad behaviour.

Consequences throw the ball of responsibility back into the court of the badly behaved, providing them with the impetus (where little existed previously) to change their ways.

Rachael Sharman specialises in child and adolescent development and lectures in psychology at the University of the Sunshine Coast.