The Sentencing Of Aiia Maasarwe's Killer Should Signify A Shift In Our Blame

On January 16th this year, Aiia Maasarwe’s body was found in a Melbourne street. She had been beaten with a metal pole, sexually assaulted, set on fire, and left for dead. She had just gotten off the tram, and was calling her sister when she was attacked. She was only 21.

Yesterday, the man who murdered her, Codey Herrmann, was sentenced to 36 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole in 2049 after serving 30 years of that sentence. He’ll be 51 years old by then.

We’ve heard this story time and time again. As of this morning, 58 Australian women have been murdered since the beginning of 2019. Aiia was the first victim  of violence for the year, but sadly she was definitely not the last. 

As well as those 58 women, 20 children across the country have been killed too. The youngest was a Victorian child who was only three months old. 

Standing outside court, Aiia’s dad Saeed Maasarwe told reporters that “our compass is not revenge. We think all the time, our mind, our compass is positive, is not negative”. 

“This is not our compass, this is not our focus, but to care for the society, for the people, for the ladies [to be able to] go out and go back home,” he said.

He also said that he hoped their experience made authorities think more about preventing crimes rather than responding to them after they’ve already happened. 

The attack on Aiia was a crime of opportunity that never should have happened. It’s an important point about prevention, but we have so many organisations working to prevent situations like this that it’s sometimes easy to forget that they shouldn’t be the ones bearing any responsibility. Front line services do their absolute best with what they’re given, but they can’t hold any blame when tragedies like this happen.

We’re hearing more now about what the court was told about Herrmann’s life. He had apparently lead a life of “extreme physical and emotional depravation“, and had diagnoses for drug-induced psychosis and severe personality disorder. The judge described his life before the murder as full of “profound chaos and despair”. 

Herrmann’s background was taken into consideration when he was sentenced, but it’s important that we don’t start speaking about these aspects of his life as if they’re an excuse. A lot of people have managed to get through horrible circumstances in their life without murdering a random woman walking home at night. 

I never quite know how to wrap these articles up. I can’t say that I hope something like this never happens again, because we all know it’s just a matter of time. I can’t try and find a silver lining amongst it all, because everything involved in these cases are just a horrible tragedy. I can’t tell you to stay safe, because I shouldn’t have to tell anybody that. 

I think I’ll just say the same thing I said when the news of Aiias death first broke: Vale, Aiia Maasarwe. You deserved better.