The real tragedy of the Adrian Bayley case is how easily it could have been avoided

• Adrian Bayley trials: full coverage
• John Silvester: Bayley's reign of terror
• Adrian Bayley's savage history
• Why you weren't told

It's been almost two years since Adrian Ernest Bayley was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the rape and murder of Jill Meagher. In late 2012, Bayley approached Meagher on Sydney Road, Brunswick. After failing to engage her in conversation, he followed her on the short route to her home via Hope Street where he then viciously raped and strangled her. Later, he buried her body in a shallow grave at Gisborne South.

The confluence of circumstances around Meagher's disappearance and reasonably rapid discovery drew the community in with a fever. When Meagher's body was found, six days after she failed to come home following a night out with friends, the community had become so committed to her safe return that there couldn't help but be a genuine outpouring of grief. A question began to play on repeat, as everyone struggled to come to some kind of understanding.

How could this have happened?

But in light of what we now know about the failings of the Victorian Parole Board, it turns out that it was quite easy for a man like Bayley to stalk, rape and murder a woman who was just exercising her right to walk home at night.

 Now a jury returned a guilty verdict in yet another trial in which Bayley was accused of multiple counts of the rape and imprisonment of women in Melbourne's bayside area. The charges related to crimes against numerous women, perpetrated from as far back as 2000 to as recently as the months before Bayley murdered Meagher. As Bayley  had a reputation for being particularly brutal in his manner of sexual assaults, one could make the reasonable assumption that the emotional, psychological and physical fallout of these crimes has had devastating lifelong impacts on his victims.

And still, that question. How could this have happened? How could a known risk, someone the sentencing judge in the Meagher rape and murder trial called "a recidivist violent sexual offender who has had little compunction about sexual offending when the mood takes [him], or about threatening and inflicting violence as part of the process", be given the kind of freedom that enables him to traumatise and brutalise countless women?

The answer surely lies in the approach the legal system takes towards sex crimes, and particularly sex crimes perpetrated against certain kinds of women. Between 2000 and 2001, Bayley was charged with the horrifying rapes of five St Kilda sex workers. Five individual women, whom he separately trapped inside his vehicle before brutally raping them. For these collective crimes, Bayley was given a minimum sentence of just eight years. That's just 1.6 years each. He would serve even less of that time, securing parole on March 17, 2010 after serving his minimum term.

Why is it that the sexual assault of sex workers is  regarded as somehow less serious, less worrying, less criminal than the sexual assault of women whose characteristics and lifestyles satisfy a social expectation of "nice behaviour"? Had those women not been sex workers, perhaps Bayley – with his extensive priors – would have been given a heftier sentence. Perhaps he would have still been in jail when Meagher set out to make the short, eight-minute walk home from Brunswick's Bar Etiquette.

The gut-wrenching irony is that Bayley was able to rape and murder the kind of woman our community values most because justice wasn't pursued for the crimes he committed against the women that same community values least.

But then, maybe this isn't just a case of apportioning a hierarchy of value to different kinds of women. Perhaps it's that the legal system itself, informed as it is by overriding patriarchal social ideas, simply doesn't view violence against women all that seriously. Earlier this month, a Brisbane man pleaded guilty in the Brisbane District Court to "rape, producing child exploitation material and indecent assault" after repeatedly raping his nine-year-old daughter and filming it. He was sentenced to seven years and three months in jail. He will be eligible for parole on August 12, 2017, meaning he may only have to serve a little over two years in jail.

Incomprehensibly, Judge Michael Rackemann told the court that the sentence would have been much higher had there been "any violence towards the girl" – as if the act of raping a child could ever be considered non-violent.

It's apparent that our country struggles to properly comprehend the impact of violence against women and children, but there should be no degrees of acceptance in regard to sexual assault. There are certainly more extreme versions of brutality, but all sexual assault is violent. And anyone who has been subjected to it, be it woman or man or child, is irreversibly affected by it.

Adrian Bayley was able to rape, strangle and then bury Jill Meagher in September 2012 because he operated in a world that doesn't view his numerous rapes as indicative of posing an ongoing threat to more women.

The traumatic impact of Bayley's existence is felt well beyond the circle of people who knew and loved Meagher. It's felt by every woman and child who has been brutalised by him and then discounted by the system. It's felt by their loved ones too. It is felt, surely, by Bayley's four children. His destruction has been so widespread and debilitating that there are many more victims beyond the ones he exacted his misogyny and hatred against.

 The verdict will not remove the trauma from Bayley's victims. But it might go some way to helping them heal. The real tragedy is how easily it could have been avoided. After Bayley confessed to raping and murdering Jill Meagher, he told police that he should never have been released from jail, that he shouldn't have been given any more chances.

The question that must be asked now is why he, and countless other men with horrifying histories of violence against women, are still given chances – and at what point we decide as a society that enough is enough.