ORAL DRAFT
Women, if you want to be safe, stay at home. Except that you are more likely to be killed at home by someone who claims they love you, so don’t stay at home. Make sure you don’t have a boyfriend because he’s the most likely person to kill you, but don’t go out without your boyfriend because you need someone to protect you. Don’t show too much skin, or laugh too loud or dance too much but come on love, give us a smile. Carry your keys in between your knuckles and your phone in your pocket. Make sure you run far enough to burn all those calories but don’t do it in public and for goodness sake, don’t run in shorts or a singlet, that’s just asking for trouble. Public transport is dangerous, but so are taxis and walking and driving on your own and did I mention that staying at home is really risky?
Like many women in Melbourne, I’m scared to live in a world where we can’t walk home at night without wondering if it might be the last time – but I’m not as scared of this as I am knowing that society seems perfectly content to make that our problem as women. Women’s safety is a men’s issue, and its high time that we employ this.
Jill Meagher, Eurydice Dixon, Masa Vukotic are names that we should not know, and yet we do. These women represent every woman’s fear; the fear that we rightfully feel when we dash along an unlit street or through an empty park or hear footsteps from behind. The fear I felt when I debated whether I should take a different route home from school than through the park when it was dark. These women tell us that what happened to them, could happen to anyone. It could happen to me.
Sexual violence and homicide might be the extreme end point of it, but the spectrum they sit on stretches right back to "harmless" casual sexism, the rape jokes and threats that proliferate and the attitude expressed towards women on a daily basis by groups of men who’ve been socialised to view themselves as superior. These toxic behaviours don’t manifest one day out of nowhere. They are cultivated over decades; and this cultivation needs to be stopped. No matter the circumstances, no matter the situation, we need to challenge the concept of male sense of entitlement about using violence. According to a 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 90% of perpetrators of sexual violence against women are men. Moreover, when men are victims of sexual assault, 93% reported their abuser was a man. It’s true that women also assault men, but even when victims of all genders are combined, men perpetrate 78% of reported assaults. These statistics are merely because men aren’t taught to see themselves as part of a group with a culture. That's obviously not saying all men are violent and that's not saying there's something inherently evil in men. It’s saying that it's something about their culture. A culture where men’s violence is normalised and celebrated in the locker room with hi fives and jokes about how “she wanted it”. And so we must challenge our systems and ourselves to confront the prevalence of normalised, sexualised violence experienced by many women.
Parents, instead of telling our girls not to walk through parks, maybe we should be telling our boys not to rape them. It isn’t up to women to modify our behaviour in order to prevent violence from being enacted against us, it’s up to society to work together to dismantle misogyny and the particular kind of male rage that informs these acts of aggression.
In the wake of Melbourne’s loss of Eurydice DIxon, Senior Police Officer David Clayton speaks what many of the population believe: Only those who suffer from mental conditions or upbringings in which they were exposed to domestic violence turn into ‘rapists’. The link between domestic violence, mental health and sexual assault constructs the all too familiar catch cries; “rape is not a crime, it is a disorder” or “rapists are mentally ill and suffered rough childhoods”. Eurydice’s rapist and murderer had autism, so this doesn’t hold him accountable right?. Research into these claims convey that only 9.3% of sexual assaulters suffer from these alleged conditions. Mental health assessments of rape and sexual assault claim that it is “downright negligent and harmful” to substantiate psychiatric problems to justify this behaviour. And while only a small number of men would do something as heinous as killing a woman, regardless of their upbringing or mental health, all men have a duty to challenge attitudes towards women, to condemn sexist jokes, and to push for women’s safety.
This brings me to my next argument. Men should take responsibility for sexual assault, not women. Don’t let another woman robbed of her life be turned into a cautionary tale just because the people who have the power to change things think it is easier to keep women afraid than it is to make men accountable. A man is assaulted at night and we discuss lock out laws and drunk violence. A woman is assaulted at night and we tell her to stop walking alone. The men in parliament keep asking “why didn’t she leave him?”, “why did she lead him on?”, “why was she not being safe?”, “why was she alone in the dark?” instead of asking “why was he?” or “why did he?”. And so, we get told to practise “safekeeping routines”, where I call my own mother when I need to walk a block in the dark, or when I feel eyes at the back of my head on a bus. Many women, like me, have been taught from a young age that they are responsible for avoiding the violence that men perpetrate against us. At best, this makes safety "advice" redundant. This highlights the impossible double bind women face in engaging in "safety" routines: if we use them, we restrict our worlds and possibilities. Often, women are positioned as "overreacting" and "hysterical" in relation to their wariness and hyper-vigilance in public places. Even if some women are able to effectively harness "safety" strategies in some situations, this is not effective as a prevention tool. At best, it could be thought of as victimisation avoidance.Teaching women to enact safety strategies relies on the inevitable possibility that there is a willing perpetrator out there whom we need to avoid. While safety strategies may allow individuals to avoid or deflect a perpetrator, this may simply displace harm onto a more vulnerable target. Ultimately, the focus on safekeeping routines are problematic in that they shift responsibility for men's violence back on to women, and distract us from the difficult and long-term conversations and deep-seated cultural, social, and structural changes that need to happen to truly prevent this violence from occurring in the first place.
Victoria; keep ignoring the real problem, but I can’t help but wonder how many more lives have to be taken to change men’s attitudes and their responsibility? People in power need to stop victim-blaming by telling women they need to change their behaviour to avoid rape and murder. Tell men to change theirs. Tell men to talk to their friends and peers, tell parents to talk to their sons, teach boys from early childhood about consent, respect and equality. Ensure boys don’t grow into men who believe women’s bodies are theirs for the taking. Violence and abuse starts with disrespect. Call it out at every opportunity. Don’t suggest women hide away and live in fear; support and empower them.
Abusive, violent men are not unavoidable weather patterns who tear through our natural environments without warning. We don’t just have to close the windows and ride out the storm, convinced that nature is an invincible force we’re powerless to resist. Because, even if we do manage to get ourselves into a protected bunker, the storm is still going to hit someone. The narrative of prevention as women’s responsibility does nothing to stop sexual violence and homicide. At best, all it might do is direct that rage towards someone else. In the words of Margaret Atwood, who wrote her dystopian feminist tale almost 30 years ago captured this imbalance that we still experience 30 years on: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Freedom from sexual assault and violence is a right, not a privilege. And as I stood with the two paths infant of me, my usual route through the park with the thinning amount of joggers and dim soccer lights, or the main road that added an extra 10 minutes; my safety felt like a privilege. And whilst Domestic Violence Victoria chief executive Fiona McCormack said attitudes towards women were changing, more needs to be done. Let’s stop telling women to stay safe. Let’s tell men not to assault us. Let’s change don’t get raped to don’t rape. Because women don't need to change their behaviour. Men do.
For what it’s worth, I did walk home through the park alone in the end: a small act of resistance in honour of all the women who should have made it home safely.