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Women's VoicesWomen's voices create powerful action. One of the most powerful ways of working against sexual violence is by speaking up and out against sexual violence. The women's voices included here represent women's stories and women's action, from the personal to the political. If you would like to include your story on this page please email BRISSC at admin@brissc.org.au. Women, violence and the law My name’s sarah and I work in the supreme court of QLD for one of the small minority of women judges we have in the Australian legal system. I’m an associate, which means I do a bit of legal research, but I spend most of my time either being in court or dealing directly with lawyers and judges. I’m also a lesbian, which means I’m a pretty extreme abnormality in the judicial staff world. Despite equal opportunity and anti-discrimination laws, the legal system is still an incredibly conservative and incredibly masculine institution, and it still operates to protect the interests of property-owning, straight, white men. If my job was the only exposure to society that I had, I would have no idea that there existed any sort of social problem concerning male violence against women. Of course there are some men who get convicted for raping, assaulting or killing women, but they don’t come anywhere near corresponding to the estimated 1 in 3 women who has experienced male violence during her lifetime. Men commit violence against women on a completely astounding level – as women, the greatest health risk we face is from male violence. But the overwhelming majority of that violence never comes before the law. Studies estimate that, in Australia, around 90% of assaults committed against women go unreported. That figure increases to over 95% for sexual assaults. This insanely high rate of non-reporting means that the law doesn’t even register that violence against women is happening, let alone actually do anything to stop it from happening. Women have good reason to not report male violence, especially sexual violence, to the legal system. Although there have been some changes to methods of police interviewing and to the rules of evidence in rape trials in recent years, going to a police station and then into a courtroom is still a completely awful experience for a woman who’s been raped or bashed, especially when only 1 in 10 rape trials actually result in a conviction, and domestic violence complaints tend to just result, at most, in another DVO. The fact that the legal system has had to come up with the new term “domestic violence” and introduce the DVO system is indicative of how difficult it is for the law to even comprehend women’s experiences. Most violence against women happens at home. For a very long time it was legal for men to rape and bash their wives at home. It’s not anymore, in theory at least, but the ongoing prevalence of violence against women at home shows that in practice the law still lets is happen. The most ineffective and offensive laws of all are those against rape. According to rape laws, acceptable, legal sex, happens when a man penetrates a woman, and the woman gives her consent. That’s her only role. The law defines the act of sex as something men do to women, and women just consent to, kind of like we would consent to a dentist pulling out a tooth. The only involvement we have is to give our consent. If you think you do more than that when you have sex, if you see yourself as an active participant rather than just a thing that lies back and is penetrated, then you should be grossly insulted by the wording of rape legislation. For many women, sex isn’t even about penetration – we tend to gain more pleasure through other methods. And some women actually choose not to have penetrative sex at all. Or at least not with men. But then lesbians don’t really exist in the law, because the legal system thinks that women are generally willing, if not eager, for men to “have sex with us”. So women who have been raped and who are actually brave enough to report it to police have to then convince the judge and jury beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not, in fact, consent - meaning that these women have to stand in the witness box and be cross-examined on issues like whether they were flirting with the man beforehand, what they were wearing, and how much of a fight they put up once the rape started. We have to loudly, clearly and preferably physically protest in order to overcome the legal assumption that we are always willing for men to have sex with us. These types of attitudes help explain why such a tiny minority of rape survivors actually report their experience, and why the law so dismally fails to prevent rapes from happening. We don’t know very much about violence against queer women – it’s even more invisible than violence against straight women. But what we do know shows that it happens for the same underlying reason as violence against straight women, (and it’s sheltered from the law in the same way as violence against straight women). Like men who rape their wives because they believe those women should provide them with on-call sex, homophobic men attack lesbians because they think all women should be eternally sexually available to them. Straight or queer, we get punished for not fitting the mould of the passive, sexually submissive woman. And law does nothing to stop this. It actually affirms and legitimises violence against women by almost completely ignoring it. This is all painting a pretty dismal picture, and the picture is pretty dismal, but laws are made by politicians and politicians respond to public demand. We need to make it clear to the people in power that just because this issue has been around for so long doesn’t make it any less urgent or important, it actually makes it more urgent and important. So let’s keep gathering together as women and supporting each other in making as much noise as possible, in every way we can think of, about the need for law reform and hopefully one day we’ll have a legal system and a society that is actually capable of providing meaningful justice for everyone.
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| NOBODY EVER DESERVES TO BE RAPED |
