Last year, I wrote about my cancer diagnosis and all the waiting that entails. I called it waiting to live, waiting to die and I wrote it because I can’t not write about the things that matter to me, but also because it was the easiest way to tell people about the cancer. I had told my children, my mother, my friends, the people who mattered to me and the people who would have to make changes to accommodate the changes in me. I couldn’t keep telling the same story so I wrote it once, sent it out into the world and thought, naively, that would mean I didn’t have to keep talking.

I forgot that I am important to people. I forgot how important that it is to me.

It’s been four months since the surgery that removed my tumours and several internal organs, and I’m still not fully recovered. In the weeks afterwards, menopause and chemotherapy linked arms and crash-tackled me into a new world of sick, exhausted brain fog. At the moment however, I do not have cancer. I just have a slightly worse than 50/50 chance I will have cancer again soon. Uncertainty is a killer.

The question people ask most often is “are you ok?” and I never know how to answer. I’m alive and not in pain, so, yes, I’m ok. I can’t digest food without medication, and I might be dead before Christmas, so no, I’m not. But mostly I can’t answer the question because what they’re really asking is “are you going to die soon?” and the answer is I don’t know.

Most of the time I’m very calm. The future is unknowable but I’m alive today and tomorrow looks pretty good. That, dear reader, is the best any of us can get. My cancer might come back next week, but you might get hit on the head by a falling coconut tonight. Any emergency department nurse or doctor can tell you more than you want to know about unexpected death and the wounds we never see it coming. Fear is in the confrontation, not the knowledge, of the inevitable.

The calm is not a façade. My ability to live entirely in the present has always made planning a future almost impossible, now it’s really having its time in the sun. I’m alive today. I can sort out the rest later. But I get these tiny, occasional jolts. TV has become an important means of stopping all my naps crashing into each other but the new season of The Gilded Age won’t be released until 2027. Jolt. After 25 years of a slightly weird obsession with US Survivor, will I get to see season 50? Jolt. My PhD is still trucking along and I’m now planning to do the interviews with convicted rapists next summer. Next summer. Jolt.

When I first started taking the dog for walks after the surgery I couldn’t get halfway around the park without having to sit on the ground to catch my breath on a cold spring morning. Now the dog park is dry and hot and full of Australian summer smells as I pace steadily around, until a remembered waft of winter knocked me to the ground again. Clinging to the earth as it spins, trying not to wonder if I’ll see another cold season in this park.

I can be equally knocked aside by how lucky I am. Were it not for a vigilant GP and an eagle-eyed radiologist, my cancer would not have been caught in time for any treatment to work. But here I am, buttressed on all sides as people who care about me care for me. Alive in my comfortable, safe home with the nutritious food and time for sleep I need, as the medication that makes me sick gives me a chance to survive.

And yet, death dances with me in my dreams. Not looming and awe-inspiring. Small and imp-like. A sniggering trickster stealing all my time and the memories I’ll never get to make. The reality of everything that is me just ending is too brutal but I can’t see any alternative understanding of death. A friend tried to talk to me about faith and belief in an afterlife. She meant well but it bewildered me.

What portion of me could exist after my death? There’s no iteration of me that wouldn’t be tormented by knowing my mother’s final years were spent grieving for her only child. Nothing of me could find peace knowing my children have to keep growing up without me. There’s no version of me that could know my daughter has to have a child of her own or apply for a job or get a new dog without me there to share it with her. Nothing could remain of me that would not be tortured by how much that would hurt her. I couldn’t conceive of anything worse than continuing awareness of self after death. So, I just end. Nothing left but my children’s children I will never meet and the small joys and stupid jokes and anxious moment I’ll never have.

Maybe it’s this that makes me calm. That ending is too harsh, too final to think about. So the small joys become much larger. I was immensely cheered when my local dog pack acquired a novice bagpiper. He stands solidly in the middle of the park practicing Auld Lang Syne and Scotland the Brave, sounding like he’s trying to stuff an elderly Scottish elephant into a backpack. Indifferent to jeers, shouts, applause and the occasional hounds howling back at him, he blows on relentless in the face of all that opposes him.

The healthcare system continues to confound me. The doctors and nurses determined to save my life laugh at my cancer jokes and don’t drop their gaze when I ask if I’ll die in pain. Your taxes pay for the care they give me; a billionaire’s wife pays for the clinic I go to, sometimes my daughter pays for the drugs that might save my life. I… just keep sleeping 14 hours a day. And working. Somehow, my PhD is still on track. My confirmation hearing is next week and then comes the multiple ethics applications – they’ll take a while. Interviewing incarcerated rapists comes with many ethical dilemmas.

I walk the dog most days and go to the gym most weeks. My oncologist told me I’m welcome to try the snake oils purveyed by Instagram wellness grifters, but the most effective things I can do to keep cancer at bay is sleep a lot, eat well and exercise regularly. So I go to the gym to lift my tiny weights. It helps to feel that I’m fighting, not waiting passively for death to take me. Mostly I ignore the gym bros huffing and puffing around me but one of them interrupted me once, in the middle of a endorphin-induced moment of gratitude for all my body has endured and given me - despite my frequent hatred and ill treatment. He told me I would never change my muscle mass unless I started lifting more. I told him I wasn’t trying to change my body I was trying to thank it, and he should keep his unsolicited fucking opinions to himself. He stormed off, looking as affronted as any man does when being chastised for giving a woman he doesn’t know a you’re doing it wrong lecture about her decisions for her own wellbeing. Two well-muscled women behind me laughed and muttered cheers.

Days pass. Days I can take the dog out and walk for miles. Days I can’t get out of bed. Days I could get up but instead I just clutch the mattress as the world spins without me. Days I lie on the floor and scream into the bitter injustice of it all. Days I spend in a bathroom and a cold sweat with a bucket on my knee trying to convince God to make a deal with an atheist. Days I’m grateful to be alive. Days of wasted time. Days of counting every second. Days and days and days passing. Days of being alive. Days of unanswerable questions and unendurable answers.

Am I ok? I don’t know. I’m still waiting to find out.

Don’t forget to claim your 20% discount of any book purchase from my store

In case you haven’t heard about Adelaide Writers’ Week’s rapid descent from globally respected festival to utter shitshow, the short version is that much loved and respected Writer’s Week Director Louise Adler invited Palestinian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah to speak at one of the panels. Dr Abdel-Fattah has vehemently protested the atrocities committed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza. Depending on your affiliations, her protests are viewed as either dangerously antisemitic or courageously anti-genocide but it was her latest book, Discipline, exploring who gets to be heard and why people choose to speak, that was the basis for her invitation to appear at the festival. Despite the debacle that was last year’s Bendigo Writer’s Festival after similar attempts to silence Dr Abdel-Fattah, the Adelaide Festival board of directors overruled Louise Adler and cancelled Dr Abdel-Fattah’s invitation because her presence would not be “culturally sensitive”. In the week since, 180 writers have boycotted the festival, Louise Adler and all but one board member have resigned, and now the Writer’s Week festival has been cancelled. An entirely avoidable clusterfuck from start to finish.

Peter Greste, Isabelle Oderberg, Richard Flanagan and Hannah Ferguson are among the many people who have written about the danger of silencing writers and I don’t have much to add to what they have already said so well. But there is a structural aspect to this sadly stupid story that hasn’t been covered yet – the widespread damage done by the corporatisation of Not-For-Profit (NFP) boards of directors.

I haven’t worked for any organisations in the arts world but peering over the fence from the NFPs doing prevention and response to men’s violence against women, the back yards look remarkably similar.

The board of an NFP is supposed to provide strategic guidance and assistance with raising funds. They’re meant to keep the organisation on mission, sticking to the purpose for which it was created, whether that is providing crisis service to abused women or a festival for writers to talk about ideas. What they are not supposed to be is a career stepping stone for inexperienced middle management and second tier politicians who have an eye on lucrative corporate board positions.

Before 2013, board members for NFPs in the community sector were mostly emeritus positions, allocated to the elders of the sector who were no longer willing to work long hours for little to no pay but couldn’t bring themselves to walk away. Their experience and wisdom were valued and used. It was a system with flaws – there wasn’t a lot of financial expertise and management was often a dirty word – but at least the annual reports weren’t full of weasel words and meaningless sector-babble. Board members might (and did) fight with CEOs about how to run the organisations but they were usually both fighting with principles and expertise. Ignorant self-righteousness was the exception not the rule.

If you cock your head and squint, you can find a perspective that blames the union movement for this transition. At the beginning of 2013, unions finally got the community sector some decent pay and conditions (thank you) and suddenly a whole lot of middle managers with stalled careers in the corporate sector realised they could snag a three figure salary and a c-suite job in an NFP because an MBA and a well cut suit can look impressive to people who have never worked with them before. Panting along at their heels were all the people who want to be on corporate boards but didn’t have the experience or connections to get there. Advised by their life coaches to kick start their board experience with a position on a small NFP – one that does nice things for the kiddies would be great – and work up from there, they’ve flooded community services and arts organisation boards and kicked over all the tables. They’re often incapable of understanding or even trying to learn about the organisation’s purpose and service, they’re just there to manage risk. Tenure is about enhancing their reputation. They want annual reports with lots of colourful graphics and non-controversial motherhood statements. They want support from politicians and lobby groups to help them move onwards and upwards. Courage, change, resistance, political pushback are dangers to avoid not aspirational goals. Achieving nothing more than a nice infographic and a well-lit photo-op is their ultimate aim.

I’ve watched too many career-building corporate-worshiping board chairs at NFPs stack the board with carbon copies of themselves then gang up and white-ant the CEO who they find “too militant” and “radical”. She just finds them exhausting. Eventually she leaves and the board replaces her with someone who “understands how things should be done”. The new CEO, who has little to no experience in the sector, cleans out all the militants and radicals hired by the last CEO and replaces them with more carbon copies (the MBAs in suits). The management end of the organisation moves entirely to policing language and minimising risk and forgets it even had a purpose, while the front line workers increasingly carry all the load of remembering the purpose and implementing it. Staff turnover surges and no one in management can work out what went wrong or how to fix it.

Imagine a car company filling its board with experts on sound systems, air conditioning, leather chairs and phone chargers but not a single engineer or anyone who understands large scale manufacturing or the design and function of cars. Imagine a bank filling their board with marketing gurus and experts on plastic cards but no one who understands whatever it is that experts on banking need to understand. I’m no fan of the corporate sector but I recognise they know how to organise themselves to achieve their purpose. The ANZ bank stacks their board with people who have decades of experience in financial services. The BHP board is stiff with experts in mining and global finances. Coles, Telstra, Rio Tinto, all of them have board who can give expert advice on making money by screwing their frontline workers and the environment just enough to maximise profits without giving grounds for a lawsuit.

NFPs in the anti-violence sector used to ignore the corporate sector as thoroughly as corporations ignored them, but now they worship at the altar of corporatisation. So taken up with their own self-importance, they don’t realise how laughably irrelevant they are to the corporate monoliths who rationalise customer deaths and massive environmental damage as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Scraps of funding tossed to a palatable NFP are useful for a feel good sentence in their annual reports and staff newsletters but it’s not worth the millions or even billions the sector needs to do the job it is supposed to do. Only government can (or should) fund essential services.

If you’ve ever wondered what patriarchy looks like, it’s exactly this. Structural, deliberate underfunding of a sector designed to serve women and children (in the arts, it’s to serve ideas and critical thinking, an almost equal threat cast as equally irrelevant by the people who fear it). Corporatisation denudes NFPs of wisdom and expertise, replacing them with ignorance and futile ambition. The result is a sector that cannot fulfil its fundamental purpose: to keep women and children safe (or to facilitate the free exchange of ideas).

Police, military and men’s sports are not funded like this, in tiny, short-term bits and pieces, allocated only after vicious competition with similar services. Imagine suggesting that police or military services should be offered by multiple different organisations that have to compete with each other for funding doled out in drips, 18 months here, 2 years there. It would be laughable. How could they possibly work together or deliver efficient services or plan for the future under such ridiculous restrictions? It would be rightly shouted down as a destructive and malevolently ignorant idea designed to make police and military services utterly inoperable.

The debacles of the Adelaide Festival, the Bendigo Writers Festival, and Creative Australia’s removal and reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi to the Venice Biennale are all outcomes of exactly this process, you know about them because their audiences are the public. There are hundreds you don’t know about because the people they affect are underpaid frontline workers who stay silent to protect an ideal they know is dying: keeping people safe, keeping people informed, keeping people free.

Don’t forget to claim your 20% discount of any book purchase from my store

I’ve never had cancer before, but I’ve seen people in my family through it multiple times. Mostly, cancer is about waiting. Waiting in uncomfortable chairs and uncomfortable silences. Waiting for results. Waiting for a diagnosis. Waiting for a prognosis. Waiting for treatment. Waiting to recover. Waiting to live. Waiting to die.

My wait started a while ago in the emergency department of a big inner city hospital, which is no place to be when you’re feeling sick. It’s noisy, drafty, cold, uncomfortable and full of irritable people who’ve been waiting too long for someone to notice them.

My symptoms were not particularly sinister. Medium upper right quadrant abdominal pain and barely noticeable yellowing skin and eyes. My GP demanded a barrage of tests and called me less than 24 hours later. “Off to the emergency department (ED),” she said brisky, ignoring all my prevarications and complaints. “It’s not serious yet but it will be soon. Go. Now.”

So, I went.

Triage, according to Google’s AI, “is a process of sorting people to determine the priority of treatment based on the urgency of their condition or need”. It’s a logical, fair and sensible way to manage emergency entry to the healthcare system. It’s also a process that makes sick, frightened people watch as doctors and nurses appear to ignore them in favour of patients who do not always show obvious signs of immediate danger.

American medical dramas taught me that emergency departments are full of well-groomed doctors who spend their days running about shouting “not now damnit” at patients as they flatline. Reality is disappointing calm, slow and scruffy looking – and far more dependent on nurses than any TV show lets on.

The wait in ED felt interminable. I fought the urge to join the queue of patients who trooped up to the triage desk to check they’d not been forgotten. I was alive, breathing, uninjured, unimportant. I stared at my hands, trying to work out whether it’s just odd lighting or whether they were really going yellow.

Eventually one of the scruffily tired-looking doctors moved me to the inner ED waiting room.

Across the hall a long oval desk was covered in workstations. A blonde, cheerful looking woman had a bright orange sticker on her back that read “NURSE LEADER”. I watched for hours as waves of people in scrubs engulfed her. She updated records, answered questions, directed doctors, nurses, orderlies and security guards to beds and patients by name, number, illness and description until the wave receded. Then she picked up a phone and, in a tone that would have made any sergeant-major proud, started demanding that the wards clear beds, pick up patients, move people along. “No we will not be waiting another five minutes. Is that five actual minutes or five nurse minutes? Not that’s too long. You need to get him now.” Another wave engulfed her, and she answered a dozen questions about beds and patients and treatment without checking her notes. Her hands remained steady, breath even, jaw muscles relaxed as the beds and waiting room was filled and emptied and refilled.

Just before midnight they moved me from an uncomfortable chair to an uncomfortable bed. The first of many nurses arrived to tap me awake and whisper “I’m just going to take your blood pressure.” They wheeled me out for ultrasounds, wheeled me back for blood tests. They woke me up for doctors to say “hmm” as they prodded my stomach and examined my records and then hurried off to examine more important patients.

Down the hall I heard a male voice yelling “fuck you bitch” followed by a crash and a voice of the PA “Code Black in emergency department.” Running feet and loud voices. I stayed in bed waiting to find out why my hands were turning bright yellow.

A doctor and her trail of interns arrived in my cubicle. The doctor told the wall behind me that she though I probably had gallstones blocking my bile ducts. “It’s quite common and nothing to worry about. We will do a procedure called an Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography. Do you know what that is?”

“Umm,” I said.

“An ERCP, is an endoscopic procedure,” she said impatiently, “they’ll use contract dye and instruments to find the stones, break them up and clear the ducts. You’ll need to fast for 12 hours beforehand. Hopefully we can book you in today, but it might be tomorrow or the day after.”

I ask if this is the only treatment option and she sighed. Why is the procedure talking?

“Well, it’s up to you,” she said. “I can’t force you to do it.”

For the next two days, various admin staff worked with the doctor and her trail of interns to try to get me into an MRI and then into a room with the ERCP team. There are enough machines in my huge inner city public hospital but there are not enough qualified technicians to get through all the scans and procedures. The MRI was cancelled twice, the ERCP rescheduled around it.

Finally, three days after I arrived at ED and four days since my last meal, I was sedated and a team of specialists sent a camera and other instruments through my mouth and into my abdomen to scan, film, poke, sever, biopsy and rebuild.

Then I was wheeled back to the ward to wait for results from the ERCP.

I took to roaming the halls. Glowingly neon yellow, hair unbrushed for days, in pyjamas so big I had to tie the pants with a piece of string, I pushed my IV pole, wheels whining like tired children, up and down the halls of the gastro ward.

I met another patient too restless to wait in bed, an elderly Vietnamese man. He told me he’d come to Australia in the 70s and didn’t go to a doctor for more than a decade after he arrived because “doctors are only for rich people”. He and his wife had children as soon as they got their citizenship and he worried about sending them to government schools because he thought that’s children went to learn to love the government. “But they did not. They learned how to learn!” he said triumphantly.

He also discovered that doctors would treat his children when they were sick and heal them even if he could not pay. Now his doctors were healing him, and he still did not have to pay. “This is the land of bright dreams,” he told me.

The doctor who needs me to be a procedure not a person came back to my bed but this time she was in the trail of the god-like consultant (the most senior doctor on the ward).

Gods do not descend from Olympian heights for a mere gallbladder, and this was the first time I heard about the Ampulla of Vater. As his trail of interns and doctors nodded admiringly, the consultant explained that it’s a structure connecting the liver, pancreas, gallbladder and small intestine. The small lump they’d found on my Ampulla of Vater, however, he could not explain. “It’s very small. It might be nothing. It might be something. We’ll do some more tests, but you will probably need surgery next week.”

“When you say it might be something, you mean it might be cancer?” I asked.

“Maybe” was the closest I got to a diagnosis that day.

I went home and dived into a whirlpool of google results on ‘ampullar cancer’. It’s very rare cancer with no known cause. Survival rates for ampullar cancer from intestinal cells are good. If it comes from pancreatic cells the prognosis is emphatically not good. There are other, even rarer sources. Treatments, surgeries, statistics all started to blur. I put down the phone and turned on the TV.

My surgical consultant was not only a woman; she was a woman of colour. Before she even spoke, I knew she had worked twice as hard, proven herself three times as often, and overcome infinite multipliers of bias that her white male colleagues couldn’t even recognise. She was practical, warm, informative, honest and reassuring. I knew I was in good hands.

So, a couple of weeks ago, she and her team performed a Whipple procedure on me. They opened me up from sternum to groin (gnarly scar!) and removed my ampullar, the head of my pancreas, my gallbladder as well as a few other connecting bits and pieces. Then they reconnected all the remaining organs. The surgery took eight hours and carried considerable risk, but as my surgeon told me, I am “relatively young” and I would die without it.

Now I am waiting to recover from the Whipple, which will probably take about six months. Then I wait for more scans, more treatment, more diagnoses and prognoses.

I cannot tell you how much time I have or even what my odds are. The risk factors for my very rare cancer are being male, aged 65 or older, having chronic health condition, obesity and/or living in Southeast Asia – and none of these apply to me. There just isn’t enough information about what this cancer does to women of my age, size, lifestyle, ethnicity and medical history to give an accurate prognosis.

I can’t tell you that whether I have 30 days or 30 years. I can tell you that however long I have, I’m not going to waste the any of it wafting about like a ghost waiting for a coffin.

I am going to finish my research. I am going to publish It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children Consent, because I’ve spent two years writing and rewriting that book and time is far too valuable to waste.

I am going to finish writing the book based on the Rape is a Theoretic Crime series I started here on Substack. And I am going to continue to advocate for the changes that might be able to slow (or even reduce) the horrifying increase of sexual violence in Australia. I might be a bit slower and need a bit more help than I would have without the cancer, but I’m going to do these things because they matter, because they give me strength and purpose. Because I can. And because what else could I do while I wait?

If you’d like to do something, please share the link to the launch page for my new book, It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent. You can pre-order your copy, book tickets to the launch and share it with anyone else who you think might find the book helpful. Helping me get this book into the hands of people who need it is the best thing you can do for me now.

I know many of you will want to get in touch and I’m so grateful to you but since the surgery I’ve been sleeping 16 hours (or more) a day and I may not be able to respond very quickly. I don’t need anything for now - I am very lucky to have an amazing group of friends who have clubbed together to offer all practical help anyone could want.

If you’re in Melbourne on the 16th October, please do come to the launch. I’d love to see you and it will be a great night. Kristine Ziwica and I are both really looking forward to it.

I've been offline for the last couple of months after a double whammy of a health drama and a legal drama knocked me off my stride (so dramatic!) I'll have more on both those another time, but today is all about the good news.

I have a new book coming out, which will be available at the end of September. It's called It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent and I wrote it for parents and families who need a bit of help supporting kids to understand consent education and abuse prevention. I'm so delighted this book is finally ready to publish. So many parents, teachers and families are struggling with these topics at the moment and I really hope this book will help.

You can find out more about the book on my website, including a link to the launch even in Melbourne, which I am very excited about. Kristine Ziwica (who has a long history of expertise and excellent journalism on violence prevention) is joining me to talk about consent education and abuse prevention. It will be a lively discussion and I'd love to see you there.

I'm hoping to confirm events in other cities later this month but the Melbourne one is all we have been able to nail down for now.

I'm also hoping that this month I can get back to more writing about my PhD research, FixedIt and my other usual topics.

Thanks for subscribing and I hope you enjoy reading about the book.

Best,

Jane Gilmore

A couple of years ago Tim Dunlop commissioned me to write a piece about the structural deficiencies in Australian journalism that creates dire reporting on gender based violence.

I was reminded of that piece this morning as I listened to Bruce Shapiro’s lecture on The Spectacle of Fearsome Acts: Violence, Journalism and the Democratic Future.

Shapiro is the executive director of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia Journalism School. He took a wide view on violence in the lecture, from the intimate terrorism of child sexual abuse and domestic violence to the structural violence of authoritarianism, war and ethnic cleansing. Some forms of violence he talked about are outside the scope of what I typically write about in Fixed It but all of them have the same root cause – dehumanisation of people who become the victims of violence.

Shapiro also talked about the redemptive power of what he calls “narrative justice” and journalism’s role in humanising dehumanised people. George Floyd pleading for air ripped away the dehumanisation of racism to make him a person and his murder a vicious crime. Rosie Batty gave abused women a relatable, human face and in doing so, made them impossible to ignore. Journalists have tremendous power to create this narrative justice - when they choose to use it.

Power is always the doubled edged sword. In the lecture, Shapiro talked teaching about a group of students in Ukraine who assured him that Christian babies were being sacrificed in Satanic (code for Jewish) rituals not far from their own villages. This myth, the Blood Libel, has persisted in Europe for centuries and was perpetuated by early forms of tabloid journalism to stoke populism and antisemitic violence.

Myths that dehumanise the human targets of violence are necessary in structural oppression. Only the most sociopathic of us can commit or condone violence against people. Violence done to non-people is different, justifiable, even deserved if those labels dressed up in human clothing pose a threat to us or our children.

• The slaughter and deliberate starvation of people is abhorrently unthinkable – unless they have become terrorists not people.

• Imprisoning babies and ripping away the most basic protections of the law for people is unthinkable unless they are just illegal immigrants.

• Rape is vile when it happens to good people but it’s not something we need to worry about if it’s just an allegation by a drunken slut or a lying bitch.

• Domestic violence is a terrible scourge but only if it’s committed by a tattooed thug in a wife-beater not when accusations are turned against good blokes by man-hating feminazis who demonise our boys and cause male suicides.

Journalists are not passive bystanders in the dehumanisation of human victims of violence. I’ve spent almost ten years documenting the structural, persistent dehumanisation of the women who are abused by violent men in Australia. This issue, however, is much bigger than ignorant, misleading and inaccurate headlines. It’s the structures of journalism in Australia that implicitly endorsement men’s violence against women by making it small and unimportant, the trivial hobby of angry feminists and wounded ideologues.

As I wrote in the piece for Tim, there is not a single news outlet in Australia – including the ABS and the Guardian – who has even one staff journalist specifically dedicated to reporting on gender based violence.

To put that in context, there are around 250 journalists in the federal press gallery and at least that many sports reporters in Australia.

I’m not ignoring the excellent work of people like ABC’s Hayley Gleeson but I am saying that even her expertise does not give her a dedicated role as a reporter on gender based violence. It’s a preference she has chosen, and it will disappear with her when she leaves the ABC. Award winning freelancers such as Amy McQuire, Jess Hill and Nina Funnell also do outstanding work – when they can find an editor who has the will and the budget to commission them. This impermanence does not happen to political or sports reporting because those positions are embedded in the structure of journalism. An expert sports reporter leaves and the hunt is immediately on to find someone with the experience and knowledge to replace them. The idea that any journalist could use basic skills to do the job of a senior AFL reporter is ridiculous.

Imagine what would happen if an editor sent a general news reporter with no experience in sports reporting to cover an AFL Grand Final. It would cause an uproar. No editor who wanted to keep his (yes, “his” was deliberate) job would even send an experienced NRL reporter to cover an AFL Grand Final. How could they do a half-way decent job without years of experience and a thorough knowledge of the rules and history of the game, the names and histories of all the major on-field and off-field players, and a play by play of at least the last five Grand Finals?

And yet, almost all reporting on men’s violence against women, children, themselves and each other come from general news reporters and this is built into the structures of journalism.

I started writing for publication in 2007 and in the nearly 20 years since then I’ve learned enough about gendered violence to know how much I still don’t know. I do, however, know enough to know that a journalist with no background, training or expert editorial guidance on gender based violence cannot possibly report well, accurately or usefully on the causes and effects of men’s violence. Any more than a news reporter who has never been to a football game could do a useful or interesting report on a Grand Final.

In lieu of useful or interesting reporting on violence, almost all reporting on this topic is riddled with repetitive, poorly understood, dehumanising jargon (the ubiquitous “victim-survivor” who is an experience not a person). The stories are so formulaic that, as I said to Tim two years ago, ChatGPT could do a better job than most general news journalists. To demonstrate the point, I sent him a semi-joking AI prompt: “Give me, in the style of the ABC, an article about domestic violence with a survivor story at the top, a truncated quote from a CEO of a structurally underfunded Not-For-Profit in the middle, some prevalence stats with no context at the end, and finish off with some generic helpline numbers.”

Tim pasted that into ChatGPT4 and honestly, the result is better than most reporting done by human journalists. If news outlets are not going to invest in knowledge and expertise in their reporting on violence, maybe they should get ChatGPT to take over. At least it would remember to include the helplines in every article.

**Title: "Rising From the Ashes: Domestic Violence Survivor Shares Her Journey Amidst Sector Struggles"**

[ABC-Style Byline: By Jane Doe, ABC]

As dawn breaks in Melbourne, Sarah Thompson (name changed to protect identity) starts her day with a steaming cup of coffee, a routine she adopted after reclaiming her life from the clutches of domestic violence. It's a symbol of her newfound peace, a stark contrast to the tumultuous storm she weathered not too long ago.

"Each morning, as I sit by my window, I'm reminded of my journey, of the life I left behind," Sarah shared, her voice wavering yet determined. "It was a life of constant fear, where I was walking on eggshells, constantly trying not to trigger him."

Sarah's harrowing experience with domestic violence is far from uncommon. But what makes her story resonate is her resilience, her determination to rebuild her life from scratch, and her desire to shed light on the struggles faced by countless others who are still trapped in similar circumstances.

Despite the horror, Sarah counts herself lucky. She found refuge with 'Hope Shelter', a not-for-profit organisation that provides support and assistance to victims of domestic violence. However, it's a lifeline that's increasingly under threat due to structural underfunding and other systemic issues.

At the heart of the 'Hope Shelter' is its CEO, Lisa McKenzie, who has been spearheading the fight against domestic violence. Amidst the crisis, she's fiercely advocating for increased funding and recognition of the issue at a systemic level.

"We are doing all we can, but without appropriate funding, there's only so much we can achieve," McKenzie expressed, her voice imbued with a mix of frustration and resolve.

But the stark reality of domestic violence goes beyond these individual stories. It's a deeply entrenched issue that demands immediate attention. The latest statistics paint a grim picture. In 2022 alone, 1 in 5 women reported experiencing domestic violence. However, these figures, as alarming as they are, remain devoid of context, masking the true depth and complexity of the issue.

These numbers, while stark, serve as a stark reminder of the urgent need for societal and systemic change. They underscore the importance of organisations like 'Hope Shelter' and the incredible work they do under strained conditions. But more importantly, they highlight the crucial role we all have to play in bringing this issue to the forefront and ensuring that victims like Sarah are not left unheard.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, there are several resources available:

- National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1800-RESPECT (1800 737 732)

- Safe Steps: 1800 015 188

- 1800RESPECT online chat: www.1800respect.org.au

Remember, help is just a call or click away. No one should ever have to suffer in silence.

[ABC-Style Sign Off: Jane Doe, ABC]

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

This is part six of a series on sexual violence.

• Part One: The Data examines the available data on rape and sexual assault in Australia, which shows that men have raped or sexually assaulted at least one quarter and possibly more than half the women in Australia.

• Part Two: Understanding Rape Myths looks at rape myths and how they are used to obscure the reality of sexual violence.

• Part Three: Shame Must Change Sides on Gisèle Pelicot’s declaration that ‘when you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them’ and the effect of shame on people who have been raped or sexually assaulted.

• Part Four: Why do men rape? There is no simple or single answer to this question but believing in rape myths and shamed masculinity are common in men who rape. This might give us a path to prevention.

• Part Five: Justice in the justice system The purpose of the justice system is not to find justice for victims. It is to ensure a fair trial for people accused of crimes and then punish the people who are found guilty.

This article is about rape and sexual violence. Helplines are listed at the end. Please call them if you are hurt, shaken, scared, in pain or you just want someone to talk to.

In 1974, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam established the Royal Commission into Human Relationships. Despite budget cuts and moving deadlines imposed by the Fraser government after the dismissal, the Commissioners presented their reports in 1977. They are a truly fascinating exploration of marriage, love, parenting, faith, sex, education, healthcare, racism, violence, abuse and rape as those things were understood at the time. They’re also an invaluable measure of change. Some parts of the reports could easily have been written by today’s radical progressives, others are painfully archaic to modern eyes.

The section on rape (in volume 5) explores the evidence that most rapes were not reported to police, why the conviction rate was so low in rape trials and strived to find recommendations that might reduce the prevalence of rape and make rape trial less traumatic for women who had been raped. Much of it is as relevant now as it was when it was written almost 50 years ago.

The report also summarised feminist thought at the time about removing the word ‘rape’ from the criminal code and replacing it with ‘sexual assault’. The reason, they said, to make this change was that they wanted consent removed from the legal definition of rape so women could not be questioned on their demeanour or behaviour in rape trials. The report suggested that sexual assault should be viewed no differently to any kind of physical assault: as long as there was evidence of violence, the accused would be convicted.

A journalist who was a cadet at the time told me that there was a lot of support for rebranding rape as sexual assault. He said many readers liked the idea that people would be more likely to plead guilty to sexual assault than rape “because it didn’t sound so bad”. He also told me that journalists supported the change because “writing about rape was uncomfortable, it’s an ugly word and ‘sexual assault’ doesn’t unsettle people as much”.

NSW, ACT, NT and WA have all removed the uncomfortable word “rape” from their criminal code and replaced it with “sexual assault”, “sexual intercourse without consent” or “sexual penetration without consent”.

Other recommendations in the Royal Commission’s report on rape covered physical and mental health care for victims, legislative reforms to make trials less painful and shaming for women, training for police and court staff to reduce the prevalence of rape myths, and special support and services for child victims. Some of these recommendations were implemented. Many were not.

In 2025, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) released its report on “Justice Responses to Sexual Violence”. It’s a 600 page report that makes over 60 recommendations on various changes state and federal governments could make to give some measure of justice to people who have been subjected to sexual violence. I’ve read it several times now and the best I can come up with is… well, at least it’s not terrible.

The recommendations lean a bit too heavily on the belief that training will end police and court’s reliance on rape myths, and that this in turn will result in significant increases in reporting, but at least the report recognises that rape is underreported and most men who rape people are never held accountable. There are several recommendations about strengthening alternative paths to justice as well as new structures inside the legal system to support people who have been raped as they trudge through the process. Experts and advocates, such as Nina Funnell, have been asking for this for years, so it’s nice that the ALRC is on board now too.

It's undeniable that if all the report’s recommendations were fully funded for long-term, structural implementation, rape and sexual assault survivors would find the criminal system less traumatising than it is now.

The realist (cynic?) in me says that this not-terrible report and it’s not-terrible recommendations will go the way of all the countless other reports that came before it. Months of sincere effort, millions of dollars, more people opening their veins to bleed out their trauma in the desperate hope this will make a difference to other traumatised people, even though they know the only difference it will make is that the report can piously claim to have consulted a “lived experience panel”. And nothing much will happen.

Various levels of government will issue press releases about taking “take matters of sexual violence very seriously” and pretend that one pilot program based on one recommendation is real action while ignoring the interlinked dependence of the recommendations (they all need to happen together as embedded, structural long-term changes to be effective). Short-term tweaks and messing about with the decimal points does nothing but create even more frustration and revulsion with a system already designed to be hostile to women and children.

For example, when the report was released, the federal government promised $7M a year for 3 years to temporarily prop up some structurally underfunded legal services, fund a pilot program, and collect more evidence on the attrition of rape cases from the legal system. To put that in context, Federal MPs spent over $8.5M on employee travel in just the first 3 months of 2024.

In the 2025 election campaign the report was barely mentioned, and no new funding was announced.

Plus ça change.

Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety lists just over forty inquires on various topics “relevant to domestic and family violence, sexual assault and women’s safety”. This is just in the last two years.

Reform on rape and sexual violence laws and responses has been going since the seventies. It would be quite the task to list every parliamentary inquiry, law reform commission, and government policy paper on sexual violence over the last 50 years. I’m not sure it would even be possible (I’ll let you know) but looking back at some of the work done in the 1970s tells us a lot about how much has changed – and how much has not.

What were people saying 50 years ago?

In 1977, then journalist Malcom Turnbull wrote a short article for The Bulletin, called Remedying the rape law flaws. It summarised the need for and likely approach to reforming rape law in NSW. He finished the article with a jocular little reassurance to the largely male readership of The Bulletin that a feminist army was not about to land their broomsticks in Australia’s town squares and start setting up tiny, groin-height guillotines. “Many men,” he wrote, “would be concerned that a change in the law would make them vulnerable to charges of this sort that are as difficult to deny as they are to prove. Perhaps would-be Lotharios could carry special release forms that their ladies of the moment could sign to ensure that no questions of non-consent would arise”.

This is not a gotcha moment for our beloved not-as-bad-as-what-came-after-him former Prime Minister. By the standard of the time, his article was not just informative it was actually quite progressive in its inclusion of extensive quotes from celebrated feminist lawyer, author and reformer, Dr Jocelynne Scutt.

To get a sense of how (relatively) benign Turnbull’s article was, and also, maybe, to find some hope in the reform process, it might be useful to look at another law reform report from the same period.

In 1975, the Attorney General of Victoria asked the Law Reform Commissioner in Victori to investigate and report on possible changes to procedures and rules of evidence that made rape trials such a terrible ordeal for rape victims. The Commissioner submitted the report in 1976. It was 49 pages long and included eight recommendations. Some were procedural, to do with hand up briefs and timing of trials. Another recommended abolishing the rule that permitted the defence to provide evidence that the woman who said she was raped had a “bad reputation for chastity” (in other words: someone said she’s a slut so she can’t reliably testify to her own rape). The report also recommended retaining corroboration warnings, a common law requirement that judges warn juries against convicting a man of rape on the evidence of a woman or child without corroboration - women and children were considered to be inherently untrustworthy witnesses to their own experiences of sexual violence, so no man should be sent to prison on just their word alone.

Most of the rest of the report is taken up with listing all the reasons and methods women use to lie about rape. Women lie because they can, because it’s easy, because they’re weak, vengeful, wicked, fanciful, avaricious, shameless, shameful, faithless, duplicitous or just plain crazy.

In the section of the report discussing whether rape victims could be cross examined on “sexual intercourse with other men” , the authors create several convoluted imaginary scenarios in which a vindictive and duplicitous woman fabricated a rape allegation against a simple, honest man to cover up her whorish past. These ridiculous scenarios are then cited as proof that cross examination of a rape victim’s sexual history is relevant to the trial and to her “general character and credibility” and must therefore be permitted.

No modern law reform commission would publish a report so overtly contemptuous of women - particularly women who have been raped. Indeed, the recent Australian Law Reform Commission report on justice responses to sexual violence specifically addressed the myth that false reports of sexual violence are common, citing research that suggests the actual rate of false reports is about 5% and most of these are not malicious or deliberate.

At first glance, the stark difference in language and approach of the two reports seems to indicate there have been substantial changes to the way we view rape since the 1970s. To understand how deep those changes might go, we need to dig into the differences between attitudes, beliefs and behaviour.

Attitudes & beliefs

Beliefs are ideas we hold to be true. For example, some of my beliefs are that violence is gendered, exercise is vital for mental and physical health, human induced climate change is real, and that art is an essential form of expression humanity.

Values are deeply held beliefs that are intrinsically important to our sense of self. For example, my belief that violence is gendered is so important to me that I’ve dedicated much of my life to understanding why it happens and how we can prevent it. It’s linked to my identity as a feminist, an advocate, a writer and a researcher. This belief is woven into my core values and my sense of self. I like art and I believe it matters, but it’s not something I think about very much and it wouldn’t occur to me to list it as one of my values or part of my identity.

Attitudes are how we feel about our own and other people’s beliefs, usually expressed as positive or negative. Again, as an example, I have negative attitudes about rape myths and gender stereotypes and positive attitudes to feminism. Attitudes tend to be more dependent on external factors, such as peer pressure, media influences, perceptions about socially acceptable behaviour, etc. They often develop from beliefs and dictate behaviour, but they can be changed or moderated quite easily if they are based on beliefs rather than values. One last example: I have a positive attitude to recycling but I might be more vigilant about it if all my neighbours are recycling and will notice my recycling behaviour. If addressing climate change was one of my core values, however, my positive attitude to recycling would be much less influenced by my neighbours.

Investigating attitudes without incorporating the context of social pressures can be misleading. Take the National Community Attitudes Survey’s report that 43% of young men agree “it is common for sexual assault accusations to be used as a way of getting back at men”. Is this an attitude or do they really believe it? Do the 57% who disagree just think they should say so, despite any doubts they might have? Is it an attitude or a belief? Will it hold strong in difficult times? What would the men who say they do believe women do if they were asked to believe a woman who says she was raped by someone they know? What if she says she was raped by one of their closest freinds? Their brother? Their football captain? What if she says she was raped by actor Chris Hemsworth, AFL star Nick Daicos, or Greens leader Adam Bandt? Would their attitudes stand up against emotional or political allegiances? To be clear, I am not suggesting any of those men ever have or ever would rape someone – to the best of my knowledge none of them have done so. I’m using them as examples because they are respected and admired by many different groups of men and this creates conflicting values, beliefs and attitudes that results in behaviour that may be very different to the response someone gives in an impersonal survey.

ANROWS tried to unravel this dilemma a few years back with a detailed study of how people respond to specific allegations. They found that despite low agreement with a survey question about false reports being common, almost all the participants (both men and women) had a default position of suspicion and doubt about women who say they’ve been raped. Most of the discussions aligned with all the standard tropes of rape myths and very few participants disputed them.

How much has really changed?

I wish I was just cynical and embittered. It would be comforting to think the problem is me and not the system. But, as always, I go back to the evidence, and it says that despite more than 50 years of law reform and social pressure, nothing much has changed. The strategies and tactics used by defence lawyers in cross examining rape victims hasn’t moved much since the 1950s. Lawyers still regularly rely on rape myths and women’s sexual history in trials – and it works. The rate of sexual assault has increased and the conviction for sexual assault has decreased. Law reform has not made a difference to the way trials are conducted. Traumatised people, most of them women, are still traumatised again by the injustice of the justice system that treats victims like criminals and rapists like victims.

Even the modern law reform commission reports that don’t say women are a pack of duplicitous harpies implicitly recognise the persistence of this now-unspoken belief by enumerating all the structures and people in the legal system who do not believe women when they say a man has raped them.

Is change possible?

Some people will risk their lives, even choose to die rather than renounce their core values. Think Emilsen Manyoma, Thomas More and Maria Ressa. For other people, changing beliefs is possible but it would take a long time and a huge effort to convince them that something they know to be true is actually false. They have evidence – they’ve seen it and heard it in ways that, to their mind, is irrefutable. It is as real and provable as looking up at the sky to prove whether it’s day or night.

Changing your beliefs can feel threatening – with good reason. There’s not much physical risk in believing that the earth is flat (as long as you don’t want a job as a pilot or a navigator) but if your closest relationships are with other flat earthers and if you think they’ll ostracise you for disputing that belief, changing your mind puts you at risk of a lonely, isolated future. Even more so, if being a devout flat earther is one of your core values. Giving it up could mean losing your sense of self and everything you believe makes you unique and valuable. That loss of self and worth is an intangible but profound injury.

When we’re deciding whether to change our beliefs, as well as assessing all the evidence, we’re also assessing all those other intangible costs and threats. Most of these calculations happen at a subconscious level, conscious thoughts remain centred on the solidity and evidence for the belief, but if the subconscious mind decides that change is a serious threat, trying to change someone’s mind will only make them cling even more staunchly to their beliefs.

So, what do we take from all this? All the work of the last 50 years has given us a thin facade of changed attitudes to rape, but lightly scratch that surface and underneath are the same old rape myths telling everyone that women lie about rape and no good man should suffer for a mistake, a momentary lapse, a miscommunication, or the lies of a vindictive, hysterical madwoman.

If we can’t change this widespread pernicious belief, no amount of law reform or alternative justice options will matter. The belief that women are untrustworthy witnesses to their own rape will continue undermining every stage of the legal system and implanting shame in people who have been victimised by someone else’s shameful actions.

All the work of the last 50 years, which has taken so much time, pain, effort, dedication and energy from many thousands of women, was not wasted. It hasn’t worked - yet - but it has built us solid ground to stand on as we keep working.

All those 50 year old reports and books and attempts to understand rape show us how much they didn’t know in the 70s and how much we have learned since then. We’re trying to change social habits ingrained over millennia of dehumanised women and preeminent men. It’s not surprising that it takes more than five decades to change what has remained unchanged for more than five thousand years. And one thing I know for sure is that none of the women doing this work are giving up on it it now.

What do we need to do next?

We need to know more about why men (and some women) cling so tightly to their belief in rape myths. What is it about this belief that is so core to their values and identity that they can’t bear to give it up?

My theory is that both men and women need to believe that only aberrant monsters commit rape so they can safely maintain the belief that all men are good and honourable and protective. When binary genders are defined by opposites, women must therefore be bad, dishonest and weak. How can good, honourable men be the opposite sex to women if women are also good and honourable?

It’s all woven into the interaction between our beliefs about gender and our beliefs about ourselves, our place in the world, our sense of self-worth and our entitlement to being seen as a ‘good’ person.

This is still a theory. It’s backed by years of research on violence, power, gender myths, and rape myths, but I don’t (yet) have direct evidence that can prove it. Hopefully, that will come over the next few years of studying men who have committed sexual violence. If the theory holds up, we might then find a way to untangle those rape myth beliefs and separate them from men’s ability to see themselves as good and worthy people.

Imagine what a system of justice for sexual violence might look like if rape myths lost their power over all our beliefs and values. Now that would be a thing to see!

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

This is part five of a series on sexual violence.

• Part One: The Data examines the available data on rape and sexual assault in Australia, which shows that men have raped or sexually assaulted at least one quarter and possibly more than half the women in Australia.

• Part Two: Understanding Rape Myths looks at rape myths and how they are used to obscure the reality of sexual violence.

• Part Three: Shame Must Change Sides on Gisèle Pelicot’s declaration that ‘when you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them’ and the effect of shame on people who have been raped or sexually assaulted.

• Part Four: Why do men rape? There is no simple or single answer to this question but believing in rape myths and shamed masculinity are common in men who rape. This might give us a path to prevention.

In 2015, a week after being acquitted of sexually assaulting a 17 year old girl, Mitch Peggie raped a 21 year old woman in Brisbane.

During the second trial, the (very) young woman was cross examined by Mitch Peggie’s barrister, Doug Wilson, who asked her if she was just a liar who claimed rape because she didn’t think Peggie treated her well enough after consensual sex. He showed a photo of her underwear to everyone in the courtroom and suggested that she must have wanted sex if she wore such nice lingerie. He asked her if she was ‘moaning’ and ‘gasping’ in pleasure during the rape and looked scornful when she denied it. Peggie and the woman exchanged hundreds of text messages before the date. Some were flirty but many were Peggie making crude and overt sexual demands. Each time the woman responded by attempting to laugh it off or explicitly stating that she would not have sex with him on their date. Her rapist’s lawyer tried to use this to argue that she knew what Peggie expected from the date and must therefore have consented to sex with him.

“I felt so alone and isolated up on that witness stand, like everyone in that room was judging the person I was based on that one night, that one thing that happened to me”, she wrote afterwards.

She was alone in a courtroom designed to be intimidating, surrounded by a judge, court staff, the jury, the lawyers, the accused, his supporters, journalists and anyone else allowed to watch (sexual assault trials are often but not always held in closed courts). The defence lawyer can suggest and insinuate and sneer and say things like ‘I put it to you that you wanted to have sex with him’ about the man who raped her. He can track through every minute of the lead up to the rape, jumping on every tiny, missed detail as if it’s proof she’s a contemptible liar rather than evidence that she has been traumatised, and he can do it for days as all those people watch in silence.

Inexplicably, under such pressure, that young woman held her nerve and gave her evidence – even if she did have to leave the room in tears because of what she described as ‘constant badgering’ by the defence lawyer.

The jury believed her and Peggie was found guilty of rape.

He appealed the conviction but the following year the appeal was dismissed. He would have been eligible for parole in January 2020.

I don’t know if the woman found justice in a conviction after the two years Peggie spent dragging her through humiliation after humiliation in court, trying to deny a rape that even a Queensland jury and appeal court said he committed. I hope she got something from it to help her reclaim herself and everything he tried to take from her.

Another women reportedly told police Peggie tried to use threats and blackmail to force her into unwanted sex (i.e. rape) and yet another woman said he handcuffed and sexually assaulted her. There were also claimsmade to Crime Stoppers that Peggie lied about providing a path to citizenship to extort sex (i.e. rape) from vulnerable migrant women. No charges have been laid against him regarding these claims. He may well not be guilty of these crimes, but the justice system cannot tell us the answer to a question it has never asked.

Bruce Lehrmann, having lost his hat, is now scrabbling his way back to pretend he can roar at a lion. When he’s not allegedly nicking cars in Tasmania, he’s gearing up for another rape trial in Queensland and an appealagainst the finding, on the balance of probabilities, that he raped Brittany Higgins in 2019. I have no sympathy for him at all, but I do wonder whether he thinks that ducking a criminal conviction was justice. Did Brittany Higgins find justice in Justice Lee’s judgement? Or is she, under constant attack for being attacked, still too mired in ruinously expensive battles of the justice system to find justice?

Luke Lazarus was accused of raping Saxon Mullins behind a bar in Kings Cross in 2016. He might also say he beat the system because he doesn’t have a conviction of rape recorded against him, but he doesn’t have an acquittal either. Over five years, Lazarus was convicted, overturned on appeal, retried, convicted again and the second conviction quashed on appeal. The NSW DPP decided to not attempt a third trial. Can we call him a rapist? Not really. But equally, he cannot claim the system says he’s not a rapist. I don’t know if he would call this justice. Saxon Mullins called it ‘total and utter traumatisation’.

The justice system gave Lehrmann, Peggie and Lazarus the right to spend years humiliating the women they raped. It says they were entitled – required – to do it in front of an audience of strangers because this is how the justice system ensures justice is done.

A woman who asked to be known as Lila contacted me recently because she wanted me to include a positive experience of the justice system. She said, ‘I went to a party at the end of lockdown. There was a lot of alcohol and other stuff floating around. The end of lockdown was a weird time and I think lots of us were doing stuff we wouldn’t usually do. Without going into too much detail, I met a man at the party and at the end of the night he raped me in a spare room.’

‘One of my friends is a cop and I called him the next morning. He took me to the hospital and the police station and helped me understand the whole process. The man who raped me admitted it. From the beginning he admitted it. They charged him and he pled guilty and apologised in court. And he really apologised, not a sorry-not-sorry apology. He apologised like he had really thought about it and he meant it. He got a very light sentence, but I was ok with that. I actually would have preferred it if he got mandatory counselling or therapy instead of a few months in prison, but it’s not like the sentence upset me.’

‘To be clear, I was unbelievably lucky. I had a cop with me, on my side, guiding me through and making sure I got treated well. My rapist admitted it from the get-go so there was no trial, just a plea hearing and a sentencing hearing. It was all processed pretty quickly and everyone was really sympathetic and supportive. I know that doesn’t happen for most people, but I just wanted to let you and your readers know that it is possible.’

‘Unbelievably lucky’ … because the man who raped her didn’t choose to drag her through years of additional torment in the justice system. Is that justice? Lila wasn’t sure when I asked her, but she should not have to feel guilty for finding something akin to justice in the justice system.

What is Justice?

The Oxford dictionary defines justice as ‘conformity (of an action or thing) to moral right, or to reason, truth, or fact; rightfulness; fairness; correctness; validity’.

In other words, justice is in the eye of the beholder. Fairness, rightfulness and validity are subjective ideas, based on perceptions of who was right and who was wrong. Very few people ever really believe they have done the wrong thing. Men who commit rape and sexual assault almost always find a way to believe that either what they did wasn’t wrong (she’s a liar) or that the person they did it to could not be wronged (she was asking for it).

Some people who have been subjected to sexual violence want vengeance. They want him to be convicted, shamed and punished because that’s the only way he might feel something of the shame and punishment he inflicted on them. There’s evidence that police, the gatekeepers of the justice system, frequently believe women who report rape are ‘vengeful liars’ seeking retribution for rejection after consensual sex. Or, they might use the absence of vengeful thoughts as another excuse to disbelieve women - if you were telling the truth you’d want revenge so if you’re concerned about him you must be lying.

Vengeance and punishment, however, are rare motives for people who seek justice for sexual violence. They are far more likely to want safety (for themselves, the people they care about and other women he might hurt). The violence itself, however, is proof that they have no power over his choices and it can take months, even years, to overcome that feeling of powerlessness and report his crimes.

Most of all they want recognition. Far more than prison sentences or convictions, people who have been raped or sexually assaulted say they want recognition of what was done to them and taken from them. They wantrecognition of the work they must do to recover, and for everything they cannot do or will lose in all the grotesquely unfair demands of that recovery. They need to know that others see the pain they feel and understand the assault was not their choice or their fault. Ideally, they would get this from the man who hurt them as well as from the people and institutions in their community. Lila, the ‘unbelievably lucky’ rape victim got that. Most people do not.

The most compelling explanation of justice I’ve found is what the researchers described as kaleidoscopic justice, which sees justice as a ‘constantly shifting pattern, continually refracted through new experiences and perspectives, with multiple beginnings and no finite ending’. This description encapsulates what I’ve seen in so many people who have told me about the sexual violence they’ve survived – their needs and perspectives of justice are always in motion, even years after the event. But for almost all of them, the underlying need for recognition, participation, dignity and prevention are always close to the surface and the re-traumatisation from the legal system is almost always because it ignores those needs.

Just adjudication

The British common law system, on which Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand and the USA all base their legal system was developed over more than a thousand years. It was primarily a means of arbitrating disputes over property and taxes as the monarchy slowly absorbed powers previously held by the church and feudal lords. Rape, as I wrote in part two of this series, was until very recently, a property crime against the man who had an ownership claim over a woman’s body. Justice for rape was given in the form of recompense for the devaluation of his property.

The legal system is often referred to as the justice system, but justice is not its purpose. The criminal system exists to enforce the law, adjudicate claims of wrongdoing, and punish wrong doers. It acts on behalf of the state, not the victim, and its claim to being a system of justice is not in the outcomes it produces (punishment for wrong doers) but in the method by which it determines who is or is not deserving of punishment.

No person in a democracy, no matter how rich or powerful they are, can have their own police force - an organisation of thousands of trained enforcers who have a legal right to arrest and question people, or force them to hand over documents, DNA, fingerprints and digital communications. Very few people have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and experts who can present a compelling case in court. No one has the right to collect taxes and use that money to incarcerate someone for years, even decades. Only the state (governments, courts, parliaments, police, prisons, all working together and supposedly keeping each other in check) has this power.

All of which means that there is inherent unfairness in a legal system that pits the state against an individual.

The legal system attempts to redress that unfairness and ensure every accused gets a fair trial by imposing strict rules and limits on the state:

• The burden of proof is on the state, meaning that everyone accused of a crime is presumed to be innocent and does not have to prove it, rather the state must prove they are guilty.

• The standard of proof the state must achieve is very high, proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt means that even if a jury thinks it’s quite likely he is guilty, they still have to acquit.

• A jury must assess all the evidence provided by the state. They must be people from the accused’s community who have no prior knowledge of the alleged crime, and they must make their decision based solely on their impartial assessment of evidence presented in court where the judge can see it and the defence can question it.

Stemming from these basic principles, there are rules for criminal proceedings and while there are exceptions, they mostly apply to all trials for sexual violence

• The accused cannot be compelled to give evidence against themselves,

• People the accused trusts, such as priests and spouses and doctors, cannot give evidence against them.

• They have the right to have a lawyer test the evidence the state has collected against them and this is so important that the state will pay for it if the accused can’t.

• The jury can only hear information about the crime with which he is charged. His history, public opinion about his guilt, or expert analysis not presented and tested in court is such a risk of influencing the jury that even knowing about it can cause a mistrial (as it did in Bruce Lehrmann’s trial for raping Brittany Higgins).

(It's worth noting that these rights are only relevant to the criminal system where they address the massive power imbalance between the state and a single person. If a woman you know says your mate sexually assaulted her and you have to make a decision about whether to invite him to your next BBQ, you can’t hide behind innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. You’re not the state and not getting an invite to a BBQ is not the same as being incarcerated.)

The rights given to the accused are the justice in the justice system. Without them, government ministers could simply declare that someone who irritated them is a criminal, lock that person in a cell, refuse to allow them to speak to anyone, and keep them there until they die. Even without going to such extremes, if we start watering down the protections people have against the power of the state, the people who will suffer are the ones already over-policed and disproportionately incarcerated – First Nations people, anyone with a mental illnessor addiction, people living in poverty, and children from trauma backgrounds.

So, there is an unresolvable conflict between protecting people from abuses of power by the state and protecting people from abuses of power by other people. There is no law reform that can resolve that conflict or enable the justice system to give people who have been raped the recognition, dignity, and participation they need to find justice. The criminal law system cannot find justice in the intimate terrorism of most sexual violence. There might be an argument for the rare cases of stranger rape to stay in the legal system and there is definitely an argument for giving people who have suffered sexual violence the option to go through the legal system if they choose, but decades of reform have not made any difference to persistent rape myths and the trauma the legal system inflicts on rape victims. It’s well past time we stop looking for alternatives and start making ‘alternative justice’ the primary justice pathway for sexual violence.

The next instalments in this series will look at the results achieved by restorative justice programs in Australia and around the world and the other options available to people who have been raped and sexually assaulted in Australia.

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

Earlier this week, I posted about sector speak, the linguistic routines embedded in the language we use about violence that diminish our ability to fulfil our purpose.

In summary, the three main (but not only) culprits are:

• Passive voice: the idiom of the invisible, unaccountable perpetrator.

• Jargon: wordy, distancing terminology designed to exclude and intimidate people unfamiliar with sector vernacular.

• Semantic saturation: the process of repeating a word so often that it loses meaning.

Each of these three are dangerous enough on their own, but used in combination with each other, their effects are exponentially increased.

Together, they become sector speak, and they are as dangerous as any dehumanising language can be. The first post delved into how these three forms of language diminish our work. This post is about the history that created sector speak, the effect it has on our ability to reduce violence and how we can manage the risk of change.

The effects of sector speak

Supports myths about violence

I’ve written extensively about the harm caused by rape myths - they make rape easier to commit, more difficult to report, much easier to dismiss or ignore and more traumatic for people who have been raped. The same is true of myths about domestic violence, sexual harassment, child sexual abuse, and you can extend that circle further and further into all forms of violence and oppression.

When we use language that is repetitive, dehumanising, and meaningless, we’re failing to communicate actual ideas. There’s nothing in sector speak for our brains to process so we fill in the gaps with preexisting bias and myths, usually without even knowing that this is what we’re doing. Perfect victims, ideal survivors, and monster myths all thrive in meaningless repetitive language.

Provides tools for perpetrators

Men who perpetrate violence see the poorly understood jargon being endlessly repeated in sector communications. They know how to weaponise terms such as ‘coercive control’ and ‘trauma informed response’ and ‘misidentification of the primary aggressor’. Women who try to talk to their abusive partners about the damage they’re causing are often met with accusations of ‘gaslighting’, ‘silencing’ and ‘emotionally abusive and controlling behaviour’.

The complex dynamics of gender and power are difficult to understand and explain – although this is what the jargon is supposed to do – which means misunderstood jargon is easily twisted to fit myths about violence.

‘She’s gaslighting me’ translates to ‘she’s lying’ and fits the myth that women commonly lie about rape and domestic violence.

‘She’s emotionally abusive’ or ‘she’s so controlling’ fits the myth that men cannot control the rage that is deliberately provoked by manipulative women.

As well as weaponising sector speak against the people they’re abusing, perpetrators also use it to manipulate sympathetic responses out of counsellors, police, magistrates and juries. When it works – which it often does – perpetrators feel safe to continue or even escalate the abuse because everyone involved has learned that if a woman says a man has hurt her, he is the real victim and she’s a damned liar.

Diminishes public understanding of violence

Debunking myths about violence changes more than just attitudes and beliefs. It makes a difference to how people respond to violence. Helping people understand and reject myths is how we get everyone to move from asking ‘what did you do to provoke him?’ to ‘what do you need to be safe?’ That change cannot happen if everyone who is talking about men’s violence is using the same meaningless sector speak.

Jargon also, as it is designed to do, excludes people who doesn’t know the jargon or are afraid they’ll get it wrong if they try. When jargon is repeated in every public discussion of violence, anyone who hears it and isn’t sure what it means will know they are not meant to participate. They’ll either tune out or try to use the terms without understanding what they mean. Both options are dangerous in their own way.

Obscures genuine expertise

For most of its history, almost everyone who worked in the sector was horrendously underpaid – if they were paid at all. That started to change in 2010 with the introduction of the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award (SCHADS Award) in 2010. By 2025, senior positions in large organisations are often quite well paid. The unintended consequence of this is that those positions now attract a range of people who have no experience or expertise in the sector.

While the sector benefits from new ideas and definitely needs new people, it’s important to maintain a balance of experience and inexperience. Sector speak masks imbalance to the point that in one large domestic violence crisis response organisation I know of, there is no one a senior position who has ever worked in domestic violence. The CEO, the entire board of directors, and everyone in senior management came from corporate, healthcare, child services or police backgrounds. These might be useful skills to add to expertise in domestic violence, but they cannot replace that expertise. The absence of expertise is doing terrible damage to front line staff and the people who depend on the organisation for support, but this is rendered invisible because sector speak means all those senior managers and board members can speak authoritatively on ‘inclusive provision of service for all victim-survivors’ and ‘the vital important of including the voices of lived experience in everything we do’ and ‘providing all victim survivors with evidence-based best-practice trauma informed care’. None of them have a genuine understanding of what these terms mean, nor do they have any comprehension of the service they are meant to provide, but sector speak is the perfect disguise for ignorance – especially when it’s the mainstay of policy, governance, and reporting.

Why did sector speak become so ubiquitous?

Despite my frustration with sector speak, I understand why it exists. The explanation is buried in the history of our sector.

Last year was the 50^th anniversary of Elsie, the women’s refuge founded by feminists who squatted in a vacant property in Glebe in Western Sydney. The Sydney Rape Crisis Centre, now known as Full Stop, also turned 50 last year. Other crisis response services around the country will reach the same milestone over the next few years because most of them were started by second wave feminists. There was no sector and no jargon in the seventies and eighties. They talked about ‘battered wives’ and rapists and were frequently accused of being hysterical feminists, man haters, and bra-burning lesbians (a supposed insult that could only be hurled by someone who has never spent all day locked inside an underwire bra). Women at the time were considered too emotional and sensitive to sit on juries or participate in making or enforcing laws.

‘when imagining the obligations of citizenship, rather than the rights, women’s primary duty was to the home, not the law’ Alecia Simmonds, A Jury of her Peers, 2024

In response to this, and in a genuine effort to better understand how to help women who were being abused by men, activists turned to academia. Research, evidence and calm, unemotional language countered the myth that hysterical feminists were shrieking and wailing over a few undeserving unfortunates. The formal, unemotional approach helped transform a private problem that only needed a personal reaction into a public issue that demanded a structural response. The language had to transform too but it wasn’t like medical or legal jargon where there was a long history and dead languages to lean on. New terminology was required and researchers had to invent it along the way. Collective action, which was still very much part of the feminist ethos, required united use of terminology and the sector quickly became accustomed to falling in behind whatever terms were deemed to be accurate and appropriate.

Over the last decade or so, the sector has also confronted its short but disturbing history of concentrating on able-bodied, English-speaking white women as the only deserving victims. Aboriginal women, migrant and refugee women, LGBTQIA+ people, children, and women with disabilities were ruthlessly excluded from the early years of feminist activism against men’s violence.

We have stumbled, imperfectly and erratically, towards an understanding that this failure cannot be absolved by demanding forgiveness, it requires recompense. And so, our impersonal and technical language has been carefully altered to ensure it includes all the people we once refused to see and we are, as we should be, hypersensitive to any language that harks back to our pallid past.

Unwinding sector speak does not mean we should have less care for that history or the people still injured by history’s modern manifestations. In fact it means we have more care. We need to work harder, take risks in our language rather than rely on safe but jargon that hides human dignity under lazy repetition. We build more trust by speaking with meaning, even if it’s imperfect, than by trotting out tired cliches. Words give form to thought and the imperfections of language are far more effective at displaying intent than smoothly practised phrases.

Technical language and jargon

If I worked anywhere but the healthcare sector and said this sentence to my colleagues there’s a good chance they’d have no clue what I was talking about or how to respond, no matter how many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy they’d seen.

If, however, I said ‘I’ve got a terrible headache and taking painkillers didn’t make it any better’, not only are they going to be able to help me, it’s likely that someone with basic first aid training will know to do a FAST test (check for Facial drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty and know that if I have any of these symptoms, Time is critical). If my headache is due to a stroke, that person’s knowledge of this simple test means they will call an ambulance and probably save my life or my ability to live independently for the next twenty years. But all of that depends on our shared understanding of plain language and their knowledge of when to call for expert help.

If my headache was a stroke and I need surgery, however, I do not want my surgical team talking about headaches and painkillers. It is crucially important that they know I took acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) not acetaminophen (panadol). Aspirin is a blood thinner and their exact understanding of what medicine I’ve taken and whether my stroke is ischemic (a clot in the brain) or haemorrhagic (bleeding in the brain) will determine my entire future. Technical language will save my life. (My apologies to anyone who does speak neurological medicalise - as you can tell, I am not fluent. I am using language I barely understand to make a point and misuse of terms probably only emphasises the point.)

The FAST test was developed in the 1990s to help paramedics ensure stroke patients get immediate treatment. It proved highly effective and its simplicity means it’s now included in most basic first aid training.

The lessons here are obvious. We don’t need everyone to become experts in the technical complexities of violence and abuse any more than we need train the entire world to be neurologists. But we save lives when we give people basic skills, simple language and widely understood triggers to call for expert help. (Of course, we then need to have in place all the sector equivalents of paramedics, ER doctors, neurologists, neurosurgeons, theatre nurses, ICU clinical care specialists, pathologists, radiologists, physiotherapists, occupational and speech therapists, and mental health counsellors, but that’s a topic for another time.)

The language of violence and the future

Risk averse, depersonalised language based on collective agreement and too many inexperienced speakers has led us too far from our purpose. We want structural solutions to gender based violence and for that we need strong public support because government rarely initiate change, but they will almost always follow it.

Widespread steadfast support means lots of people need understand the basics concepts of power and gender that underpin men’s violence. Which means we need to dispel myths and build empathy. We need all the variations of violence to become familiar and understandable. We cannot do those things with repetitive, passive jargon. Sector speak, that calm professional language that once helped us, is now getting in our way and it’s time for another course correction.

We need to commit to taking risks in what we say and who we allow to speak. Give a megaphone to people who are imperfect and not shame them for their imperfections. That includes people who don’t use acceptable, appropriate language but have stories to tell. People, most of them women and children, who don’t understand or accept progressive ideals also suffer abuse by violent men. They need services, support, compassion, and acceptance. We need to believe those people and include them, even when we don’t agree with them.

In a sector that is trained to be hyperaware of appropriateness, we need to get much better at understanding appropriate use of language. We don’t apply the same language to an annual report, a technical policy document, an academic paper, a personal story and a social media post. They each serve a very different purpose for a very different audience. And all of them deserve more effort than sector speak can give them.

The Sector Speak posts have a wider application than just rape and sexual assault, which is why I’ve not listed them in the Rape is a Theoretical Crime series. They are, however, highly relevant to the series and the reason I wanted to post them this week is so I can refer to them in later instalments of the rape series.

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

“If I do not speak in a language that can be understood, there is little chance for a dialogue.” bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1989

Almost ten years ago I started the Fixed It project, challenging the way the media reports on men’s violence against women. While I still see the occasional egregious reversion to old habits, it’s genuinely reassuring how much media reporting has improved in the decade I’ve been monitoring its progress.

News articles in 2025 almost never talk about the once ubiquitous ‘jilted lover’ who ‘just snapped’ and killed his ‘cheating girlfriend’. Nor do they talk about ‘good blokes’ who ‘fell from grace’ when they raped ‘drunk teenagers’ or ‘loving fathers’ who were holding the smoking gun when their children ‘tragically died’. Even ‘star footballers’ no longer ‘face a career in ruins’ when they have to miss a few team practices because they’re on trial for sexual assault. Ten years of persistent advocacy from many different people and organisations has forced news media to get much better at using the active voice and removing tired old cliches from their reporting.

This improvement, however, only highlights the concurrent increase in passive voice, repetitive terms and dehumanising language that comes almost entirely from the people who work so hard to alleviate the cause and effects of men’s violence.

The organisations that research, respond to, advise on, and prevent gender based violence (often referred to as ‘the sector’) have developed a swathe of minimising and subverting linguistic tricks that are now standard in almost all discussion of violence.

The three main (but not the only) language culprits are:

Passive voice: the idiom of the invisible, unaccountable perpetrator.

Jargon: wordy, distancing terminology designed to exclude and intimidate people unfamiliar with sector vernacular.

Semantic saturation: the process of repeating a word so often that it loses meaning.

Each of these three are dangerous enough on their own, but used in combination with each other, their effects are exponentially increased.

Together, they become sector speak, and they are as dangerous as any dehumanising language can be.

Digging deeper into sector speak

It’s useful to know a bit more about how passive voice, jargon and repetition work to undermine ideas.

Passive voice: The idiom of the invisible, unaccountable perpetrator

In grammatical terms, voice describes the relationship between the verb in a sentence and the subject and object of that sentence.

In the active voice, the subject performs the action of the verb on the object. In the passive voice, the object receives the action of the verb.

The easiest way to make sense of this is using examples. I’ll use the example Jackson Katz used in his TED talk (still far too relevant after almost 13 years).

John is the subject.

Beat is the verb.

Mary is the object. (I am very uncomfortable with using the word ‘object’ to describe any woman, let alone a woman being abused by a man – even if she is fictional – but this is not the time or place to start renaming grammatical terminology).

In the active voice, the subject is first, then the verb, then the object.

In the passive voice, the order is reversed, and the object is the recipient of the action by the subject:

In the active voice, the sentence isn’t complete without the subject and the object.

John beat… or …beat Mary are not complete sentences.

In the passive voice, the sentence is complete without the subject:

Mary was beaten.

The passive voice without the subject is a way of implying that either you don’t know who beat Mary or that knowing who beat Mary isn’t relevant to the information you’re conveying.

The APA style manual recommends using the passive voice when it is more important to focus on the recipient of the action than on who performed the action. Journalists and editors often used to use passive voice to erase violent men from headlines and news stories about the choices made by violent men.

Now, it’s the standard sentence construction in almost every sector publication, as demonstrated with some examples and simple fixes:

The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children

The National Plan to End Men’s Violence Against Women and Children

Too many women are lost to family violence

Violent men kill too many women

It’s important that victim-survivors are believed

Police must take victim-survivors seriously

We must believe victim-survivors

It’s important that I believe people who tell me they have been abused.

Ending violence against women is a priority

My priority is ending men’s violence against women

Jargon: obscure, dehumanising terminology

Sector speak is full of acronyms and jargon.

The PUV frequently deploys DARVO tactics against the VS in FDSV.

For anyone familiar with sector speak this is a simple sentence and a very basic concept. For anyone else it’s a meaningless collection of words and letters.

Even if all the acronyms were removed, the sentence is still just a collection of concepts, not a description of a person and their choices and actions:

The person using violence frequently deploys deny attack reverse victim and offender tactics against the victim-survivor in family domestic and sexual violence.

Rather than digging through the very long list of sector jargon, it might be more helpful to take a close look at two of our most ubiquitous terms: ‘victim-survivor’ and ‘lived experience’.

Victim-survivor

In a sector full of repetitive jargon, victim-survivor has been so over-used that it is now used - unquestioningly - as a synonym for person in every statement about people who have lived through violence. Or even people who didn’t survive - I was at a domestic violence conference a few years back where a very dedicated and credible researcher gave an entire presentation on ‘victim-survivors of domestic and family violence homicide’. That sentence was in her slides. More than once. And no, she was not talking about family members of murdered women. She was talking about women who had been killed. None of whom were survivors.

The victim/survivor dichotomy entered public debate in the 1960s and 70s when people who had lived through the holocaust were often separated into victims (seen as passively existing and alive only by chance) and survivors (bravely working to save themselves and others). Victimhood was perceived as being about shame and cowardice while survivors were, by implication, heroes who were stronger and more deserving than the people who were killed. ‘Victim-survivor’ was coined to erase that divide and remove shame from all the people targeted by the Nazis during the holocaust.

Feminists in the 70s through to the 90s started using the term for very similar reasons. Tying the terms together was supposed to erase the negative connotations of both, but it seems to have entrenched the effect of labels, both good and bad.

“I stopped when I saw the words Rape Victim in bold at the top of one sheet… I paused. No, I do not consent to being a rape victim. If I signed on the line, would I become one? If I refused to sign, could I remain my regular self?” Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir, 2019

A victim is defined by the harm someone chose to do to them and a survivor by their power to heal and live afterwards. A victim-survivor is both these labels, but they still exist only in relation to the thing someone chose to do to them.

The word ‘victim’ comes from the Latin, victima, meaning an animal sacrificed to the gods. While the word is embedded in criminal courts and police reporting, it’s almost never used on its own in the sector. ‘Victim’ carries connotations of someone who is weak, helpless and pitiful, even shameful in their inability to defend themselves. After being deprived of the power to decide what someone else can do to their mind and body, it’s entirely understandable that someone who has lived through abuse would fiercely reject language that defines them as a powerless person.

The term ‘survivor’, however, is not universally embraced. Some people passionately object to being labelled ‘survivors’ because they see the term as a demand for evidence of recovery, which may not be true or even possible for everyone. Others refuse it because they think it minimises violence that is not life threatening but is still painfully traumatic - if the violent person was never going to kill you can you call yourself a survivor? And if not, does the ‘victim-survivor’ dichotomy mean ‘victim’ is the only other option?

Research with university students who had been raped shows some people might be reluctant to take on the ‘survivor’ label because it indicates they don’t need support or justice or because it implied a level of personal power that meant they should have been able to defend themselves against the rapist.

Other research suggests the label risks perpetuating the romanticising of violence, where abuse is perceived as a life lesson or a moment of personal growth that turns a ditzy teenager into a wise and empathic woman. Almost as if someone should be grateful to their abuser for helping them become a better person.

Trauma does not make someone a better person. In fact, trauma can make a good person behave like an asshole. A reactive, raging, self-centred, unpredictable, hurtful, self-medicating asshole. This behaviour can be an entirely reasonable, even healthy response to deep injury and it’s very common in people who have been abused. But it’s not the romantic, self-sacrificing, if-I-can-stop-this-happening-to-one-other-person-it-will-all-be-worth-it ideal survivor response. Erasing that raging, messy person from the victim-survivor archetype builds a mythology that ‘good’ victim-survivors find healing in noble and selfless service to others. That may be true of a few people, but for most people, recovery takes years and requires considerable time, effort and focus on the self. No one should ever feel shamed for making that effort on their own behalf.

The victim-survivor myth might be more about offering comfort to observers who don’t want to think of violence as a terrible story with no happy ending. Or even no ending at all.

There is rarely a binary choice between triumphantly healed and permanently damaged. Both can exist in the same person. Victim-survivor as a term might offer some path between the duality but it still defines and limits an entire person to a single experience.

A person is still a person after (and during) violence. They have complexities and flaws and interests and aspirations that exist outside their trauma and even if trauma makes their ambitions more difficult to achieve, it does not have to create or define them. No matter how much lived experience they have.

Lived experience

What other kind of experience is there? Using tautologies to produce jargon is a hollow sales trick that should have no place in any discussion of people who have been abused.

Having said that, there is history to this term. Until very recently, policy, response and services for many groups of marginalised people were often designed and implemented without any input from the people who actually used the service. It was paternalistic, frequently racist, and usually unhelpful. As the sector grappled with this, they searched for language that would give greater respect and prominence to people who had first-hand experience of living through violence. ‘Lived experience’ was the term they chose to differentiate people who had that first-hand knowledge from people who had (or believed they had) expertise in structural responses to violence.

That first-hand knowledge is a vital component of any service. I don’t want drive a car designed by someone who has never had a driver’s licence, no matter how much engineering expertise they have. But I also don’t want my car designed by someone whose only qualification is that they survived a terrible car accident. The best driving experience will come when not just those two people, but an entire team of people (like them and unlike them) work together. A group of experienced engineers who can genuinely listen to and care about thousands of people who have been in car accidents in many different conditions and circumstances. They also need to hear from people who have avoided accidents or had the split second timing and tools to turn a devastating crash into a minor bingle.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with the very tortured analogy.

Surviving something does not make someone an expert on the thing that almost killed them. It does make them an expert in their experience of it – how they felt, what they thought, whether the responses they got from crisis services were helpful or hurtful, what else they needed, how the experience affects their life – no one else could possibly know these things or should ever claim to know them. And that knowledge is invaluable to the people who design and implement response and recovery services.

The issue with lived experience is not in its meaning or intent. Where it becomes a problem is when the meaning of the term moves from respect and prominence to veneration and mythology.

Asking people to give input to service and policy is very different to demanding public advocacy. Traumatised people who have barely had time to understand what was done to them cannot become experts in every form of violence. Asking them to do so is grossly unfair and to then insist that they unzip themselves on demand and spill out their pain for the eager consumption of journalists and social media followers is replicating abuse, particularly when we know how they will be dehumanised, idolised and vilified across the political spectrum. Every action, every expression, every smile (or failure to smile) measured against the ideal survivor standard and used as justification to strip a person of their personhood. It’s grossly unfair and it sets up deeply unrealistic expectations for people who think they can find healing by becoming the next Rose Batty if they share their story. For almost all those people, their story will vanish within 24 hours and no one will remember the courage they had to find and hold when they revealed their scars to the world.

Input does not require veneration. There is no moral authority or worthiness in surviving violence or in being able to speak publicly about abuse’s graphic details. Sometimes survival is simply a matter of luck. Sometimes the opportunity to speak happens in a single tortured moment, as it did with Rosie Batty. Sometimes it’s denied to people who do not fit the perfect victim myth or who aren’t young, white, or photogenic enough for mainstream advocacy. Some people cannot overcome the silence and shame imposed on them by violent men and equally violent patriarchy. Others want to speak but cannot because the man who hurt them is still too much of a threat. Far too many others believe the abuse they experienced wasn’t severe enough to give them real lived experience.

‘A journalist friend of a friend contacted me looking for a survivor quote for a story. I told her what happened to me and her response was, “so he didn’t actually rape you then?” He threatened me and terrified me and hurt me, but I managed to get away before he actually got into my vagina, so I guess that means I wasn’t survivor enough.’ A 28 year old woman who lived through an attempted rape

The lived experience veneration also forces people to choose between becoming a lived experience advocate or a sector expert because the term exists only to differentiate between the two. The truth is that many people in the sector have first-hand knowledge and expertise. Men’s violence is far more prevalent than commonly cited statistics indicate and it’s ludicrous to assume that the people who can publicly declare their lived experience are the only victim survivors.

Semantic satiation: repetition eliminates meaning

Semantic satiation (also known as semantic saturation) is what happens when a word is repeated so often that it stops being a word and becomes nothing but meaningless sounds. This effect was documented as early as 1907 and ongoing research shows that too much repetition not only eliminates meaning of the repeated word, but it can also diminish people’s ability remember and connect meaning to related words and concepts.

Apply that theory to the term ‘victim-survivor’ or ‘family and domestic violence’ or ‘coercive control’. When these terms are the only words anyone uses to describe these concepts, the repetition is massive and endless. Anyone hearing it can’t help but lose understanding of and empathy with ‘victim survivors of family and domestic violence and coercive control’.

So, people who have already been dehumanised and terrorised by someone who claimed to love them are then collectively dehumanised and diminished by people who claim to support them.

This is the reality of sector speak.

Once again, I underestimated how much needed to go into this piece and it was getting ridiculously long. Later this week I’ll post part two of this piece, covering the causes and effects of sector speak.

The Sector Speak posts have a wider application than just rape and sexual assault, which is why I’ve not listed them in the Rape is a Theoretical Crime series. They are, however, highly relevant to the series and the reason I wanted to post them this week is so I can refer to them in later instalments of the rape series.

In 2025 I’m starting PhD at Monash University to research men who have committed sexual violence, what they think about masculinity and shame, and whether there is anything we can learn from them to improve prevention education.

Paid subscriptions support my research and in return will receive plain language summaries of my research along the way.

Subscribe now

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

I took a few desperately needed weeks off over the holidays. I spent the first week reinstating all the sleep hygiene, regular exercise, and home cooking practices that a particularly tough year had stripped out of my routine. But the most restorative thing I did was turn my phone off, toss it into a drawer,and leave it there. Weeks went by without any beeps to notify me that someone I will never meet thinks I’m stupid or awesome or fat or dangerous. News articles came and went, research papers were published, people were amazing and awful, and I didn’t know about any of it. This is not a bubble I could live in for very long, but as a three week holiday from my life, it was brilliant.

But I’m back now. Slowly working through all the notifications I missed, deciding which ones I’m happy to keep missing (farewell social media - it’s not me, it’s you and I’m putting up some healthy boundaries) and gearing up for what is going to be a huge year.

How huge? So huge that Elon Musk’s delusions are looking at my year and saying, ‘goddamn that is HUUUGE’.

First news: I am starting a PhD at Monash University in February. I’ll be doing research on men who have committed sexual violence, what they think about masculinity and shame, and whether there is anything we can learn from them to improve prevention education.

So many feelings about this. Elation. Terror. Excitement. A little bit of nausea. I’ve wanted to do this for years, ever since I first read Diana Scully’s book about the research she did with convicted rapists in Virginian prisons during the early 1980s. But a PhD is a massive undertaking. I had to wait for my kids to grow up (and maybe for me to grow up a bit more too) before I could manage a project like this. Emotionally, financially, intellectually, logistically and a few other adverbs I can’t think of right now, it’s going to be…well…HUGE. Can you dance with excitement while being frozen in fear? Yes, as it turns out, you can.

*ungainly frozen dancing*

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, I’ve got two new books and a tenth anniversary to celebrate this year!

I’m still very committed to finishing the Rape is a Theoretical Crime series. I’m hoping to get most of it done before semester starts, but there will undoubtedly be some (potentially very useful) crossover. The series will go behind the subscriber paywall at the end of February because I plan on using it as the basis of a book (for which paying subscribers will get a 50% discount). I’m hoping to collaborate with some of the rape crisis centres in Vic and NSW on publishing the book, but I’ll have more news on that later in the year.

And I’ve got another book (already written) coming out mid-year. The publisher wants me to keep schtum on the title and topic for now, but we should be ready to drop all the veils in a month or two. I can tell you that it’s non-fiction and very much connected to all the themes of the PhD and the rape series.

Finally, in September this year it will be ten years since the first ever Fixed It post. Ten years is a long time to stay so close to a topic like this. It’s been so frustrating and exhausting and rewarding. Also, so much has changed over that decade. Both news media and social media are now almost laughably different to their 2015 iterations. Reporting on men’s violence against women has changed drastically too – mostly, but not entirely, for the better. Public understanding of gender based violence, the power of language, who gets to be heard and seen – and who doesn’t – have all changed as well. The cycles and feedback loops and polarisations that fuel all these changes moved so quickly it was often difficult to examine them properly as they were happening.

I have learned so much and the Fixed It project has changed my professional life in so many ways that I think I have to do something to mark the tenth anniversary and explore some of those changes in more depth. I don’t know what form that will take yet, but you can be sure I’ll be posting about it here when I do.

What does that mean for my Substack?

Mostly, my plans for 2025 give the Substack page a direction. When I started on Substack I didn’t have a plan much more detailed than ‘I should write about stuff’ (I feel like I’m not the only writer here who started that way, but maybe that’s just wishful projection).

I started the Rape is a Theoretical Crime series because this felt like the perfect place to collect all the research and interviews I’ve done over years of writing about sexual violence, but I didn’t see it as a long term plan.

The PhD gives me that plan. For at least the next three years (probably longer) I’m going to be doing a deep dive on masculinity, shame, men who commit sexual violence, and effective prevention education strategies. I’m also going to be learning how to successfully complete PhD - and think very positively about the future.

Substack is where I’ll share what I learn about all these things and where I get to translate all that academic writing into English. Like a journal, but for ideas and knowledge not personal growth.

I generally prefer to not write behind paywalls but I’m going to treat Substack as my part-time job, the work I do to keep the cost-of-living wolf at a reasonable distance from my door while I’m studying. Which means at least half the work I do here will have to be for paying subscribers only.

Paywalls and subscribers are great when people have the means, but I’ve lived too many years with that wolf strolling through my door and prowling around my kitchen to be comfortable publishing only for people who can pay. So, if you are keenly interested in the work I’ll be doing but you can’t afford to subscribe, email me. I’ll have a few gift subscriptions ready to go.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon with the next instalment in the Rape is a Theoretical Crime series. Please do share it (or any other post) with anyone you know who might find it interesting.

Subscribe now

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

This is part four of a series on sexual violence.

• Part One: The Data examines the available data on rape and sexual assault in Australia, which shows that men have raped or sexually assaulted at least one quarter and possibly more than half the women in Australia.

• Part Two: Understanding Rape Myths looks at rape myths and how they are used to obscure the reality of sexual violence.

• Part Three: Shame Must Change Sides on Gisèle Pelicot’s declaration that ‘when you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them’ and the effect of shame on people who have been raped or sexually assaulted.

There is no simple answer to the question of why men rape. ‘Because they can’ is a flippant response to such a serious question, but that doesn’t stop it being true – men who commit rape rarely experience any consequences.

There are, of course, other far more complex reasons men perpetrate sexual violence and very few of them are included in the common rape myth scripts.

While men who rape might have different motivations, rape, at its core, is a crime of contempt. The rapist’s fleeting gratification is achieved through contemptuous indifference to someone’s else’s peaceful dominion of their own body.

Whatever his motivation then, the first requirement for any rape must be that the rapist can see another person’s body as a thing. Not a person but an object stripped of humanity, existing only to serve his purpose. Having achieved this, he then must have a reason to rape, which is where we get into the complexities of rape motivation.

What does the evidence say about motivations for rape?

Power, vengeance, anger, and aggression were found, in a one study, to be common motivations for rape. Rape can also be about control, ignorance, entitlement, dominance, or lack of empathy. It can be driven by revenge and anger, or fulfillment of a fantasy. It is sometimes opportunistic but it can also be deliberate, planned, or punitive. Occasionally it is sadistic and thrill seeking. While sexual gratification is sometimes part of the motivation for rape, it’s almost never the sole reason.

Despite the common misconception, men do not rape because they are so overcome by lust that they lose control or are unable to tell that the person they’re with doesn’t want sex. In fact, evidence says most men are able to recognise and understand the verbal and non-verbal cues of consent. This is true in both brief and long term relationships.

If a sexually aroused man ignores the signs that his partner does not consent, the rape he commits is a choice, not a loss of control. He will, however, often blame his actions on the woman he raped or shift responsibility to his need for ‘intimacy’, ‘self-affirmation’ or ‘peer approval’, as if rape can provide him with these rewards.

Such a distorted perspective must have a source, and the obvious one is childhood abuse, which can and does have many terrible effects on people.

A 2018 study by the University of Washington attempted to understand how different kinds of abuse in childhood affects men’s risk of being abusive as adults. They found a link between childhood abuse and men who go on to physically abuse their partners or children as adults, but no link to increased risk of committing sexual violence.

Other studies have found a connection between childhood abuse and sexually violent men, but all the research I can find shows that most people who were abused as children do not grow up to be rapists.

One thing that is clear in all the studies of the connection between childhood abuse and adult sexual violence: there is a gendered difference.

Traumatic childhoods, particularly sexual abuse, may be a risk factor for committing sexual violence, although the findings for this are inconsistent. Where a link is found, however, it is significantly more common in men than women. Additionally, childhood abuse (again, particularly sexual abuse) puts everyone at higher risk of being sexually victimised by violent men, but this risk appears to be higher for women than it is for men, and higher still for gender diverse people.

In other words, childhood abuse always causes suffering. If has an impact on someone’s involvement in violence as an adult, it tends to make men more likely to commit violence, but for women and gender diverse people, it means they are more likely to be the victims of sexual violence.

A 2013 review of almost 200 studies on risk of perpetrating sexual violence found no significant connection to family characteristics (poverty, addiction, crime etc in the family). It also found the evidence on interpersonal skills (including typical cues of neurodiversity) was mixed and difficult to interpret. The inconsistency of results is enough to suggest there’s not a significant causal link. Similarly, drug use has inconsistent evidence but studies of men who drink alcohol have found consistent and significant connections to sexual violence when those men also believe in myths about gender and rape.

Mental illness does not cause men to rape. A review of almost 20 years of research in the US found that mental illness was far more likely to put someone at risk of being the victim of violence than the perpetrator. While some types of severe mental illnesses (psychosis etc requiring hospitalisation) are associated with violence that is investigated, charged and convicted, it doesn’t seem to be linked to the vast majority of sexual violence.

Poverty, which is often a risk factor in criminal behaviour, is not connected to rape. Rich and poor men commit rape with roughly equal frequency.

The biggest risk factor for committing rape is not childhood abuse, poverty, mental illness or substance abuse. It’s being a man. Obviously, this alone is not enough. Not all men are rapists.

Research on why men commit sexual violence was much more common in the 1980s and 1990s than it has been in the last 20 years. However, analysis of 25 research papers published between 2000 and 2021 found one characteristic most often associated with men who commit sexual violence: believing in rape myths and hostile gender myths. This was more common than any of the stereotypical reasons, such as mental illness or depravation.

Men in mostly male friendship groups are also at higher risk, but only when those groups condone beliefs and behaviour that objectifies or is hostile to women. Men who spend a lot of time in fraternities or sports clubs where those attitudes are not prevalent didn’t show the same risk. In other words, it’s the attitudes and behaviour, not the male dominated groups, that creates the risk.

There is also interesting evidence that suggests belief in traditional gender roles is only a significant link to sexual violence if those beliefs are hostile and aggressive. Men are not likely to rape if their beliefs about gender lead them to open a door for a woman because they think it’s good manners, but they don’t find it funny to humiliate or degrade women. Men who let women open doors themselves but laugh at faked nudes of women are much higher risk.

I’m not saying that benign sexism does no harm or that we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it, only that evidence suggests it’s not directly linked to sexual violence. Sexism that is hostile and contemptuous, however, does show a link.

To get an idea of what hostile beliefs and behaviours look like, these are some examples I’ve heard in the last few years that boys and men have either done or laughed about their friends doing:

• Pulling off an unconscious woman’s clothes and urinating on her.

• Driving through St Kilda to throw beer cans and rotten food at sex workers

• Putting tampon boxes full of dog shit in women’s bags.

• Sharing fake nudes of girls who rejected them with fake ‘SLUT’ tattoos on their breasts.

• Placing bets on who could get a naked photo of a girl perceived as ‘ugly’ then sharing it around the campus.

• Sharing a faked image of their homeroom teacher being gang raped.

Organisations such as Our Watch often set the terminology for public discussion of men’s violence. When they talk about the ‘drivers of gender based violence’ being ‘gender inequality’ and ‘disrespect towards women’, they’re talking about the reasons men do things like the above examples, and the effects these actions have on people of all genders. The terminology is dreadful, but I understand why it happens. Ten years of Coalition government, with Christian Porter leading the charge to defund feminist organisations and crisis services, made many government funded organisations understandably risk averse and terminology that doesn’t say anything can’t upset anyone. Unfortunately though, bland language combined with the sectors’ unfortunate tendency to semantic saturation (repetition that makes words meaningless), renders too much of the public discussion about prevention of men’s violence incomprehensible to anyone outside the sector. The wider problems in the language we use about men’s violence is a topic for another time, but I think it’s helpful to know what terms like ‘gender inequality’ are trying to explain.

The key to understanding this behaviour might lie in another branch of research on men’s violence: shame.

Shame as a precursor of rape

When Gisele Pelicot said ‘it is not for us to have shame, it is for them’ she was talking about feeling shame over the rape itself. Most men who rape women don’t feel shame or even guilt about committing rape. They tend to believe they don’t need to.

Many of them, however, do feel a very deep sense of shame. Not about the sexual violence they’ve committed, but about their own masculinity.

I wrote about shame in more details in part three of this series, but to summarise, shame is different to guilt. Shame is a painful feeling of inherent unworthiness, it’s about who we think we are, whereas guilt is about what we think we’ve done.

Helen Block Lewis, in her 1971 book, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis clearly delineated this different between shame and guilt. She also coined the term ‘humiliated fury’ to describe the violence used by shamed men to regain a feeling of power.

Dr Micheal Lewis, in his book Shame: The Exposed Self, said the key elements of shame are the person’s belief that there is:

• A violation of some role or standard

• A failure to meet expectations

• A defect of the self that cannot easily be repaired.

If we apply these elements of shame to gender myths that dictate men should be powerful, virile, and dominant, the opposite of every supposed feminine quality, a man who believes in these myths would be highly vulnerable to shame if he also believes he’s failing to live up to the myths. This is not a small risk. A 2024 Australian study of men’s beliefs about masculinity found 42 percent of young men agreed that a ‘real man’ would never say no to sex’ and 50 percent agreed that ‘guys should act strong even if they feel scared or nervous inside’.

If a man believes his masculinity is the defining characteristic of his identity, and he also believes that masculinity earns respect by being sexually dominant and aggressive, he will feel every failure to meet that standard as overwhelming shame, as evidence that he is unlovable and unworthy. The slightest hint of disrespect from others will feel to him like proof they have seen his shameful self, and they are disgusted by him. Violence, particularly sexual violence, is his means of proving to himself that he is powerful - shameless rather than shameful.

Dr James Gilligan worked as a psychiatrist in the American prison system for 25 years. In his book, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, he wrote, ‘I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked…by feeling shamed’. He described men who had committed the most horrific crimes against women as feeling shame so devastating it resulted in what he called the ‘death of self’ and said that the ‘purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it...with pride’.

Shame mutes a person’s ability to feel empathy. It can both create anger and increase the intensity of anger. It also reduces a shame-prone person’s willingness to control aggression, whereas guilt tends to inhibits anger and aggression.

There is a horrible logic to sexual violence for a man who feels deep shame about his masculinity. Rape is power, dominance and control, wrapped into a single act of virile subjugation.

Men with elevated shame are more likely to physically, emotionally and sexually abuse their female partners. Men who commit sexual violence almost always showed high levels of shame, although this did not mean they felt guilt about their crimes.

Men who feel this shamed masculinity need something very different from women than what they need from other men. At the most extreme end, for example, misogyny mass murderer Elliot Rodger, women exist only to dispense the love and sex as an antidote to shame. Rejection by women is confirmation that shame is real and deserved. So, women are both an omnipresent need and an omnipotent threat to shamed men.

Other men are not expected to provide love and intimacy. Rather, they offer amelioration of shame by affirming each other’s virility, power, and dominance. They can do this with shared laughter at weaker men and shared contempt for women thought watching and laughing at violent porn together or collectively taunting women in public, and, at its worst, gang rape. This is why men so rarely see shame in each other. All they’re allowed to see is the performance of confidence and power.

Jess Hill, in her celebrated book, See What You Made Me Do, devoted a chapter to shame and the research that connects it to violence. She writes that the source of much male violence is ‘buried deep inside, where an insatiable hunger for intimacy and belonging had mutated into violence through contact with another powerful emotion – shame’.

For such men, anything perceived as a challenge, rejection, diminishment, ridicule, or ignoring can trigger shame. The only response a man gripped by shame can allow himself is a performance of ego, power, or dominance, which is often expressed through violence.

The connection between shame and hostile gender myths might explain why some men, even men who believe in traditional gender roles, are never violent. If their sense of self is tethered to things beyond their adherence to gender myths – their race, or physical strength, or even their sense of being a calm and good person - they don’t feel the shame about not meeting gendered expectations and therefore don’t react with fear, rage and violence.

This is not to suggest shame is the only reason men are violent, but it is such a looming presence in so much of men’s violence that we cannot ignore it. A better understanding of gendered shame might also explain why all kinds of violence, but particularly sexual violence is so gendered.

The combination of believing in hostile gender myths and feeling shamed because of them, as well as believing in rape myths that justify sexual violence and blame victims creates the perfect conditions for men to commit rape. It also gives us a place to start in preventing, or at lease reducing sexual violence.

Children and teens who are still forming their understanding of themselves and their place in the world can be particularly vulnerable to shame and distorted beliefs about gender. I’ve seen it in so many schools where epithets such as ‘cuck’ and ‘mangina’ are common, and insecure boys will react with rage if their attempts to use these terms to shame other boys don’t work. The strength and confidence to shrug off shame is not something all teenage boys can easily achieve. Even boys who wholeheartedly reject gender myths can still crumble a bit when other boys call them ‘weak little soy boys’ (a derogatory term implying a boy is weak and feminised by consuming the phytoestrogen in soy milk rather than ‘manly’ food like dairy products and red meat).

Sometimes this gender shame is born of neglect or abuse, but young and vulnerable boys can also learn shame from constant exposure to people who revile masculine weakness and female strength. It might start in infancy when boys are told to toughen up when they cry. It can even be hidden in praise: ‘you’re such a big strong boy’. Or it can be imposed when insecure or uncertain teens are exposed to influences such as professional misogynist Andrew Tate, whose core business is manufacturing male shame for profit.

To be clear, I am not saying shame is an excuse or a justification for violence. Nothing excuses or justifies deliberate harm to another person. But if we can attempt to understand the feelings behind the actions, we have a much better chance of understanding what we can do to prevent or at least reduce sexual violence. One way to do that is to understand that simply debunking gendered shame is not enough. We need to replace it with something else.

The flip sides of shame and guilt are self-worth and self-esteem.

Self-worth is the intrinsic sense of self that says ‘I am a valuable person who deserves love, respect, and consideration’. It’s based on stable characteristics that are inherent to who someone is, not what they do or how they look. Self-esteem is built on self-worth but is about the things someone does, such as what they’ve accomplished, how they look, what they say and other people’s recognition of their successes. Building self-worth and self-esteem into our understanding of gender and identity, and actively teaching this - with children and adults – certainly can’t do any harm. And there’s sound reasons to believe it could do a great deal of good.

Dr James Gilligan studied an intensive program for violent men in San Francisco prisons, which concentrated on helping them change their rigid ideas of masculinity and reduce the shame this induced in them. The program almost entirely eradicated violence inside the prison and participants recorded an 83 percent drop in recidivism compared to men from the same prison who didn’t participate in the program.

This does not mean we need to remove gender from our understanding of identity. Boys can still build manliness into their understanding of themselves. It doesn’t have to be feminised or weakened or diluted. But it cannot be rigid or small, it must include a wide variety of strengths and capacities and it cannot be policed by shaming boys who explore those variations.

It’s also not enough to just target the high risk groups. All the evidence outlined above says this change must happen in men and boys who might be at risk of committing sexual violence as well as in the friendship groups and organisations where they live and play. This means widespread, not narrowcast, change of our understanding of gender.

We already have some evidence that this might work. In 2016, Victoria introduced respectful relationships and consent education for all government schools from foundation to year 12. The roll out was patchy and inconsistent, and the full evaluation, inexplicably, still has not been released by the Victorian Department of Education. But, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey data indicates that Victoria is the only state that saw a significant reduction in sexual violence between 2016 and 2021-22. As I’ve outlined in more detail in part one of this series, PSS data almost certainty underestimates the prevalence of sexual violence, but the rate at which it underestimates wouldn’t change much between iterations of the PSS and the reduction in Victoria is significant enough to warrant further investigation. There may be other factors, but it is plausible that this education program had some impact.

We need to know much more than we do about the effective prevention of sexual violence. A plausible possibility is not enough. And far too many people are being hurt by sexually violent men while we struggle to find a solution.

After Christmas, I’ll be delving into the evidence on how and why the legal system fails so thoroughly in its respond to rape and sexual assault. I’ll also tell a much more optimistic story of the services outside the legal system that offer compassionate and effective support to people who have been raped and sexually assaulted.

If you want to read the next instalments in the series and haven’t already subscribed, you can sign up below. I will do my best to keep them all outside the paywall, but if you can afford to subscribe it’s only $10 a month and every subscriber helps me slice away time from chasing paid work to do this work.

Subscribe now

Share

Discount offer for readers

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast

The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

In 2020 police discovered that Gisèle Pelicot’s husband of fifty years had, for at least ten years, been systematically drugging her, raping her and inviting other men to her home to rape her.

He was caught because a vigilant security guard saw him filming up a woman’s skirt in a supermarket and reported him to police. The woman he filmed decided to press charges and when police seized Dominique Pelicot’s computer they found videos of more than 80 men raping Gisèle.

If the security guard who caught him and the woman who pressed charges not taken the upskirting so seriously, men would still be raping Gisèle Pelicot today.

These men are not monsters, despite their monstrous acts. They’re just ordinary men. A soldier, a journalist, a truck driver, a baker, a builder. Many of these men have wives, children, grandchildren, friends, and colleagues who may well have thought they were ‘good men’. In fact, they are rapists.

Dominique Pelicot admitted to raping Gisèle. He said he drugged her and raped her two or three times a week, which was more than the images from his computer indicated. He testified in court that he had drugged her and invited other men to come to her home to rape her. He said they knew she was drugged and unconscious. The videos showed the men moving her inert body as they raped her. In some videos, she was even snoring.

Despite all this evidence, some of the men who raped Gisèle have tried to excuse themselves or even blame her. “It was a game,” one of them said. “It’s his wife, he can do what he wants with her” and “if the husband was present it wasn’t rape”. I was “naïve” claimed another man who raped an unconscious woman. Many of them have hired defence lawyers who attempted to blame Gisèle for the rapes they committed. They asked her about her sexual desires, “don’t you have tendencies that you are not comfortable with” and questioned whether she really was unconscious or just pretending. “There’s rape and there’s rape” one of them told her.

“No. There are no different types of rape”, Gisele replied, “Rape is rape”.

While there are 50 men on trial, another 30 men in the videos have not been identified.

Gisèle Pelicot could have stayed anonymous. She did not have to become a global avatar for raped women. She chose to do it because she said, “I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Madame Pelicot did it, we can do it too. When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them”.

She is right of course. Shame does not belong to people who had no choice in what someone else did to them. And yet, this is far easier to say than to believe. Shame is common among people who have been subjected to sexual violence. It crosses all cultural, age, religious and gender lines, although all those factors can influence its impact.

What is shame?

In the 1970s, American psychiatrist Helen Block Lewis pioneered the ongoing research into the difference between shame and guilt, and how they impact our relationships with ourselves and the world.

Shame is far more damaging than guilt (what we feel about a wrongful act that can be redeemed and forgiven) or embarrassment (what we feel about other people’s perception of our actions). Shame is a deep belief that the entire self is inherently unworthy. It’s the cold, uncaring voice in our heads that says, “I am not good enough. I will never be good enough. I do not deserve love or consideration. My pitiful attempts to be loved or respected only prove that I am irredeemable, contemptible and vile”. Shame is about who we are, not what we do. Shame can be felt to different degrees, but at its worst it murders the soul and explodes into violence against the self and others. It can be corrosively destructive, far more so than any other emotion. Anger or rage can be clarifying, even redemptive when they reveal and give strength to redressing injustice. Shame, when it is hidden and unredeemed, can only diminish.

Some cultures use shame as a corrective tool to discourage behaviour that damages the community, but it’s tied to public forgiveness and redemption not rejection and unworthiness.

In her book, The Shame Machine, Cathy O’Neil writes about the shame clowns of the Hopi people, who live in northeastern Arizona. The clown’s bodies and hair are covered in clay and, as part of a community festival, they imitate and caricature shameful behaviour. The premise is that they are innocent children who do not know how to behave, but slowly learn to become more honourable, more Hopi. The clowns sometimes pick out individuals who have broken taboos or ethical rules and ridicule them in front of the community. The point is to reinforce behaviour that benefits the entire community and help transgressors learn better behaviour. But the ceremonies do not end with shaming. O’Neil writes that “both the clowns and their shame targets can receive formal forgiveness. With that, the shamed return to the tribe in good standing – though aware that others will be keeping an eye on them.” Shaming in this example is directed at the behaviour not the entire person. It is redemptive, not hidden or secretive, and designed to teach the entire community to concentrate on collective rather than individual benefit. This is very different to the shame experienced by people who have been raped or sexually abused.

Rape Shame

“I don’t know why people only talk about rape and young people. What do they think happens to those girls and young women? Do they think rape goes away? That we get over it and life goes back to what it was before? Maybe it does for some people, but I don’t think that happens for most of us. It changes you and you can’t change back. I’m almost 70 but I can still see the girl I was before it happened. She walked taller and held her head up higher. She trusted people and life to treat her well. She had faith in herself. She would not have grown up to be the woman I became. It’s not that it ruined my life, it just changed my life, and I didn’t have a choice about that.’

Penny*, raped when she was 16

“I know I’m not the one who’s supposed to be ashamed. Like, we’re all told that, right? And I don’t…I guess…. But I wish I’d done things differently. One of my friends asked me why I was with him when we all knew what he was like. And I kinda knew, like I knew he had done something to another girl, but I didn’t really know what. I didn’t know what rape was, or how easy it would be for him to do it. I didn’t think he would ever be mean to me. I guess that makes me kinda stupid, huh?”

Jessie*, raped when she was 16.

Penny and Jessie were both raped by boys only slightly older than they were at the time. They were both initially flattered by what they believed was romantic interest and then stunned when the boy they thought was cute and smart and funny turned into a rapist at the first opportunity.

Penny is almost fifty years older than Jessie. She adjusted herself and her life to fit into a world where 16 year old girls are raped by cute boys, and she says she learned to find joy again. “I don’t want it to sound like I’m some poor, broken thing. I’m not. I’ve done a lot, I’ve had a lot of fun along the way, and I’ll have more before I’m finished. It’s just that I know my life would have been different if it hadn’t happened. All those young years wasted on fear and hatred and not being able to do things. He put me on a different path. One that was much harder to walk, so it took me much longer to get where I wanted to go. I didn’t get nearly as far as I would have if I’d been allowed to be the person I was before it happened.”

Jessie is still trying to understand her path. “I don’t want to be just ‘the rape victim’. That’s never going to be who I am. But yeah, I think I am different now. I wish I could go back to being that stupid girl who thought boys were nice. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s why it happened?”

Neither of them reported the rape to police. Penny said she didn’t want her parents to know about it. “Not that they would have rejected me. They were lovely and would never have done that. But they would have been heartbroken. I couldn’t do that to them. I couldn’t bear their pain as well as my own, so I stayed quiet.”

Jessie says she didn’t report because “it wasn’t really rape. I mean it was because he forced me to even when I tried to make him stop. But I went to the house with him, and I was texting my friends about how cute he was. They told me not to go anywhere with him and I didn’t listen. I thought he was nice and they were wrong about him. No one would believe me after that. Even [her friend] said it was my fault for going with him.”

Even though Penny and Jessie both said they knew they shouldn’t feel shame, they both felt shamed by a boy’s choice to rape them.

Rape shame is counter intuitive – why should another person’s choice to commit such a terrible crime incite shame in the person who had no choice in what happened? The X factor that turns this conundrum into terrible emotional logic is the power of rape myths. I outlined them in much more detail in part two of this series, but essentially, rape myths are a set of beliefs about ‘real rape’ that make women responsible for being raped and men not answerable for committing it.

People who have internalised rape myths are more likely to feel shamed by rape, as are people (like Jessie) who get victim blaming responses when they tell people about the rape, but rape shame can exist even without this reinforcement. Women who have been raped sometimes believe the rapist chose them specifically because he saw them as someone who could, even should, be raped. Penny, for example, told me that for years she believed he saw something “weak or dirty or wrong, something in me that made it ok to do what he did”.

While a pre-existing feeling of shame exacerbate rape shame, it is not a failing in people who have been raped that they feel this way. It’s not a weakness or overreaction. It’s a result of the rape, like a bruise is a result of a whack. As one research paper described it, “degradation, humiliation, and worthlessness communicated by the rapist is likely to be internalized by the victim, particularly if this message is consistent with widely prevalent attitudes about women and sexuality.”

Rape shame contributes to underreporting and all those silent women who never tell anyone about what a man chose to do to them. It exacerbates PTSD and depression and could even contribute to suicide (please call one of the helplines at the end of this article if you feel that this could be happening to you – help is available and it works).

The overwhelming evidence that links rape myths to rape shame proves that one of the most powerful things we can all do to make shame change sides is to expose rape myths as destructive and dangerous lies. Every news headline, tv show, meme, “joke”, police report and piece of legislation that leans on rape myths contributes to the power they have over shame. Every person who says this is a lie, this is hurting people I care about, this is just plain wrong, is contributing to dismantling that power.

Gisèle Pelicot, in a truly stunning act of courage, stood up to the world’s acceptance of rape myths. The very least the rest of us can do is give a disgusted snort and a powerful “that’s just bullshit” when we see or hear rape myths in action.

* Penny and Jessie are pseudonyms and some details have been changed because both of them wanted to remain anonymous. Penny wanted to keep her experience private. “I don’t want people to read your thing and think they can talk to me about it. They can’t. But they won’t believe that if I let you put my name in there.” Jessie was afraid of her friend’s reactions. “They’ve all stopped talking about it now but if you use my real name they’ll start again, and I just can’t deal with it.”

This is part three in an ongoing series. Part four will look at why men who rape rarely feel guilt or shame for their crime but despite this, shame is often the driving force behind sexual violence.

Part One: The Data

Part Two: Understanding Rape myths

If you want to read the next instalments in the series and haven’t already subscribed, you can sign up below. I will do my best to keep them all outside the paywall, but if you can afford to subscribe it’s only $10 a month and every subscriber helps me slice away time from chasing paid work to do this work.

Subscribe now

More Stuff

20% DISCOUNT plus free postage on any book purchase from my store.

• Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children

• Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media

• Teaching Consent: Real Voices from the Consent Classroom

Discount code: 20Fairy

Podcast: The Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children podcast, loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name, is out now. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

Image generated by AI

Rape myths have been the subject of discussion and research since the 1970s, and there’s a huge body of research on the influence they have on the legal system, people who commit rape and people who have been raped. I’ll get into the effects of this, but first I think it’s helpful to ground rape myths in the wider myths about gender, because they don’t just suddenly come alive after a woman has been raped and disappear back into the ether after a trial. They permeate all aspects of our lives and set the conditions that make rape so common and rapists so unaccountable (as outlined in part one of this series).

The Opposite Sex

Gender myths are an exercise in opposites. They’re based on the belief that all people are divided into two genders, each of which is defined by its contrast to the other. In this mythology, strength is masculine because weakness is feminine. Men are logical, objective and rational because women are emotional, sensitive and empathetic. Successful performance of a person’s gender is dependent on how starkly they can show themselves to be the opposite of the other gender. For example, female bodies tend to have less hair and muscle than male bodies, so femininity is enhanced by removing body hair and masculinity by increasing muscle mass. Brash, arrogant, vulgar, forceful men can be elected president. Women who display those characteristics have trouble getting a job.

Gender myths also define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ men and women within their gender roles. ‘Good’ men are strong, powerful, stoic, virile, protective and honourable. ‘Good’ women are submissive, empathetic, nurturing, selfless, fertile, and passively alluring. ‘Bad’ men are aggressive, violent, domineering, and cruel. ‘Bad’ women are weak, hysterical, vain, frivolous, provocative and duplicitous.

We’re all influenced by gender myths. Regardless of age, race, gender, or choices, we all grow up with the relentless battering of gender myths from how we dress our babies and the toys we give our toddlers to the stories we tell our children. They continue in adolescence and adulthood in online games, news, advertising,books, tv and movies art, sport, education, politics and of course, in easily accessible, free online porn. From infancy, people’s perception of our gender and how we conform to it affect how they treat us and even how much they like us. Even people who choose or are born to live outside the gender binary and people who consciously reject gender myths still live in the same world as the rest of us and can’t escape those definitions.

Rape myths cluster around the gender myths about sex and credibility, which dictate that masculine sexuality is virile, active and dominant, while feminine sexuality is passive, alluring and dangerous. Men, because they are supposed to be rational, logical and protective, are inherently trustworthy. Women are deemed to be weak, emotional, and vindictive and are therefore inherently untrustworthy.

‘Real’ Rape

When all this mythology is applied to sexual violence you get the myth of ‘real rape’. It has a specific script that lists all the conditions that must be met before a rape can be taken seriously, where everyone can believe the person who says they were raped and demand accountability from the person who committed the rape.

The ‘real rape’ script is where a pure, innocent girl is attacked at night in a public place by man she does not know. He is an immediately recognisable monster motivated by overwhelming lust for her beauty. He uses physical force to penetrate her vagina with his penis. She screams, fights back and receives visible physical injuries. After the rape, her attacker flees, and she immediately reports the rape to police, where her story is taken seriously, her injuries are documented, her attacker is identified, and the case quickly proceeds to trial. She cries every time she talks about the rape but is never angry, vengeful, or numb. Tears are the only sign of trauma she ever displays. From the very first report to police right through to the cross examination at trial, she remembers, in precise chronological order, all the details of the attack and this recollection is unwavering regardless of time or circumstance.

Anything that deviates from this script means it wasn’t a ‘real rape’ and the victim becomes the suspect. Not only is her credibility diminished and the devastation of being raped erased by these deviations, but her alleged rapist becomes the object of sympathy. If she’s not a pure young girl and it wasn’t a real rape, she must be a vindictive liar. She is getting back at a good man who rejected her lewd advances, or she’s after the buckets of cash the victimised men pay bad women to reclaim their good name, or she’s hiding her immoral activities from the judgement of more worthy observers.

Rape myths also weave themselves into myths about race, age, disability, and sexuality. The fetishisation of women of colour and the revolting myths that black women are ‘oversexed’ or Asian women are ‘hypersexualised’ immediately places them outside the pure young girl requirement for ‘real rape’. Equally, racist myths about black men being incapable of controlling sexual urges (particularly their desire to rape white women) cast them into the monster myth and highlights white men as the protective white knights who could not possibly fit the monster role. Women who have been drinking, flirting, having fun, wearing revealing clothing, actively pursuing sex or relationships (aka the ‘Tinder Rape’) are not pure or innocent, so they don’t fit the ‘real rape’ script. Nor do older women (who are presumed to have lost all sexual interest and desirability) and people with disabilities, who are also presumed to have no sexuality or desirability. Straight men, trans people, non-binary people, lesbians, and gay men also don’t fit the real rape script and are assumed to be over-sexed liars.

What does rape really look like?

There is no script and there is no such thing as ‘real rape’ There’s just rape.

While acts of sexual violence may have some common characteristics, the experience and circumstances are different for every person. Very few of those experiences, however, fit the ‘real rape’ script.

In 2020, the Australian Institute of Criminology put together a comprehensive list of research and data that debunks every aspect of the ‘real rape’ script. It’s well worth a read, but in summary it shows:

• Sexual violence is most often committed by men against women and appears to be more common in young people, but people of all ages and genders experience sexual violence.

• Most sexual violence happens in private homes.

• Race does not make someone more or less likely to commit rape or sexual assault.

• While rape can be opportunistically about sexual gratification, it is often more about power, dominance, and control.

• The person most likely to commit sexual violence is a man known to the victim (usually her intimate partner). They do not look like monsters, they just look like ordinary men.

• Visible physical injuries are rare.

• Fear is the weapon most often used to impose silence and minimise resistance.

• Most people don’t report rape and many who do find it frightening and stressful. Some police officers are supportive, others are contemptuous. There’s no way to know which one you’ll get.

• False reports to police are very rare, probably less than 5% and most of those are not malicious.

• Numbness is a common response, but different people have varying emotional responses, and they often change over time.

• Trauma can make memories fragmented, confused, and inconsistent. This does not mean they are false.

• Alcohol is sometimes used, either deliberately or opportunistically, as a weapon to incapacitate victims.

• Where rape and sexual assault are committed by someone in a relationship of trust and/or power with the victim, fear and control make it unlikely the victim will instantly end the relationship or cease communication with the perpetrator.

Where did rape myths come from?

In western civilisation, they’re historical, even biblical, and embedded in all forms of storytelling.

Rape myths, and the gender myth from which they’re created, are embedded in the stories we tell our children. Last year, when I was writing Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children, I was struck by how closely the fairy tale princess trope aligns with the ideal victim in the ‘real rape’ script. They’re both young and beautiful, without being at all sexual. They’re trustworthy because of their proven purity and unselfishness, which they demonstrate by contrast to their villainous counterparts – the wicked old witch, evil stepsister, or malevolently sexual bad fairy (aka, the vindictive, avaricious harpy who lies about rape to serve her own ends). Think Cinderella and the evil stepsisters, Sleeping Beauty and the bad fairy, or Snow White and the Wicked Queen. They’re all variations on the old whore/Madonna dichotomy, or what Anne Summers called Damned Whores and God’s Police.

Rape myths are embedded in ancient mythology and modern memes. They’re in tv shows, movies, social media, comic books, and even in romantic fiction.

Free online porn, which is easily accessible and viewed by most Australian men, sometimes depicts violent and degrading acts against women. Pornography, however, is not one monolithic thing. Some porn shows consensual, even loving activity. Evidence on the effect of watching porn is as mixed as the content in porn, but most reliable research suggests that adult men who have hostile attitudes to women and sex will reinforce those attitudes when they watch violent and aggressive porn. Adult men who don’t have such attitudes don’t routinely watch that kind of porn for sexual gratification and it doesn’t seem to affect their belief in rape myths if they do see it. The proliferation of free online porn is relatively recent, so research on the effect of porn on children and young people is still emerging. Some research indicates porn is ‘normalizing sex acts that most women do not enjoy and may experience as degrading, painful, or violating’ but sex, sexuality and beliefs are so complex it’s difficult to pin them all on one activity.

All these occurrences don’t operate independently. The myths that start in childhood are confirmed by widespread and consistent repetition over a lifetime of consuming stories and ideas. Even when they just flicker across our screen, each tiny instance reinforces the thousands that came before, until they harden into unexamined belief that they must be true, if only because they’ve always been true.

This is not to say we’re all wandering about pinning RAPIST signs on black men, giving comforting hugs to slim white girls who regret consensual sex, and stoning older women when they tell us about martial rape. Nor does it mean every police officer and juror who hears a rape allegation is briming over with misogyny, eager to colour the case with shrieks about lying sluts and hard-done-by white men. That’s not how rape myths work. They’re movable, changeable, sub-conscious beliefs that form over time and sit in the back of our minds to help us manage difficult or complex situations. Rape myths are a familiar story that repetition has turned into a reliable and relatable story. Most people probably don’t think about it very much, but if they are given what they need to replace that story with a new one that makes emotional sense as well as logical sense, they can and will change their beliefs.

Where this becomes difficult is in the strength of the real rape story and the dearth of stories that don’t fit that script.

Historically, rape was a crime against property, in which a man either abducted a woman to marry her and claim any wealth owed to her husband, or ‘stole’ her virginity and thereby reduce her value as a potential wife. This was not a crime against the woman who was raped, rather it was a crime against the man who owned the right to her body and property. Ownership demands exclusivity.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word rape probably comes from the Latin rapere, meaning to ‘seize, carry off by force, abduct’. Interesting, the word ‘rape’ has never been used in legislation about sexual violence against children. Possibly because sexually abusing children did not confer property rights upon the abuser, particularly if the child was a boy.

Rape myths have been embedded in legislation for hundreds of years. The corroboration rule required judges to instruct juries in sexual violence trials that they could not rely on evidence from women and children unless it was corroborated by witnesses. It was based on the myth that women commonly lie about rape. While it existed before his time, the doctrine of corroboration is often attributed to Sir Mathew Hale, a barrister, judge and strict Puritan, who sentenced at least two women to death for witchcraft in the mid seventeenth century. Hale, like many pious misogynists, was deeply concerned about women being ‘malicious and false witnesses’ against men of ‘good character’.

Hale was also the judge who said rape is ‘an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho’ never so innocent’ In other words, women can just cry rape whenever they want, and men can’t defend themselves. This quote became known as the ‘Hale Warning’ and was often read out in courtrooms during rape cases until the late twentieth century.

This fear hasn’t gone away just because we don’t burn witches anymore. The 2021 National Community Attitudes Survey in Australia found that over 40 percent of young men agree that ‘it is common for sexual assault accusations to be used as a way of getting back at men’ and one in four agree that ‘a lot of times, women who say they were raped had led the man on and then had regrets’.

Surveys can anonymise rape (it’s about a concept, not how you react if it’s your mate who is accused or your brother who is charged) and there’s always the possibility that people will give a response they think is acceptable rather than how they would react to a real life situation. The Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety addressed this gap with a series of interviews and discussion groups about rape stories. Almost all the participants (male and female) started with a default position of mistrust and suspicion of the woman who said she’d been raped. Most of them referred directly or indirectly to the ‘real rape’ script and almost none of them thought to ask about the supposed rapist’s efforts to establish consent. Determining his guilt or innocence was not about evidence or facts, it was about his character - was he a monster or a good guy. Monsters are guilty, good guys are not. Or so the rape myths tell us.

The next instalment (part three) in this series will investigate how rape myths impact people who have been raped and people who commit rape. Part four will look at rape myths in the legal system. Then I’ll move on to law reform and alternative forms of justice.

If you want to read the next instalments in the series and haven’t already subscribed, you can sign up below. I will do my best to keep them all outside the paywall, but if you can afford to subscribe it’s only $10 a month and every subscriber helps me slice away time from chasing paid work to do this work.

Subscribe now

Share

Also, in case you haven’t seen it, my new podcast is out now: Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children is loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know, call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT
24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au

Sexual Assault Crisis Line
24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault
Ph: 1800 806 292
www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia
24/7 National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service
Ph: 1800 385 578
www.fullstop.org.au

Men’s Referral Service
24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.
Ph: 1300 766 491
www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation
Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them. Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.
Ph: 1300 657 380
www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline
24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.
Ph: 13 11 14
www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service
24/7 suicide prevention support
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

Data Summary

Reading long articles about data on rape and sexual assault is not everyone’s idea of a good time. So, for all the people who can’t or simply don’t want to read all the analysis, here’s the summary:

More than 400,000 people were sexually assaulted in Australia in 2023. The MCG at full capacity would not be enough for one quarter of them.

A total of 4,564 people (96% male) were convicted of sexual assault in 2023, which is roughly the same as the number of people working in Parliament House in a sitting week.

National data does not include information about trans or non-binary people in crime or court data, but people who live outside the gender binary are often both vulnerable and targeted. The data also does not include information about race, but people from migrant and refugee communities face additional barriers to seeking support and have increased vulnerabilities to predatory men, which suggests they probably experience disproportionate levels of abuse. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience very high rates of sexual violence due to the intergenerational trauma of colonisation. This is not included in the national data.

The data that is available says this is a highly gendered crime.

Data also shows that Australia’s conviction rate for rape and sexual assault is decreasing and by 2023, it was roughly 1.1%. In other words, rape is a theoretical crime, or, to quote Vera Baird, it is effectively decriminalised.

Infographics and statistics are useful ways to demonstrate the scale of sexual violence, but all these data are about people. Too many people. I know some of them. So do you. In fact, we know many more of those people than we think we do.  

Are the ‘facts’ we’re given about sexual violence accurate?

Anything you see or hear quoting ‘facts’ about gender based violence that includes the phrase ‘since the age of 15’ almost certainly comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Personal Safety Survey (PSS). The PSS is the national source for almost all data on gender based violence and it’s where we get the commonly cited statistic that ‘1 in 5 women has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15’.

The data from the PSS is robust but that doesn’t mean it is accurate. The PSS excludes anyone who doesn’t live in a ‘private dwelling’ and can only report what people are able to tell a stranger about their most traumatic experiences. The PSS is not fact, it’s an estimate of the number of people in secure housing who are able to talk to a PSS interviewer about the violence someone has committed against them.

An even more robust (larger dataset and of longer duration) study of Australian women estimated that at least half the women aged 24 to 30 in 2019 had experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. These results are not directly comparable to the PSS findings because they’re measuring lifetime experience rather than since the age of 15 experience, but it demonstrates that different surveys obtain different results and we should therefore be wary of counting the results of one survey as fact, especially given its exclusions and limitations (more details below).

The most accurate statement we can make about sexual assault and rape in Australia is: At minimum, one in five women in Australia have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, although the true rate is likely to be significantly higher.

Reported vs unreported sexual violence

Crime data is not useful in understanding prevalence of sexual violence because evidence says that most people who are sexually assaulted or raped do not report to police.

Of the people who were able to tell 2021/22 PSS interviewers about being sexually assaulted, only 8 percent said they reported the assault to police. This result may have been skewed by the COVID lockdowns at the time, but PSS data since 2005 indicates reporting rates have been decreasing over the last twenty years. Given the downward trend over four iterations of the PSS and that this is reflected in estimates from similar jurisdictions (Canada, New Zealand, UK and the US) it’s likely these numbers are reasonably accurate.

Estimated rate of reporting sexual assault to police in Australia according to PSS data:

• 2005 - 19%

• 2012 - 17%

• 2016 - 13%

• 2021/22 - 8%

Source: Australia Bureau of Statistics, Personal Safety Survey

Despite this, victimisation rates (the number of reports to police per 100,000 people) are trending upwards. Which means more people are being sexually assaulted each year and fewer of them are telling police when it happens.

Meanwhile, the number of cases that go from police to the courts and reach a conviction is virtually unchanged in the last twenty years.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Recorded Crime - Victims, Criminal Courts - Australia

The Australian Bureau of Statistics crime data on sexual assaults is robust from 2010, but before then there were difficulties matching data across states. There are some issues with data matching in my calculations (explained more in the details below) but the graph above shows a rough picture of the last twenty years. The table below is the last five years (the table with the full 20 years of data won’t fit into this format, so this is an indication of what it looks like).

Notes: This data is a rough estimate. The police reports and court outcome data comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and should be very reliable after 2010. Data matching is not exact because crime data is reported on calendar years and court data on financial years. Additionally, sexual assault trials can take a long time and it’s unlikely they would be finalised in same year the assault was reported to police. The calculations hinge on the reporting rate, which is the estimate quoted above from the PSS. As outlined above and below, the PSS excludes people who don’t have secure housing and people who can’t or don’t want to discuss their traumatic memories with a stranger. It seems logical if they were included it would increase the number of people who haven’t reported to police but there’s no way to know for sure. The reporting rate estimate in the 2021/22 PSS was a sharp drop from the previous iteration of the survey, which may be due to COVID lockdowns. It's worth noting that even if it had remained unchanged from the 2016 rate, the conviction rate would still be below 2 percent.

That’s a quick outline of the data, what it tells us and what it can’t tell us. If you want more details, the second half of this article includes more information on the strengths and limitations of the PSS data and what it can tell us about unreported and undisclosed rape and sexual assault.

If you’ve got enough for now but you want to read the next parts of the series, you can subscribe here so you don’t miss any of them.

Subscribe now

How many people are raped in Australia each year?

Despite the all the data, the real truth is that we don’t know, but it’s definitely more than the commonly used statistics indicate.

The PSS is a statistically robust survey of between about 12,000 (2021/22) and 21,000 (2016) people in Australia and it asks very detailed questions about their lifetime experiences of violence.

The PSS started with the Women’s Safety Survey in 1996, then in 2005 it was expanded to include men and renamed as the Personal Safety Survey. The survey was repeated in 2012, 2016, and 2021-22. The huge number of participants and the reiterations over time mean the data it collects are robust and reliable. The ABS has rigorous methodology, well-trained interviewers, and experienced statisticians who work hard to produce trustworthy data.

The problem with the way we use and talk about this data is not because the data is unreliable – it isn’t. It’s because the many organisations that cite this data do so without explaining what it is and what it isn’t.

Every PSS since 2005 has excluded people who do not live in a ‘private dwelling’. This means the survey questions are not even asked of anyone who is homeless or is in hospital, or is staying with friends or family, living in a domestic violence refuge, hotel, motel, hostel, short-stay caravan park or nursing home. At least 45% of all women and girls needing homelessness assistance identify family and domestic violence as a cause and they are not included in this data. As another example of excluded data, the 2020 Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety heard submissions that up to 50 sexual assaults occur in aged care each week. People living in aged care are excluded from the PSS, so these sexual assaults not included in the data.

In other words, all the people most likely to be suffering the effects trauma are excluded from the survey about traumatic violence.

Of the people who are included, the response rate in 2021-22 was 52% and the PSS interviewer cannot (and should not) ask people who refuse to complete the survey why they’re saying no. Maybe some of the 48% who didn’t want to answer questions about physical and sexual violence were just bored by the topic. Maybe they were too busy, or they were in the middle of a good book and didn’t want to be interrupted. It seems likely though, that at least some of them were not willing or simply not able to tell a stranger about their most traumatic moments. On top of that, the 2021-22 PSS was conducted during the COVID years, when it was likely that partners and children were at home. The interviewers were told to make sure the survey was conducted in a ‘private place’, but I’ve spoken to far too many women who live with men who terrify them to believe that an abused woman would feel safe answering questions about her abuser when he’s somewhere in the house. The PSS data also indicates the person most likely to commit sexual violence is a woman’s male partner, so, again, it seems logical that at least some of the people who refused the survey have had experiences they can’t or don’t want to talk about, but there is no way to know for sure.

The other point to note about the PSS data on sexual violence is the question itself.

‘Has any man/woman including your current partner ever forced you, or tried to force you, into sexual activity against your will?’

There is no information in the questionnaire or the prompt cards about how people understand the word ‘force’. Would a woman answer yes to this question if her husband told her she would not be allowed any money for food if she said no to sex? What about a woman whose boyfriend was relentlessly asking ‘now, how about now, can I do it now, now? NOW?’ and kept going until she ‘gave in’? What about a woman whose partner is silently terrifying but only occasionally physically violent and while she’s not explicitly threatened, she’s too scared to say no? Some of those women might understand intimidation and coercion as force, but some would not, and if they were asked the question and their answer was ‘no’, they would be recorded in the PSS as never having experienced sexual violence.

The PSS itself hold clues about how much women’s perception of sexual violence impacts their ability to answer this question. In the 2021-22 survey, 73% of women who were able to say yes to the question about whether they had experienced sexual violence in the last ten years also said they did not perceive the ‘incident’ as a crime at the time, and 64% of those women said this perception has changed over time, mostly due to self-education. Which means around half the women who have recently been sexually assaulted would probably have said no to the question about experiencing forced sexual activity if they were asked about it in the immediate aftermath.

I don’t think there is a reliable statistical method to control for excluding people who are likely to have experienced sexual violence and also factor in the potential for being unable to answer the question (if you are a statistician and you know how this could be done, please let me know) so all I can conclude from this is that the prevalence data from the PSS must be significantly underestimated.

Again, this is not because the ABS isn’t doing a robust survey – they are – it’s just the inherent difficulty of surveying people about trauma. It would be grossly unethical to force everyone to answer or to ask for intimate details of people’s sexual experience and relationships without their consent. It is important that we know how many people are subjected to violence, how often, who did it, where and how they did it. We need that information to make sure the services are available and properly funded. We also need it to make sure prevention and intervention strategies are targeted and effective, but as important as those things are, none of them could justify forcing unwilling people to answer questions about sexual violence.

What we can do, however, is understand the data and be more informed and accurate about how we use it.

No: one in five women have experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen

Better: at least one in five women have experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen

Even better: at least one in five women have experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen, but this number is likely to significantly underestimate the actual prevalence.

How many people commit rape in Australia each year?

No one can answer this question. We can make a guess at the total number of rapes and sexual assaults that happen, as I have above, but we don’t know how many people are responsible for them. Crime data is clearly not helpful and all the robust survey data we have about victimisation doesn’t ask about perpetration.

The unknown factor is how many women each violent man sexual assaults. If 400,000 women are sexually assaulted in a year, it might be 100,000 men who choose to commit those crimes, or it might be 300,000. As far as I know, there is no reliable data in Australia that can get us any closer to an estimate than that.

A study published in 2024 found that one in six men and one in 20 women admitted to perpetrating one or more forms of sexual assault during adulthood. Men were more than twice as likely to have perpetrated more than one form of sexual violence, they were two to five times more likely to commit sexual assault and image based abuse and twice as likely to commit sexual coercion and harassment. The data doesn’t tell us enough to answer the 100,000 or 300,000 question, but it is an indication that we probably all know at least one man who has perpetrated sexual violence.

While it doesn’t answer the question of how many rapists are there in Australia, this very detailed report from QUT outlines the complications of collecting this data and the very limited information that was available in 2022.

Why is the conviction rate so low?

There are three reasons: low reporting rates (as outlined above), low proceeding rates (around 35% of sexual assaults reported to police in 2022 went to court), and low conviction rates (35% of sexual assault defendants were found guilty in 2022/23). To put that in context, 69% of non-sexual assault defendants were found guilty in 2022/23.

I’ll get into the police and court attrition in parts two and three of this series, but the huge number of people who do not report being sexually assaulted or raped is the largest part of this story and it’s worth digging a bit deeper into the data on why people are so reluctant to report to police. ABS data doesn’t deal with police responses or reasons people might not trust police and I’ll come to those in part two and three, but it does tell us something about the low reporting rate.

Unreported Sexual Assaults

In 2021/22, women in secure housing who were able to tell PSS interviewers about being sexually assaulted by a man were given a list of 15 possible reasons for not reporting to police (they could choose more than one) and the top five reasons were:

• Felt they could deal with it themselves (34%)

• Did not regard the incident as a serious offence (34%)

• Felt ashamed or embarrassed (26%)

• Did not think there was anything the police could do (22%)

• Did not know or think the incident was a crime (22%)

The PSS defines sexual assault as: ‘An act of a sexual nature carried out against a person's will through the use of physical force, intimidation or coercion, including any attempts to do this. This includes rape, attempted rape, aggravated sexual assault (assault with a weapon), indecent assault, penetration by objects, forced sexual activity that did not end in penetration and attempts to force a person into sexual activity.’

The PSS sexual assault data excludes unwanted sexual touching - this is defined as sexual harassment and forms part of another dataset in the PSS.

What is going on for all the women who think such crimes are something they should deal with themselves? Or that they are not a serious offence? The data gives us an indication of what is happening, but it doesn’t tell us why it’s happening. There may be some clues in the PSS data, which shows that the person mostly likely to sexually assault a woman is her intimate partner. Women who are sexually assaulted by their partner have difficulty recognising it as rape and are less likely to report sexual assault than if it was done by a stranger. PSS data indicates that women in secure housing who can disclose sexual assault report that strangers are the perpetrators in around 20 percent of sexual assaults.

So it’s likely that most of the women who don’t report are being sexually assaulted or raped by men they know and probably by men they want to love. They struggle to recognise it as rape and might be ashamed, afraid or conflicted about reporting him to police.

Who do they tell?

The 2021/22 and the 2016 PSS estimated that around half the women who had been sexually assaulted by a man didn’t tell anyone at all. Of the half who did tell someone, the most common confidant was a friend or family member.

If the 8% reporting rate is correct, over 200,000 of the women were sexually assaulted in 2023 didn’t or couldn’t tell anyone about it.

If you are one of those women, I hope it helps to know that you are not alone. You almost certainly know other women who have been through what you’ve been through. They might understand and empathise more than you think they will. If you can find someone you trust, it might help to tell them. No one should have to carry the weight of that at all and they certainly should not need to do it alone. If you don’t want to tell someone you know, there is a list of sexual assault services at the bottom of this article. They’re chronically underfunded so they might take a while to answer your call, but they will answer, and they can help.

If you’re still reading at the end of almost 3,000 words about sexual assault data, thank you and I hope it was useful. If you want to read the next pieces in this series and haven’t already subscribed, you can sign up below. I will do my best to keep them all outside the paywall, but if you can afford to subscribe it’s only $10 a month and every subscriber helps me slice away time from chasing paid work to do this work.

Note: some of the data and analysis in this piece was taken from my upcoming book about violence prevention education, which will be published by Allen & Unwin next year.

Subscribe now

Share

Also, in case you haven’t seen it, my new podcast is out now: Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children is loosely based on the themes in my book of the same name. You don’t need to read the book to listen to the podcast, but you can find out more about both here.

Helplines

In an emergency, where you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call police on 000

If you want to ask for anonymous advice for yourself or someone you know call one of the helplines listed below or talk to a trusted GP or nurse practitioner at your local medical centre.

1800RESPECT

24/7 support for people impacted by sexual assault, domestic and family violence and abuse.

www.1800respect.org.au

Ph: 1800 737 732

Sexual Assault Crisis Line

24/7 Support for victims of sexual assault

Ph: 1800 806 292

www.sacl.com.au

Full Stop Australia

National violence and abuse trauma counselling and recovery service

Ph: 1800 385 578

www.fullstop.org.au

Rainbow Sexual, Domestic and Family Violence Helpline

Support for anyone in Australia who is from LGBTQ+ communities (or their family and friends) who has recently or in the past experienced sexual, domestic or family violence

Ph: 1800 497 212

Say It Out Loud

Support and information for LGBTIQ+ people in a domestic and family violence relationship

www.sayitoutloud.org.au

Men’s Referral Service

24/7 Support for men who use violence and abuse.

Ph: 1300 766 491

www.ntv.org.au/get-help/

Blue Knot Foundation

Phone counselling for adult survivors of childhood trauma, their friends, family and the health care professionals who support them.

Available between 9am and 5pm, every day.

Ph: 1300 657 380

www.blueknot.org.au

Lifeline

24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services.

Ph: 13 11 14

www.lifeline.org.au

Suicide Call Back Service

24/7 suicide prevention support

Ph: 1300 659 467

www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au

On Friday FDSV Commissioner Micaela Cronin said “the system” that is supposed to serve people who have been raped, abused, humiliated, assaulted, and controlled by violent (mostly) men is “buckling”. She’s right of course, and she’s spent enough time with the people who do frontline work to know how true this is for the people inside “the system”. Broken. Stretched. Failed. Pleading for help. “The system” has been buckling for years.

What does that look like from the inside?

It looks like structural underfunding that says women and children’s lives are not important, not urgent, not a priority. Not right now. So, there is never enough money and never enough people and always too many women and children suffering, pleading for help, and far too many times they’re told there is no help available.

It looks like exhausted people supervised by managers forced to be hypervigilant about every minute wasted and begrudge every dollar spent.

I once watched a senior manager in a rape crisis service glare at a woman answering calls as she took her second toilet break in an hour. Sleepless nights medicated with too much coffee will do that to you, but the calls were piling up, too many people were out on sick leave, and someone must answer to Department heads about hold times and abandoned call rates.

Chronically underfunded organisations that can’t present adequate performance metrics risk losing their funding because, where public outrage peaks, government departments need to issue press releases about how much things have improved. All the people who do crisis work know this hopeless impasse, but knowledge doesn’t help when you’re being paid barely above minimum wage to listen to terrified women you can’t help while a manager paid twice your salary in much more secure job give you shit for taking a piss.

It looks like the DV crisis service manager who doesn’t think her job is at all secure because too many people who work for her call in sick and the ones who do show up don’t have enough training and are too tired to remember everything, so they keep asking her the same questions over and over again. Or they’re too scared to ask her, for the third time that week, where to find emergency accommodation for a woman with multiple disabilities, so they just tell a woman who thinks she might die that week that there are no accessible beds, which is probably true, but they don’t know for sure. The manager knows this is happening, but she doesn’t have time to get everyone trained on the complex needs of women with disabilities, and even if she did, she knows most of those people won’t be working for her in a year, so it feels like a waste of time and budget. Then a journalist writes a story about how horrifying this is and the manager or the worker (or both) get sacked and the CEO issues a statement saying they take all victim survivors very seriously and hires a consultant to write a new policy on responding to complex needs. Problem unsolved.

It looks like the woman working in child protection who cannot face another visit to a child she knows is being harmed and offer nothing, do nothing because there is nothing she can offer or do, and then the child is killed and she feels responsible because she is responsible, except that of course she isn’t.

It looks like the 24 year old junior constable on his fifth DV call for the night and he can’t take it anymore, so he sighs and roll his eyes at the terrified woman who called him for help. She might never call for help again.   

Senior managers in “the system” are usually people who either worked their way up or, more recently (since organisations started paying management better) came in sideways from the corporate sector. Which means often have only one of two necessary skillsets. The ones who started at the bottom understand violence. They’ve spent years working with angry men and agonised women and children. They know how violence works, what it sounds like, how it smells. They’re there for the mission. It’s a vocation that goes down to their bones.  The manager who comes in with MBAs and private sector experience know how to administer budgets, produce reports, manage upwards, and reduce expenses but they think the vocation is idealistic, impractical, and unnecessarily political. I’ve only seen a very few people who have both skill sets, although in one particularly horrifying case, a board chose someone with no capacity to understand the vocation and no management ability to lead a structurally underfunded frontline organisation. The clusterfuck that followed ruined lives beyond repair.

A few months back I found a woman sitting in the street crying. The kind of bone breaking crying I’ve only ever seen before when someone’s child died. I thought that’s what had happened to her. But no, she worked at a domestic violence service. She wasn’t there shattering to pieces in the street because of any dramatic moment. “Nothing happened,” she told me. She had just been too long with the colleagues she couldn’t help and the abused women she couldn’t help and the managers telling her that after her twenty years doing this work, “maybe you’re just not cut out for this, crisis work is not for everyone, you know”.

I’ve watched this happen in refuges and courtrooms and police stations and hospitals and classrooms. And it’s getting worse.

I’ve watched bright passionate hardworking people stride into new jobs, shining with conviction that they can change the world. Sometimes they only last a few months. Some of them stay for years. Too many of them stumble out broken and irreparably damaged.

This is what Miceala Cronin means when she says the system is buckling. She means people. She’s talking about the Aboriginal woman who stopped calling police when her life was in danger because the best response was dehumanizing contempt and the worst was that she was imprisoned and her children were legally stolen. She means the 22 year old woman with a determined chin and a cowlick who told me she had a vocation and left to be a dental nurse three months later. The woman in her fifties who couldn’t afford to retire and told me she had given her life to a role she thought would save lives, but it didn’t. The CEO who told me, “Everyone who works in this sector is just fucking nuts”. The woman who rang a DV service because she knew if she stayed with her husband he would kill her one day and waited on hold for 45 minutes for someone to tell her there’s nowhere for her to go. The nonbinary person who was fired for falling asleep at their desk after weeks of nightmares about mutilated children. The nurse who had a barely acknowledged memory of being raped by a “friend” in her teens and, after treating treated too many rape victims, ended up in hospital with depression that almost killed her.

Admin and payroll and policy people who sit next to the people who do frontline work told me vicarious trauma is not happening to them, so they have no right to complain about the moral injuries that cripple them. Nurses and counsellors and constables told me the violence is not happening to them, so they have no right to be traumatized by the trauma they feel every day.  Women who’ve been raped told me they didn’t fight hard enough so they have no right to be broken. Children who grew up with violent fathers told me they didn’t do enough to defend their mothers or their siblings so they have no right to their nightmare. These are the people who are the broken system.

Even if the government put the necessary billions into the people who do this work, which it won’t, it will take years for everyone to recover. And the people we call “frontline workers” or “the system” so we don’t have to call them people will stay barely a step ahead of the trauma they’re so desperate to alleviate in all the people abused, humiliated and raped by violent men.

The system is broken because systemic contempt broke the people who are trying to provide systemic support that doesn’t exist.

There are few things more horrific than killing a child. Children are so small, so defenceless. And have so much life unlived. It’s unfathomable that someone could simply choose to end all that time, passion, and potential before it even had a chance to grow.

Thankfully, child murders in Australia are rare.

Of the 1,957 people killed in Australia between July 2010 and June 2018, 202 were children.

Source: Australian Institute of Criminology, Homicide Victims data

One of the most incomprehensible facts about child killings is that the person most likely to kill a child is their parent, step-parent, or person who has parental responsibility to the child. In other words, the person we believe will (or should) love and protect them from all harm.   

Most parents love their children deeply and do the best they can to keep them safe and happy. It’s more difficult than it should be and none of us can ever claim to be a perfect parent. For some people, all their best intentions and staunchest defences are not enough to keep their children safe. Some, incomprehensibly, choose to harm their children. A very few choose to kill them.

No matter how rare it is that people choose to murder children, no healthy society can ignore any level of child killing. It is imperative, if we are to end (or at least reduce) the number of children killed, that we understand the circumstances in which such horrific crimes occur. Which is why Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) and the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network undertook an intensive study of filicides in Australia. The information based on primary source material including coronial files, police briefs of evidence, sentencing remarks, and service contact data.

Filicide: The homicide of a child or children under 18 years of age by their parent/s and/or parent equivalent/s.

Between July 2010 and June 2018 in Australia there were 113 cases of filicide, in which 138 children were killed.

106 children (76%) of filicides occurred in a context of domestic and family violence (DFV)*. Which means were killed after they had survived any combination of:

• Child abuse: any physical, emotional or sexual violence towards the filicide victim or their siblings.

• Intimate partner violence: any intimate partner violence involving the child’s parents.

* DFV includes a spectrum of physical and non-physical abuse within an intimate or family relationship. DFV behaviours include physical assault, sexual assault, threats, intimidation, psychological and emotional abuse, social isolation and economic deprivation.

Source: Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network data report: Filicides in a domestic and family violence context 2010–2018

We hear a lot about the violence inflicted on women by men who claim to love them. We’ve rallied and protested and marched and written millions of words, soaked in rage and grief for the women abused by men. But we rarely hear about and never hear from the children who are growing up with violent and abusive parents.

At least 44 % of women who live with violent men (and were able to disclose this to a stranger taking a survey) had children in their care at the time. This figure is likely to be underestimated as the survey group excluded anyone living in a caravan park, motel, refuge, friend or family member’s home, sleeping rough.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), Personal Safety, Australia, ABS Website, accessed 4 July 2024.

Apart from the people who work with survivors and perpetrators of violence, most of us know about domestic violence and child abuse because we’ve either lived through it ourselves or people we care about have told us their stories. The rest of our information mostly comes from the media.

Some reporting on gendered violence is outstanding. It’s nuanced, contextual, well informed and useful. Jess Hill’s 2015 reporting on the nature of domestic violence and the dangers of family court, followed by her award-winning book, See What You Made Me Do helped change the public understanding of domestic violence in Australia. Nina Funnel’s award winning journalism on the legal system’s deliberate silencing of child abuse victims led to national change in how we understand sexual abuse survivors. Hayley Gleeson’s work at the ABC and Sarah Ferguson’s Hitting Home series stand out, I’m sure there are others, but these are the well-resourced and rare feature pieces, not the routine reporting on daily violence churned out by general news reporters.  As I’ve written before, while there are over 200 sports journalists and at least another 200 political journalists in Australia, there are no journalists with a specific remit to reporting on gendered violence in any newsrooms.

Nowhere is this deficiency more obvious than in the reporting (or absence of it) on the hundreds of thousands of children who live with abusive men (no, not all men are violent, but most violence is committed by men, this fact is important for effective prevention and response work).

There is a formula to daily news pieces on gendered violence. Tim Dunlop and I put this prompt into ChatGPT a while back: “Give me, in the style of the ABC, an article about domestic violence with a survivor story at the top, a truncated quote from a CEO of a structurally underfunded Not-For-Profit in the middle, some prevalence stats with no context at the end, and finish off with some generic helpline numbers.” The result was indistinguishable from most articles published by almost any news outlet in Australia.

You can’t use that formula when you’re telling children’s stories. All Australian states have laws preventingjournalists from identifying child victims of violence. With good reason. Many adults struggle to understand the consequences of publicly sharing their stories of abuse and trauma1, so we cannot expect children to foresee all the consequences in all their possible futures and be able to give informed consent to interviews, photos, videos, quotes, and all the other standard tools of journalism.

When abusive men reach the apotheosis of violence and kill their partners or children, reporting on the killing of adults is still much easier. Adults have social media accounts full of photos and friends who can give heart-rending quotes, so content is easy to find. Murdered children become the also-rans who stumble along in their wake.

We can make children anonymous, up to a point. But there is a fine line between including enough truth to tell the real story and keeping back anything that could make the child identifiable. A step too far in either direction can have perilous consequences. Either a child identified and put in danger, or a story becomes so stripped of details that it is meaningless.

Even if journalists could find children who are not involved in criminal cases or still living in danger (which would trigger mandatory reporting and put the children into privacy protections) asking children to describe their memories and feelings about abuse requires expertise and ongoing support for months, even years afterwayrds. Journalists, at their best, are storytellers and verifiers of truth. They are not therapists or lawyers. Any ethical reporting, therefore, must ensure someone else can provide this care to children after the journalists are done. All of which takes far more time, money, care, and skill than is available to any newsroom.

How, then, do we talk about the children and teenagers who live with violence every day? At home. At school. At work. Online. They are not shielded just because we so desperately want them to be.

There are some adult survivors of childhood violence, such as Conor Pall who provide a much needed perspective, but it’s not something many people can do. And even if they could, adult memories of the past are not the same as children’s perspectives of their present. It’s better than nothing but it’s not the same as sharing the stories of children in crisis now, so we can know and act now.

At least 122 children between 2010 and 2018 survived the killing of a sibling. This is a conservative estimate of what is likely to be a much larger number of children who still live with the trauma of a sibling being killed by their parent. 

Source: Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network data report: Filicides in a domestic and family violence context 2010–2018

All of this makes it difficult (not impossible, but very, very difficult) to accurately, ethically and truthfully report the experiences of abused children. Lacking the time, expertise, and resources, most journalists simply avoid it and concentrate on reporting women’s experiences.

46% of children killed by a parent in a DFV context were under 3 years old.

More than 60% of children killed by a parent had recorded contact with police and/or child protection services and more than half of those had been in contact with services less than 3 months before the filicide.

Source: Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network data report: Filicides in a domestic and family violence context 2010–2018

There are a few ways we can ethically and responsibly tell children’s stories in their own words. Some researchers and frontline services work with children for this exact purpose. Barnados in Ireland worked with young children who had experienced coercive control to produce this powerful image, along with other resources showing children’s stories in their own words:

Art is a powerful form of communication. These images on the Australian Childhood Foundation website are another example of how children can share their stories.

We can work with the people who work with children to develop visceral but de-identified stories to make their lives visible without endangering them.

I’ve sat in childcare centres and schools listening to experts responding to little children describe in excruciating baby lisps, how sometime is touching them or making them watch pornography. I’ve heard children throw out casual mentions of dad’s violent outbursts and watched teenage boys try to prove their worth and erase their shame by intimidating girls and female teachers. I’ve run workshops with boys barely out of adolescence who are there because they’ve stopped just a shade sort of criminal harassment and don’t even understand how they came to it. I’ve seen young boys stranded in the shadowlands between victim and perpetrator because they are both and neither at the same time.  I’ve listened to girls talk about the importance of making sure they are nice and pleasing and empathetic, barely able to recognise that their own needs have value. I’ve listened to the boys who swear, in chocked up voices, that they will never be like their violent fathers. I’ve listened to the men who tell police and therapists and behavioural change groups about the fathers, unable to comprehend that they have already become their own worst nightmare. “You think I’m violent? You don’t even know violence. My old man, he was something else. I’m nothing like him.”

Those stories are difficult to hear, even more difficult to tell, all but impossible to live through. But this is what journalists, the tellers of truth and verifiers of fact, are supposed to do.

Many years ago, Margaret Simons told me that the purpose of journalism is to describe society to itself. It’s the second sentence in the Journalist Code of Ethics. More than two million children in Australia are being abused by people who are supposed to love and protect them, right now, today. Telling us about them and describing their lives to the society in which they live is the job of journalists and the responsibility of all of us.  

There were almost 5.7 million children in Australia in December, 2023

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (December 2023), National, state and territory population, ABS Website, accessed 6 July 2024.

• 40% have been exposed to domestic violence

• 29% have been sexually abused

• 32% have been physically abused

• 31% have been emotionally abused

• 9% have experienced neglect

Source: Haslam D, Mathews B, Pacella R, Scott JG, Finkelhor D, Higgins DJ, Meinck F, Erskine HE, Thomas HJ, Lawrence D, Malacova E. (2023). The prevalence and impact of child maltreatment in Australia: Findings from the Australian Child Maltreatment Study: Brief Report. Australian Child Maltreatment Study, Queensland University of Technology.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data

I don’t know how many articles I’ve written about violence and poverty and injustice. Over the last 15 years it’s maybe coming up on a thousand?  How ever many it is, that’s the number of times I’ve written variations of this sentence:  “Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people are over-represented in this data.” Sometimes when I say this in public, I can see relief on white faces. It’s not going to happen to me it’s not going to happen to my children, all these numbers are Aboriginal children and that means it happens to people who aren’t like me. It’s the very essence of racism. This group I can identify by colour, faith, region, dress, something, they’re not the same as me. They don’t have the feelings like mine they’re emotionless, blank, muted, different and they don’t feel as I would feel when awful things are done to them.

Except, that they do. There is no group of humans who were born with a lesser or greater capacity for grief and joy.

Imagine your child being abused. Imagine your child being killed. Imagine your child being taken from you. Imagine you are powerless to get them back. Imagine you are blamed for their removal. Imagine how you would feel. Imagine a life of that feeling. Imagine the life of your surviving children. Imagine their children. Imagine them incarcerated, addicted, staggering under the weight of all the lives they carry. Imagine this happened to all your neighbours and cousins and friends. Imagine the world destroyed and created for them to inhabit. Imagine all the unimaginable things.

This exercise of imagination for white Australia is the reality of Aboriginal Australia. Statistics do not happen in a vacuum.  

26% of filicide victims were identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander

21% of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander filicide victims were killed by a non-indigenous parent

16% of filicide offenders were identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander

Source: Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network data report: Filicides in a domestic and family violence context 2010–2018

The full report on DFV-context filicides is on the ANROWS website. It’s long and technical. And painful to read. It’s not something everyone can get through. But everyone should, at the very least, know about it.

Key statistics on DFV-context filicides:

86% did not have any recorded family law proceedings.

83% of offenders were living with the children they killed.

31% of cases included separation as a characteristic.

93% of victims were born in Australia.

78% of offenders did not attempt or complete suicide afterwards. 

8% involved the offender killing their entire family (child/ren and intimate partner).

85% occurred in a home belonging to the victim, offender or both.

47% were committed by assault with no weapon.

58% occurred in major cities (compared to 72% of the population living in major cities)

37% of offenders were in paid employment (compared to 66% of the population)

55% of victims were boys. (Australian research has consistently found that male and female children are victims of filicide at a similar rate, suggesting that gender does not play a role in filicide victimisation.)

26% showed evidence of pre-planning (premeditation may have existed in other cases but evidence was not identified in case files).

People who commit DFV-context filicides:

• 40% were the child’s biological father

• 27% were the child’s non-biological fathers

• 30% were the child’s biological mothers

• 2% are the child’s non- biological mothers

Source: Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network data report: Filicides in a domestic and family violence context 2010–2018

Deanne Carson and I are writing a book about school based education programs to prevent men’s violence against women and children (published next year by Allen & Unwin). The standard writer’s fuel of caffeine and self-loathing has got us almost to the end of the first draft, but nothing seems to be working to find a title that we both like, so I can’t tell you what it’s called yet. The book covers the obvious topics like consent and respectful relationships education, and the equally important but much less talked about body safety programs that aim to prevent child sexual abuse. There’s a lot of practical stuff about what happens in those classes and the reactions we get from students, parents, and teachers, but we’re also digging deeper into why these programs are so necessary and what we’re up against when we’re trying to unpick all the strands of life that make men violent and women vulnerable.

I’m going to write a standard NotAllMen disclaimer I can link to in these pieces because it’s a waste of time for writers and readers to go through it in each piece, but until I have time to do that: of course not all men are violent, this is demonstrably true. But it is equally true that most violence – against people of all genders – is committed by men. This is true across all racial, cultural, age, faith, sexuality, and class divides. What we don’t really know is why.

I don’t believe the answer is as simple as gender inequality, that seems more like a symptom than a cause. But if violence was biological, it would be all men and it isn’t, so there must be something else at play. I wish I could tell you that I know the answer and that it’s easy and makes the solution simple. I can’t.

One constant theme though, across all cultures and times, is storytelling and the myths we weave into our understanding of who we are and who we are supposed to be. We humans are atavistically designed to respond to stories. They’re woven into the DNA of our evolution. For 300,000 years we’ve learned by listening to stories about hunting, collaboration, childbirth, leadership, grief, love, surviving winters, and fighting battles. Stories were how we learned to build on knowledge accumulated by previous generations rather than having to work out how to hunt each mammoth, build each house, or raise each child as if it had never happened before.

Writing as a tool for sharing stories has been around for about 5,000 years but it’s only in the last couple of hundred years that we’ve had widespread sharing of knowledge through the written word. Barely an eyeblink in the grand human scheme.

Before the industrial age, we used stories to teach young people practical, ethical, and emotional lessons. Some of the most enduring stories were based on the needs of the group – what did we need people to believe about themselves and each other, what did we need them to aspire to that would keep the group safe, fed, and reasonably cohesive.

War is another constant in human evolution. It’s basis, in very simple terms, is that in a world of scare resources, we have something they do not have. They will try to take it and we will try to defend it. The strongest survive.

For most of human history, almost all young men were needed to produce food or die on battlefields, and young women were needed to birth more farmers, soldiers and mothers. Hunger will provide all the necessary inspiration for growing, hunting and gathering food, but how do you convince healthy young men to willingly die on a battlefield or healthy young women to risk their lives in childbirth? Stories. You tell them that not only is it their destiny, but that it is a glorious destiny. Venerate motherhood and domestic pursuits makes them aspirational instead of dangerous. Emphasising the joy in motherhood and the glory in loving and raising children is not difficult (especially if you’re not the one doing it) and so we created, in every culture, fairy tale princesses whose only goal was to find a husband, have his babies and serve his needs. Writing a book is a very useful way to focus your thoughts on one topic, or as people who live with an author might phrase it, “turn you into a tragic obsessive”. I spent last year tragically obsessing about what the fairy tale princess myth does to girls and women while I was writing Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children. This year, as we’re writing the unnameable book, I’ve turned my obsessive tendencies to the warrior myths. The stories we’ve always told boys and young men to make ugly death in war a male aspiration.

Gilgamesh, Achillies, Alexander the Great, Yueh Fei, Henry V, King Ashoka, Julius Ceaser, William Wallace, the Samurai, the Navy Seals, Captain America, Solid Snake, and Master Chief. Every culture and every era has had their warrior-king stories to inspire young men. Battles are celebrated, killing and dying in war is glorified by the warrior myth that venerates male strength, courage, and brutality. The brotherhood of men who fight in wars is sanctified in warrior myths. Hatred of the enemy might not be enough to make healthy young men run towards violent death, so the shame of being labelled a coward who would leave his brothers to die had to become a fear even stronger than death.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
-              St Crispin’s day speech, Henry V, Act IV, Scene III

The mythical warrior is both physically and emotionally powerful. He vanquishes honourable foes and dishonourable villains with equal ardour. He is justice without mercy, vengeance without consequence, and authority beyond questioning. He is revered by men, desired by women, and respected by all.  He is powerful but unaccountable. In control but never responsible. He will suffer pain, even death, for his chosen bride but she is his prize not his equal and his first allegiance is always to the battlefield and the brotherhood of soldiers. He is everything we still tell young men to exalt as the best qualities of manhood and he is, in real life, the building blocks of a violent and controlling man.

The warrior myth served its purpose for thousands of years. Men and boys volunteered for pointless causes and great wars with equal fervour. They died and killed for their tribes, states, and countries and we told them this was how they achieved greatness. 

Then we changed things.

Over the last 200 years, and particularly in the last 70 years, much of the world has learned to aspire to a more and better choices for their young men. Wealth and education gave all of us so many more options for our sons than warrior or farmer. Now they can be accountants and lawyers and plumbers and nurses and artists. We want them to be caring friends, good fathers, and loving husbands because we believe this will bring them happiness. We want them to find pride and self-worth in manhood without basing it in violence and control. Even if our boys do become soldiers, we expect our military leaders to have the technology, diplomacy, and smarts that prevent battlefield deaths, not glorify them.

But our mythology hasn’t kept up with the modern world - at least, not for men and boys.

Where are their new role models that show them manhood beyond the warrior myth? All the aspirational male heroes I can find are fictional or real life warrior-variations. Batman, Jon Snow, Tiger Woods, Iron Man, Dwaine Johnson, Cristiano Ronaldo, Will Smith, Elon Musk, Donald Trump. And of course, Andrew Tate. Fictional or real, they’re all winning simulated battles or applying the warrior mythology to politics or business.

Where is the hero in the modern mould? Where is the man who shows aspirational manhood that doesn’t rely on power and control? Where are the men leading by example and inspiring boys to modern heroics of creativity and invention?

Without those heroes, is it any wonder the likes of Andrew Tate have such reach and power over boys and young men? Tate fills the yawning identity gap and tells boys that the warrior ideal can still give them self-worth and the respect of others.

When we talk about needing men to step up, this is where they can have the most value. Step up, step out, show boys a manhood of self-respect, pride, creativity, even leadership without violence and control. Be the man of strength and power who heals and nurtures, the man who thinks and creates and invents. Find other men who do these things, share their photos and stories and tell your sons why you admire them.

If you need guidance on how to do it, look at what women have done for girls in the last 200 years.

Women have worked hard to create aspirational role models that exist outside the wife/mother role. We seek out women who succeed in sport, music, arts, business, and politics and share their achievements. Almost anywhere a woman is doing something amazing, another woman will be standing in front of her taking photos or videos to give other women hope and inspiration. Serena Williams, Hilary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Elise Perry, Cathy Freedman, Jacinda Ardern, Malala Yousafzai, Melissa Lucashenko, Michelle Obama, Madonna, Indra Nooyi, Taylor Swift, Angela Merkel, Jane Goodall, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, and Beyoncé are all visibly in the world, demonstrating all the options available to women and girls, not just of what they can do, but of who they can be. Sometimes those women paid a high price for their visibility, but even that proved to the young girls crowding up behind them that obstacles can be overcome. 

These possibilities are so real to women and girls that we’ve almost forgotten the power the warrior myth has over men and boys. Even more we’ve forgotten how much the warrior depends on the fairy tale princess myth. She is the stepping stone to the wife/mother role. She’s quintessential traditional femininity. She is beautiful, submissive, and most of all unselfish. Her defining characteristic is her ability to win her warrior prince’s love by proving she can joyfully erase all her own feelings and desires in service of his needs. The warrior prince’s story doesn’t exist without his fairy tale princess. Avenging her death or dishonour is often his reason to start his quest and a shiny new fairy tale princess is his prize for completing it.

In the modern world, the continued exitance of the warrior myth creates dissonance for women, girls, and non-binary people who have learned to far live wider, higher and deeper lives than the fairy tale princess trope. Men still ruled by the warrior myth dismiss and ignore these lives because they’re not relevant to the warrior’s story – until reality crashes into their mythology. When those men are forced to see women’s lives outside the warrior/princess dichotomy in their homes, accusing them in courtroom, succeeding in their workplaces or arguing on their newsfeeds, we’re not just sweeping aside the fairy tale princess myth, we’re also destroying the warrior prince’s primacy. Men and boys who believe the warrior myth is basis of their identity and self-worth experience this as a threat and respond accordingly. Boys perform their version of the warrior myth for each other by making classrooms unsafe for the girls and female teachers they perceive as the enemy. Men sneer, harass, assault, dismiss, and ignore women at work. And of course, men rape women (almost without consequence) stalk and intimidate them, abuse and control them, and when all else fails, kill them.

The dissonance is painful, enraging, and bewildering for women and girls. Our lives, our bodies, our futures, our inner worlds don’t just exist for someone else. They are our own, a source of pride and self-respect. And they are important, not just to ourselves, but to the world. How can we be reduced to a joke or an insult to manhood when, most of the time, our choices have nothing to do with men?

The warrior myth and the wounded blank space that is its only alternative hurts all of us and this is a problem only men can solve for themselves, each other, and the boys who look to them for inspiration.

Perhaps a true hero might make that effort.

Do you have a boyfriend? Keeping looking, you’ll find someone soon. Why are you so trying so hard to find a boyfriend? No one wants to date a girl who’s that desperate. You should get out more, you’ll never meet someone if you stay home all the time. You’re a bit too ambitious, it can make men feel threated. Your marks aren’t very good, you can’t depend on a man to support you, you know. Do you have a career plan? Are you too stupid? Are you too ambitious? How are you going to find a husband if you’re working all the time? How are you going to be independent if you stay home all the time?

Are you too angry to be black, too tearful to be white, too butch to be a woman, too fragile to be a man, too real to be nothing, too queer to be real? Just be yourself! No, not like that. You’re doing it wrong. Why are you so anxious?

Do you look like a genetically blessed woman with full make up and beauty filters turned all the way up? Why not? Don’t you care about how you look? Do you go to a gym? Are you thin enough? Are you curvy enough? Do you have exactly the right shape to your arse, your breasts, your face, your eyes, your calves, your eyebrows, your cheekbones, your thighs, your ankles, your earlobes, your elbows, your arms, your chin, your nose, your eyelashes, your lips, your fingernails, your waist, your stomach? No one likes vain women. Why are you so obsessed with the way you look?

Are you really going to wear that? Don’t you have any self-respect? Would it kill you to make a bit of an effort? You’d look much better if you were just natural. Why don’t you take some pride in your appearance? Did you know the most attractive thing a woman can have is self-confidence? Have you tried being more confident? Stop being such a pick me girl. Why aren’t you wearing any make up? A bit of bronzer could really improve you. Men don’t like it when you pack it on, just be natural.

Did he hurt you? Are you sure? Why? These things don’t just happen, there’s always a reason. Did you make him angry? Did you lead him on? Did you reject him? Did you flirt with him? Did you ignore him? Did you do something to make him jealous? Did you tell him you have a boyfriend? Did you think about how he was feeling? Did you try to calm him down? Did you tell him to stop? What were you wearing? How much did you drink? Are you lying?

Why are you just like all the other girls?

Labor promised a new and different approach. Six months after winning government they released a new National Plan to end Violence Against Women and Children. After a bit of scuffling, they added an outcomes framework with a few specific targets and put some pretty hefty funding into it in their first budget. Good start, but that’s all it was. A start.

One of the few measurable targets set in the new National Plan was a “25 per cent reduction per year in female victims of intimate partner homicide” (emphasis mine). According to Counting Dead Women Australia data (still provided by volunteers despite Labor’s 2023 promise to fund this data collection) 15 women had been killed by men at the end of April 2023. By the same time this year, that number was 28. I’ve searched for any record of a journalist asking the government about the target, or who is responsible for it, or who is answerable for such a dismal failure. I couldn’t find one. As far as I can tell, no journalist even knows about it.

And yesterday we had another federal budget.

A few years back, an enthusiastic HR manager booked me to speak about the gender pay gap for her company’s International Women’s Day event. Two days before the event the CFO cancelled the gig because the very idea had upset the men in senior management. He sent me, by way of apology, a bottle of sickly chocolate liqueur. It sat on my shelf for a few months until I needed an appropriate birthday present for an acquaintance’s horrible husband.

I was reminded of that regifted sickly liqueur when I read the federal budget yesterday. The centrepiece of their alleged efforts on men’s violence against women is $925.2 million (over five years) to extend a Morrison era program that didn’t work, the Leaving Violence Program. It purports to offer people who meet the eligibility criteria (and have a bank account not being controlled by an abusive man) a cash payment of up to $1500 and voucher payments of up to $3500. In the pilot, only around one third of applicants were given the payment, delays and bureaucracy were rife. The program doesn’t start until July 2025.

Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it’s a short-term, inadequate payment that doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of physical, emotional, financial and psychological recovery from the effects of men’s violence.

There is nothing  in this budget that even starts on the structural changes to the legal, financial, educational, medical, and housing systems that will provide women with an effective escape from violent and abusive men. There is a bit of tinkering around the edges of healthcare, safety, and economic security for women, but again, nothing structural or long term.

There was nothing in the budget for the frontline services that cannot meet the overwhelming demand from women and children trying to escape violent men.

The frontline services that struggle to keep women and children safe were flinging out press releases yesterday. Most news outlets ignored them. Two weeks ago those same news outlets doing wall to wall coverage of the Australia wide protests against inaction on mens’ violence against women. Although to be fair, most of them were just squabbling about whether it’s excusable for Anthony Albanese to snap at traumatised and exhausted women.

SBS noticed the desultory budget response to men’s violence. Jaqueline Maley at The Age made some wry jokes (who can blame her) in her reminder that women vote. Nine did a sterling service as a stenographer of the women’s budget statement, and The Guardian listed the Leaving Violence Program as a win for women. Other than SBS, Crikey, and The Australian (!!), no journalists noticed or understood the government’s failure to invest in the frontline services who struggle to deal with the effects of men’s violence against women, the economic cost of which was estimated at $13.6 billion in 2022.

As I have written before, there are around 250 members of the Canberra press gallery and at least 200 sports journalists in Australia, but there is no media outlet that has even one journalist with expertise in men’s violence against women. This is the result.

Both major parties have proven they are incapable of seeing, let alone changing, the structural supports for men’s violence against women. It’s not just unconscionable, it’s short-sighted and self-defeating.

On current trajectory, another 40 women will be killed by men by the end of this year. At least another 100,000 will be sexually assaulted by men and, at minimum, another 100,000 will be physically assaulted. Remember those photos of the Taylor Swift concert at the MCG? That many women.  

All the women who survive still vote. All those women’s friends and families vote. All the people who work at the frontline services ignored by the federal government vote, and so do their friends and families.

Voters in the last election swept away the coalition government and put a raft of smart, capable, committed women on the cross bench. There are 151 seats in the House of Representatives and majority government requires 76 seats. Labor won 77 in the last election. They are fools if they think tinkering while women die will win them another majority.  

Here are some of the statements issued by peak bodies and the few not-for-profit organisations who had the time and resources to read the budget and make a statement:

Safe and Equal is the peak body for specialist family violence services that provide support to victim survivors in Victoria.

Women’s Legal Services Australia is the peak organisation for Community Legal Centres specialising in women’s legal issues.

The National Peak Body for Family Violence Prevention Legal Services (FVPLS) around Australia that provide culturally safe and holistic services to First Nations people affected by family violence – predominantly women and children.

Body Safety Australia delivers primary prevention of violence education to children, young people, teachers, families, and communities.

Djirra is a place where culture is shared and celebrated, and where practical support is available to all Aboriginal women and particularly to Aboriginal people who are currently experiencing family violence or have in the past. Djirra is an Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisation governed by an Aboriginal Board of Directors who are elected by their members.

Full Stop Australia is one of the country's leading sexual, domestic and family violence response and recovery services.

National Association of Services Against Sexual Violence (NASASV) is the peak body for a diverse range of specialist organisations who provide prevention and response services to people who are at risk or experience sexual violence in Australia

No To Violence is the largest peak body in Australia for organisations and individuals who work with men to end family violence.

Women with Disabilities Victoria (WDV) is a not-for-profit Disabled Peoples Organisation (DPO) representing women with disabilities in Victoria.

Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health (MCWH) is a community-based, not-for-profit organisation led by, for and with women from migrant and refugee backgrounds.

Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) has been a constant, prominent and relevant voice in the gender advocacy, policy and equality sector for over five decades. We advocate for equality and justice for all women. We carry out important research and campaign to knock down the barriers that hold women back from a life of dignity, safety and independence. 

Mission Australia's integrated nationwide services help people find safe and affordable housing, support disadvantaged children and families, empower troubled young people, assist people with mental illness and disability, and much more.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed as Director of Advocacy at Body Safety Australia, quoted above

(From left to right: Fiona McCormack, Rosie Batty, Ken Lay, Daniel Andrews)

How, after her abusive ex killed her son, could Rosie Batty write a book called Hope? It bewilders me.

I watched Rosie at the event for her new book in Melbourne yesterday, as I’ve watched her at so many events over the last ten years. Her humour and fun, her generosity and honesty and grace (no matter how much she denies it) and my bewilderment never goes away. How has she had the strength to be such a powerful advocate for all these years? How was she not simply crushed into nothingness by grief? Hope answers those questions, as much as anything can. Mostly, it seems, she did it because she could, and because she couldn’t not.

I remember the morning in 2014 when Rosie did her first press conference the day after Luke was murdered. I remember the involuntary tears that burst out of me and whole body shock when she told the entire country that her son’s murder was family violence, and it could happen to anyone.

It’s too easy to forget how far we’ve come since then. Now, when an abusive man murders his child, of courseits family violence, what else could it be? Ten years ago, it was anything else. It was that he “just snapped”, he was a “loving dad” and a “caring father”, he was a victim of feminist-infested courts, he was mentally ill, he might even have been a monster, but no one back then called him an abusive man or a man who was committing family violence. Until Rosie did.

Respect Victoria organised the event and when they asked Rosie who she wanted on the panel with her, she chose people who were there with her back in 2014, Fiona McCormack (then CEO of DV Vic) Ken Lay (then Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police) and Daniel Andrews (then opposition leader in Victoria). So many people have worked with Rosie over the years but those were the three were she chose to talk about the change that’s happened in the ten years since Luke was murdered.

Fiona told me afterwards that when she was first asked to be on the panel, her immediate response was that they should get “someone new”, someone who is doing the work now. Who knew I’d ever be so glad no one listened to Fiona McCormack?

In what often feels like a dark and despairing time, nothing could have given more hope than listening to those four people remind us how far we’ve come and how much we can achieve.

I’d forgotten the impact Ken Lay had back then. The Chief Commissioner of Police, a powerful white man who publicly recognised the ground-breaking work of the woman who came before him, Christine Nixon. She was the first woman to become Chief Commissioner of Victoria police and she began the (yet to be completed) work of changing police culture to something that might be able to understand and respond to men’s violence against women. Ken Lay continued that work and it’s impossible to overstate how much it mattered when he pointed back at men – all men – and told them that they may not all be part of the problem, but they all had to be part of the solution.

I am no fan of Dan Andrews, but I remember how, while he was still in opposition, he promised a royal commission into family violence because he knew we needed structure change not, as he called it, “tinkering”. He won an election and kept his promise. Fiona reminded the room how apprehensive the sector was back then – why are we spending millions on a talkfest when we already know what needs to be done? Why isn’t that money going to the desperate front line services that can’t pay their phone bills? What we got in 2016 wasa report from the Royal Commission that is still one of the world’s most comprehensive investigations of the causes, effects, and possible preventions of family violence. The implementation of all the recommendations was far from perfect. There is still more work to be done. But it had to start somewhere and the Royal Commission was – still is – a road map for the structural changes we must make to save lives and futures.

Fiona McCormack is now the Victims of Crime Commissioner and is still one of the most respected authorities on family violence. She is the expert who speaks in plain language, the relentless advocate who never sought fame, the calm voice of reason who knows everyone’s rage. Back in the wilderness years, before the Royal Commission, before the Rosie Effect, when family violence was still a personal matter and a single incident, she was one of the people holding the sector together, dragging funding (in the thousands not millions) out of governments, and advocating for women and children who were never allowed a voice.

Hope. It’s so had to find. It’s even harder to hold on to. So often it feels like we’re stuck in a hamster wheel of wounded women and announcable inaction and the banality of daily horrors. But hope lives, as it always has, outside the present. It’s in the past, when we look back and see how far we’ve come. It’s in the future, when people like Rosie Batty, Ken Lay, Fiona McCormack, and even Dan Andrews, remind us of what can be done when enough people simply decide to do something. Hindsight can tell us it’s not perfect (because it isn’t) and it’s not finished (because it’s not) but it reminds us that it starts with imperfect, unfinished people who are determined to make change.

In the book, Rosie says that every year on Luke’s birthday she buys him a card and writes a message for him. She still has all those cards. There is no one to give them to.

If Rosie, with her unimaginable grief and her inhuman strength and her deeply human frailties can hold on to hope and keep making the world a better, safer place, the rest of us can, if nothing else, see the hope in her and believe it’s enough to keep all of us going.

Disclaimer: I worked for DV Vic for a year when Fiona McCormack was CEO and I have done paid consulting for Respect Victoria.