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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (5 June) . . Page.. 1919 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

Alcohol and illicit date rape drugs add confusion to the thoughts of the victim, a general disorientation and, in more extreme cases, loss of memory of the actual events. That adds to the common feelings of guilt, fear of retaliation by the offender, concerns about what peers will think and fear of the court process that is often felt by victims of sexual assault. Dinner table and pub talk about how women provoke sexual assault by what they wear or the way they act still occurs in these somewhat enlightened times and it is always confronting to me to hear this sort of talk. It is disgusting, because we live in a time when women are supposedly free and equal, but when women act with autonomy they are asking to be assaulted. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has stated that, except for homicide, rape is the most serious violation of a person's body because it deprives the victim of both physical and emotional privacy and autonomy.

There is no real way of measuring the cost of this heinous crime. Adding up the cost of police and health services, education programs and counselling is only a start. The emotional cost to the victim lasts a lifetime. In Canberra, the crime statistics for the December 2001 quarter showed that the reporting of sexual assaults was five times what it was for the same period in 2000. Whether this relates to increased incidence or increased reporting is unknown, but we can assume that for every assault reported there are four to five times as many assaults that still go unreported. Rightly, there is a lot of fear in regard to drink spiking and the use of rohypnol, liquid E or special K as the three most common illicit date rape drugs. However, alcohol has been a date rape drug of choice for many years and the hidden crime of date rape does continue.

A broader concern which I have and which was raised yet again in public hearings of the status of women committee is the increase in the number of young women who binge drink and use prescription and other chemist-purchased drugs as well as illicit drugs. It came up in the recent drugs in schools debate that, largely, binge drinking is not seen as a harmful practice by young people. Binge drinking and polydrug using are causing many young women to get wasted on a weekend, some even turning up at school, university or work on Monday still hung over or actually drunk from the weekend. This behaviour is more common and is just as harmful as drink spiking.

To combat these issues, education is needed for our young women on the dangers of excessive alcohol and other drug abuse as well as the dangers of drink spiking. We need to encourage alcohol-free venues, all-ages gigs and other forms of entertainment in the ACT that do not involve the excessive consumption of alcohol and polydrug use. In venues that do serve alcohol, we need to monitor the responsible service of alcohol. That simply means refusing to sell drinks to anyone who appears to be already suffering from having had too many. Towns like Dubbo, Armidale and Wagga have taken the step of introducing curfews on the serving of alcohol to try to curb the anti-social behaviour that often follows binge drinking. I raise that to highlight the fact that other places are taking strong action to curb the binge drinking that, unfortunately, is still so commonplace in Canberra.

I do wonder who polices the responsible serving of alcohol in the ACT and to what extent it is actually being monitored, because I can assure you that on any Friday or Saturday night there will be plenty of young people wasted due to self-inflicted alcohol abuse. This is a topic that certainly needs more discussion and more action, as well as the

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