Page 4437 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 November 2005
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where necessary. I think that is one of the most important messages that male leaders in communities can send out to their male colleagues.
The United Nations Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM, institutionalised the date, White Ribbon Day, established by those Canadian pioneers, and now of course we see White Ribbon Day as a day with global significance and international status. What is becoming apparently quite routine around the world is to have 16 days of activism from 25 November through to 10 December. This is a period in which the community is encouraged to participate in “stop the violence” awareness activities. To this end I, and I gather Mr Gentleman and others, have quite happily stepped forward and volunteered to become ambassadors, to join the so-called gallery of men. I will happily do that and I will speak out as much as I possibly can on this issue.
What are the fundamental issues that need to be addressed? As Ms MacDonald pointed out, one in three women worldwide has experienced physical or sexual violence from men and, if you extrapolate that, God knows how many children have also suffered violence from men. The other problem here—just picking up on the point I made earlier—is the silent witnessing. There are too many families, there are too many men—there are too many men in those families and communities—who know that some of their colleagues deliver violence upon their women and who do nothing. So what we have in many cases—and we have seen this in recent history—is women suffering in silence, because often the women who are the victims of men-on-women violence do not speak out. They do not want to suffer the embarrassment, they do not want to supposedly compromise their male partner by going to the authorities or even seeking help from other members of family or community.
If you take these figures—one in three internationally—and even if you downgrade that to make it more applicable to the Australian landscape, there must still be a significant number of women and their children who are suffering in silence as the victims of assault and violence. So that is a major challenge that needs to be addressed. Somehow we need to be able to draw the victims of violence out of their silence cones. That is our job as leaders—that is our job as a community—to make sure that those encouragements are there so that people do not have to continue to suffer in silence.
I would like to congratulate Lifeline Canberra, Men’s Link and a number of other programs and a number of other government-assisted programs. I would like to thank the ACT government for some of the work it has done, in partnership with those organisations, to try and draw out some of these lessons, particularly the need to find people who are suffering in silence and to give them assistance.
I would like to also draw attention to the massive problem that exists internationally. It is rather ironic that a number of the states that would criticise the open democracies in the world do themselves have shocking records in condoning wife-beating and child abuse. They justify this on the basis of it being acceptable in cultural terms. Women and children are not cattle, as they are sometimes thought to be in too many states around the world. Governments too often do turn a blind eye, and this is particularly so even in emerging democracies. We see around the world this terrible habit of condoning honour killings. It is sad to say that in Pakistan, India and Jordan—three states that I would immediately pick on in terms of this concern—this happens far too often. Of course, these are emerging democracies. In fact, India is a fairly advanced democracy. But
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