Page 4038 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 26 November 2014
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This is an area that I am particularly passionate about, as sexual violence against women is often shrouded in shame and secrecy as well as being an area coated in many myths. Some of the myths around sexual violence include that once a man is sexually aroused he cannot help himself and has to act—not something that we accept in our society—that if a woman is drunk or on drugs she is asking for it; that a woman who is dressed in an attractive way is asking for it; and that if a man paid for dinner, she owes it to him. These are complete nonsense, but you do hear them from time to time.
Probably one of the most regularly touted myths is that if a woman is selling sex, if she is a prostitute, then it is not rape. I recently met a woman who shared with me how she had survived 10 years of being a prostitute. Her words to me were that about 25 per cent of those who paid for sex were extremely violent. In her own words: “They wanted to make me bleed.” This violence took place within legal facilities, with bosses turning a blind eye in favour of profits. No-one stood up for this young woman, and it was over 10 years before she was able to make a break.
Another woman told me that at times a client would pay for one service and then decide halfway through that they would take another by force. Ultimately, therefore, she was raped many times while being paid, but no-one would ever advocate for her after accepting that she had been violated.
Women who are purchased by men for sex are often exposed to violence in their workplace. This violence is endemic, and we would never tolerate it in any other work environment.
According to an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, a recent interview for an international study showed that the experience of men buying sex often shows attitudes of violence towards women or attitudes of acceptance of the fact that she is likely to have been the victim of violence, terrorism, trafficking or gross emotional manipulation. One man said: “I don’t want them to get any pleasure. I am paying for it and it is her job to give me pleasure; if she enjoyed it I would feel cheated.” Another man said he had “seen women with bruises, cuts and Eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are”. But did he act? No, he did not.
For a proportion of men buying sex, knowing that a woman has been abused makes little difference to them. They are happy to go on, indifferent to the abuse, ignoring what they can clearly see and focusing on their own desires. It is time for these men to stop or be stopped from further abusing women who may have already experienced physical and/or sexual violence. It is time for men to speak up when they know of abuse and violence against women, whatever walk of life that woman is in.
In my motion today I am calling on the government to collect, collate and report meaningful statistics about domestic violence against women and to report such statistics back to the Assembly each year to coincide with White Ribbon Day. I note that some figures included in the ACT’s criminal justice statistics, tabled in the Legislative Assembly here yesterday, could form part of such a report—in particular, a breakdown of the person offences, which include sexual assaults, abduction, harassment and other offences.
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