Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would also like to start by offering my condolences to the family and friends of Eurydice Dixon, to those who loved her and who knew her. She appears, by all accounts, to have been a remarkable woman and certainly did not deserve the brutal death that she encountered. I offer my condolences to all women who have experienced violence and to their families, friends and loved ones.

I'm five foot nothing significant in heels. I consider myself to be fit and healthy. After all, I did do two years of boxing, two years of Bikram yoga and I go to the gym as often as I can. But, if I were confronted by someone double my size and double my strength, all that would not be enough. I can carry my phone in my hand and my keys in my other hand. I can text my husband and my friends as to where I'm going, when I get there and when I expect to be there. I can walk along well-lit paths. But that still wouldn't be enough.

It's part of human nature to take on protective and avoidance behaviours in the face of clear and present threats. We as women are told to take account of our own safety, and we do that. Most people do—again, in the face of clear and present threats. But not all violence against women presents as a clear and present threat. In fact, most violence against women is perpetrated by somebody known to them. Also, something as simple and as everyday as getting into a taxi or onto an empty bus, or walking down the path on your normal way home of an evening can lead to a devastating, brutal and violent situation.

It's also not enough to offer well-meaning, though ineffective, platitudes about respect for women. More needs to be done, and that doesn't mean curtailing women's rights to freedom of movement. As I mentioned, we all take on protective and avoidance behaviours when we sense a threat. In that case, all that is left for women is to stay home—perhaps barefoot and pregnant, in the kitchen? But even home isn't always safe. We need more. We need more to be done to protect women.

The Australian Human Rights Commission provided a submission in 2017 to the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, and I quote from their submission:

Australia has a disturbingly high rate of violence against women. In recent times, policy and public discussions on violence against women in Australia have had a strong focus on family and domestic violence, in particular intimate partner violence. However, consultations conducted by the Commission indicate that violence against women can take many forms, including family and domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, violence in residential settings and online violence and harassment.

In fact, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that one woman a week and one man a month were killed by a current or former partner in the two years from 2012-13 to 2013-14. There are a number of initiatives out there that focus on violence against women, but these rates are still extraordinarily high, and extraordinarily high for Australia. They demonstrate that we do, in fact, need more to be done.

We need education programs on building respectful relationships from birth, through school, to adulthood, at schools, at universities and at higher education institutions. We need workplace programs focused not just on the workplace but on public spaces too. We need to have, above all, a discussion about violence against women that does not disintegrate into a binary one of women versus men, where some men want to silence the debate because they feel victimised, or where some women want to victimise other women by somehow making violence their responsibility. We need an approach that tackles the context in which violence against women has been allowed to spread and to grow, and that also looks at the trend towards high trait aggression and the normalisation of all kinds of violence in our society. Until then, we can offer condolences and we can make speeches about respect for women, but, for each woman who dies as a result of violence, we remain culpable.

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