Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are some occurrences so bleak and sad that just to know them seems to deaden and freeze a part of you. To think that teenage girls in India, two cousins, needing to go to the toilet, went into a field at dusk in Uttar Pradesh, where they had grown up, and simply because they were girls and because they were born to a particular caste, were pack raped and hanged, from a tree. It is a horrible thing to even know. Imagine what it was to be those girls. Imagine what it is to be their families. And imagine what girls in Uttar Pradesh think now when they go by themselves to a toilet in the field or see a shadow that might be something hanging from a tree.

Gender discrimination and violence happen every day, in every country, and we each have an obligation to make sure we continue to act and speak against it. In many countries, including India, the absence of clean water and toilets puts girls and women at greater risk of being attacked. This risk is compounded in poor areas where a lack of education, corrupt police and caste discrimination are prevalent.

These girls belonged to the Dalit or 'untouchable' caste, yet—as has been sadly observed of the caste system—untouchability for women is always a curse but never a protection. Let us remember that some 2.5 billion people around the world, 36 per cent of the global population, do not have adequate sanitation facilities. Let us remember that Australian aid makes a significant and lasting contribution to addressing that problem, and to reducing gender discrimination and violence in developing countries.