Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak to an issue that, over the summer parliamentary break, has echoed around the world, with the shouts of protest from the Subcontinent resonating with good women and men in Australia and across the globe.

On 16 December, a young woman, an intelligent 23-year-old physiotherapy student, and her male friend boarded a bus in New Delhi to return home after an evening screening of a film. The only other passengers on that private bus, six young men, including one only 17 years old, attacked them. They beat the man with a metal bar. They stripped the woman, raped her and beat her within an inch of her life before dumping her body by the side of the road. She later died in hospital. The utter brutality of these crimes sparked an instant reaction from India and beyond. Thousands lined the streets to protest that such an act was ever allowed to happen. Their tears and their cries were not only for this individual tragedy. In the words of the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, in his Republic Day address, they wept for 'a woman who was symbol of all that new India strives to be'. That emotion translated into more than 80,000 submissions to a panel headed by the former Chief Justice of India, JS Verma, on issues of violence against women. A 630-page report was handed down by that panel on 23 January, including a scathing assessment of the role of government, whom he noted were not able to make their own submissions to the panel on time. But the panel stuck to their urgent time frame and delivered an important report.

More than 24,000 cases of rape were reported in India in 2011—not, of course, counting those cases that went unreported due the stigma associated with being a victim. These cases, all too common across urban and rural India, are devastating. But perhaps most disturbing of all is the perception of the role of women and men that gives rise to these acts and the way they are dealt with. Such cruel attitudes are not reflected on the streets lined with young people protesting this injustice. Nor do they reflect the heart of India, of what Indian society is or can be. They are not of the India freed by a movement of nonviolence, nor of the India that reveres Lakshmi, Durga, and the birth mother. These attitudes do not match the justice and the pride that fuels Indian civilisation.

Nor are these attitudes confined to the Subcontinent. We will all recall the tragic story of Jill Meagher, which unfolded slowly in television reports and over social media in Australia last year. She was a young Irish woman working in Australia who was abducted on the short walk back to her apartment in Melbourne and raped and murdered. The reaction to that story was a wave of public grief and, it must be admitted, some sense of fear and unease. But eventually, like in New Delhi, 30,000 people walked down Sydney Road in the suburb of Brunswick to honour her memory and resolve that such awful acts should never be repeated.

Nonetheless, for many women such confident resolutions do not match the reality of their lives. Violence against women is not achieved in a moment of epiphany but in the gradual transformation of a culture that has not adequately respected women and girls. Instead, the culture that many women encounter is one that only recognises their abilities, talents and potential next to a calculation of their value as an object of sexual desire. One cannot believe that these instances of violence are indicative of the natural culture either of India or of Australia, nor are they something just from the West, as some Indian leaders have asserted. That view is as cynical as it is complacent, and it is the kind of cynicism that, to again quote the President of India, 'is blind to morality'. Instead, these attitudes survive in all societies in which leaders, citizens and activists are forgetful that the price of freedom and of equality is eternal vigilance.

When we fail to be vigilant, these attitudes pervade our society. They are the lessons that young girls and boys learn through magazines and television shows. They are the signals that are sent to young people when the source of their role models are male captains of industry and powerful sportsmen on the one hand and women who must either talk about or take off their clothes to make the front page on the other. They are the product of an invented strain of machismo that robs women and men of their agency and forces them into roles under the false guise of what is termed as natural. They are the product of a part of an entertainment industry which makes an expectation or a joke of predation, obsession and unwanted attention towards women and girls. Ending these attitudes requires leaders, here in Australia as well as in India, and all over the world, to unite for the cause of preventing violence against women wherever it may occur. Fortunately, attitudes are slowly changing. A strong and active civil society has mobilised against these poisonous views, empowering women and men to reject the things that enable rape culture. The White Ribbon Foundation, for example, gives an opportunity to swear an oath never to commit, excuse or remain silent about acts of violence against women. Meanwhile, in newspapers, magazines and on weblogs, women are sharing their stories and supporting one another to stand up to a culture of disempowerment and misogyny.

For my government's part, on 15 February 2011, the then Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis, and the then Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, announced the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children with the endorsement of COAG. The plan, of course, is no quick fix. It provides for four successive stages, each supported by three years of programs and priorities. In the first stage, which ends this year, the focus is on strengthening the workforce, sharing information systems, improving the evidence base and tracking performance of different initiatives. All of these things will help us to understand the task ahead of us, but there is no doubt that elimination of violence and discrimination against women will require a shift in culture.

That will mean being alert to the portrayals, the jokes, the acts and the attitudes that treat women and girls as less than their male counterparts, and which give perverse justification to the violence and degradation. We must be alert to those in our homes, our schools, our workplaces and most importantly in our own minds. We must challenge those ideas wherever they persist, here or abroad.

To be a member of a community is to owe to that community a voice for what is right and against what is wrong. Recently, I had the chance to meet Migration Institute Australia executive officer, Pallavi Sinha, who, in the wake of the cases of gang rape about which I have spoken, immediately began a petition for change in India and organised and united the Indian diaspora in Sydney. Her response is one of the many examples of action guided by heritage, principle and responsibility of which diaspora communities are capable here in Australia.

I am deeply privileged to be a member of the great Indian diaspora living in Australia. As an Australian and as a person of Indian origin, I want to register not only my sadness at this kind of violence I have described but a deep resolve to change the culture that has allowed them to occur. I hope that in time, women will not only be safe from violence and all forms of discrimination but respected and enabled in each corner of the international community.