The two most incisive statements relating to the allegations of sexual assault currently miring the Liberal party have come from opposite ends of its hierarchy: the junior employee allegedly raped in a defence ministry office two years ago, and the head of government who denies any prior knowledge of her ordeal.
Parliament House is not, after all, ‘the safest building in Australia’, said Brittany Higgins when announcing her intention to ‘proceed with a formal complaint regarding the crime committed against me’ by a fellow Liberal staffer in that apparently-sacrosanct space. And, ‘if any workplace thinks that this [pervasive culture of disrespect] is just confined to the parliament, they’re kidding themselves,’ said Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in a vain attempt to deflect blame from his party.
The first statement shatters the myth that there are safe spaces where women and girls will be protected from the harm that might otherwise be committed against them. Experience and research, too, disprove this hypothesis: in Australia, one in three women has experienced physical and/or sexual violence perpetrated by a man since the age of 15, according to Our Watch. Such violence occurs in any and all of the spaces into which women dare venture: workplaces, schools, places of worship, railways stations, parks, the hallowed halls of parliament and — perhaps most frequently of all — their own homes.
The potential for violence — especially sexual assault — is like air for women, in its most rudimentary sense; it exists all around us, invisible yet omnipresent, hefted with capability. It is an unspoken — often unacknowledged — social compact, an awareness gifted to us as armour when we are young, heightening our senses and cautioning us against danger. But instead of expanding our existence, such forewarning diminishes it; as we move through the world, we mechanically measure and mitigate our movement in relation to men’s propensity for violence. We urge our friends and female relatives to text us when they’re safely home, warn one another against sleazy colleagues and against catching Ubers unless we’re in a trusted person’s company. We hold ourselves responsible for our own safety.
Such learned behaviour circumscribes our already gender-defined boundaries yet further. The fear of rape, as the writer, feminist and social commentator Rebecca Solnit writes so trenchantly in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, ‘puts many women in their place — indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I