The rape and murder of a Melbourne woman last week was a psychological jolt to the public who had hoped and prayed for her safety. Yet my conversations with other women about the crime include the admission that we too may have risked the short walk from the pub to home in the small hours of the morning.
Very few men would see it as a risk, and in an ideal community it should not be a gamble for women either. So it is not that helpful when commentators counsel women to walk or travel late at night only with company (though a more appropriate recommendation might be that all people travel with company at night).
Some scholars argue that this kind of instruction is an indicator that we exist in a 'rape culture'. As Buchwald, Fletcher and Roth describe it, rape culture is 'a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women':
It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape ... A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.
It is only when sexual harassment or assault is perpetrated on a man, by a man, that most men sympathise with a common experience of many females: the menace of a gaze that loiters or a hazardous tone of voice; the constant awareness of the ways in which one's voice, words, walk or gestures can be interpreted; the knowledge that some males consider their impulses to be uncontrollable.
Few men understand this 'continuum of threatened violence' that innumerable women encounter with distressing regularity. Many women I know have experienced harassment or threats, if not sexual assault, molestation or rape at some point in their life. But few have taken action.
Women who do not tolerate at least the narrow end of the wedge of threatened violence are seen to be lacking a sense of humour, oversensitive or uncooperative, which in educational settings or the workplace can have material as well as emotional and psychological repercussions.
This enables perpetrators to psychologically push the