This an abridged version of the speech by Gillian Myers-Brittain from the Hunter Regional Violence Prevention Unit at the first Reclaim the Night rally and march in Maitland on October 28. Sixteen days of activism for the elimination of violence against women was held in the Hunter from November 25, including a TAFE students' photography exhibition, an AIDS awareness week art exhibition, a screening of Moolaade, a film about female genital mutilation, and a march on December 2, NSW Stop Domestic Violence Day. The UN declared November 25 the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in 1999.
A right not to be violated is a basic human right for everybody in our community. So how do we as women fair? Not too well.
It was only two decades ago in most Australian states and territories that men were able to rape their wives with immunity. Rape in marriage was quite simply not a crime.
Laws have now been enacted to address "men's licence to rape" women with whom they share marital or established relationships. However, our understanding of whether this has resulted in changing social, cultural and legal responses to sexual violence is limited.
There is little dispute that women are more likely to be raped, beaten, stalked or killed by their intimate partners or ex-partners than they are by strangers or any other type of assailant.
Previous research has suggested that sexual assault is one of the most under-reported crimes, where there are numerous "hidden" victims who do not report their victimisation to the police or to health officials, making them invisible in official statistics. Despite the limitations of police and court statistics, they can indicate trends and issues, and are an important gauge of the extent to which victim/survivors access the criminal justice system.
A more reliable, but still problematic, method of identifying the prevalence of sexual assault is large-scale surveys. Comparing survey results with police statistics illustrates the low level of reporting. (These large-scale surveys do not account for women under 18 years, remote Indigenous women, women in jails, women with mental illnesses and homeless women, and we know that these groups of women are the most vulnerable to sexual violence.
What do the statistics that we do have say?
In the 12 months to April 2004, 10,100 adult women were sexually or indecently assaulted in New South Wales. In the 12 months to December 2003, NSW police recorded 2707 adult female victims of sexual or indecent assault. Thus, the percentage of sexual and indecent assaults reported to police in 2003 was 20-27%.
In 2003, 604 persons appeared before the local or higher criminal courts charged with a sexual or indecent assault offence that did not involve children. Of those 604 people, 278 were found guilty of at least one sexual offence, a conviction rate of 46%.
This translates to the number of proven sexual assault charges and convictions being less than 5% of the total number of sexual assault victims. It is glaringly obvious that we have a long way to go.
What the available statistics tell us is that sexual assault is a gendered crime. Amongst adults, it is primarily women who are the victim/survivors and primarily men who are the perpetrators. They also tell us that victim/survivors of sexual assault rarely report the crime to police and even more rarely do they see an offender face any form of justice. They tell us that victim/survivors access formal support services in slightly larger numbers than they make reports to police.
CASA House statistics for 2001-02 identified:
97% of offenders were men;
84% of those accessing CASA House were women;
women were 10 times more likely to have been victims of sexual assault than men;
men were slightly more likely to report sexual assault to police;
23% of women who had been married or in a de facto relationship experienced violence by a partner at some time during the relationship;
women are most at risk of sexual violence in the home — 55% of sexual violence occurred in the home;
the most common action taken was to discuss it with friends (58%) and family (53%);
19% of women who experienced physical violence contacted the police;
15% of women who experienced sexual violence contacted the police;
women who experienced violence from a stranger were most likely to report to police; and
women who were assaulted by a current partner were least likely to report to the police.
I will leave you with a quote by Kate Gilmore: "Violence against women is a human rights scandal of unparalleled dimension; it is a cultural, social and political malignancy rooted in prejudice, bigotry and discrimination whose eradication must be sought without reservation, without equivocation, and without delay."
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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