Bobbit trial
The Lorena Bobbit verdict certainly speaks for the place of women in the criminal justice system. But its message is one of exclusion, dangerous and nebulous alternative sanctions and the consequences for good little girls trying to stand up to the men who rightly rule their world. A psychiatric evaluation may be lenient in the eyes of some for Lorena, but for other females entering the orbit of formal criminal justice, it is a harsh indictment, stereotyping women and aiming to dismantle their abilities to act, to oppose and to change.
A dealing with female criminality which separates the act and the blame, ascribing responsibility to psychological weakness, represents a significant disempowering of women. By denying that women are and can be violent, even in situations which compel it, and by employing covert mechanisms, named rehabilitation but more rightly called means of social control, females are left unable to challenge the formal discourse. Rather they are left outside it, a special category pitied rather than censured. A constructive contribution indeed — a real freedom!
While such subjective treatment allows room for consideration of the structural inequalities women face, most pertinent in cases of violence against those with whom they are sexually and emotionally involved, it has to be seen as promoting a double standard in the system similar to those female activists have worked so tirelessly to erase.
Female equality cannot and should not be restricted to merely those favourable, but must come across the board to include an equal responsibility for criminal wrongdoing. Women are victimised by patronising justice, which treats them as irresponsible and even defective within their gender for acting "out of bounds".
What happened to Lorena Bobbit at the hands of a relationship traditionally deemed secure and desirable is reprehensible, and this background deserves note as precipitating her behaviour. Yet I wonder if the criminal justice system has really served her, or thousands like her. The cause of women's oppression is hardly furthered by a media storm, eventually left in its teacup, or a verdict which ignores female reality, and treats us as somehow flawed for empowering ourselves in defence.
Michelle Phippard
Croydon North Vic
Racism sux
I am writing to respond to the billboard posters put out by the NSW Aboriginal Lands Council as a part of its racism sux campaign. One ad has a picture of a young woman with very Anglo features and the caption "They say I'm too pretty to be Aboriginal." I think that while trying to say that traditional Aboriginal features are not seen as beautiful, the ad seems to unconsciously perpetuate this myth of Anglo beauty by using a very attractive Anglo-looking woman to make its point.
Another ad has a picture of a white, blond haired man posing seductively, with the caption saying "Racism Sux". A central poster explains that the reason Shane is up on this poster is because he is not racist. The poster quotes from him "There's a guy on my football team called Sonny, he's Koori and it's no big deal." The Land Council supposedly sees this statement by Shane as a reason for putting him up on a poster to fight racism instead of an Aboriginal person.
Such attempts of the Land Council to buy their way into popular culture by using racist myths of that culture can never be useful in combating racism. If they are serious about fighting racism these posters should be full of pictures of Aboriginal people with traditional Aboriginal features and it should be celebrating these features precisely because racism in the mainstream media consists of a denigration or absence of these features.
Another worrying thing about the posters is their attitude to the strategy of change for Aboriginal people. In one poster the Land Council says that they see the task as being to "work towards self-sufficiency, and away from welfare dependency, by setting up an economic base for black Australians with businesses like shops, farms and factories."
There is an attempt to work within the current system, which perpetuates the whole idea of individual responsibility. It gives steam to the arguments of white racists who argue that Aboriginal people are poor because "they are all lazy." There is no individual solution to the fact that governments are more concerned about making concessions to mining companies than guaranteeing land rights and they are more concerned with putting a few token Aboriginals in positions of power than providing all Aboriginals with decent housing, education and jobs.
Sujatha Fernandes
Sydney
Affirmative action
Popular misconceptions of Affirmative Action are rife. These programs originated in the USA, where the divisions between rich and poor, homeless and housed, the educated and the ignored are stark.
Affirmative Action programs were introduced by liberal progressives in an attempt to redress the imbalance that white male privilege, based on slavery, had created in the past. These programs have largely failed. Black youth are more likely to be in jail, unemployed and homeless than any other group in the US. More recently, as a result of the demands of the women's movement for equality of opportunity, Affirmative Action has been applied to women as well as men.
In Australia, with its male whitist immigration policies (Aboriginals only received the vote in '67, married women were banned from teaching in WA until '73) Affirmative Action is being popularly constructed as "favouring women".
Nothing could be further than the truth. Firstly, AA policies are designed to redress unequal treatment in the past of all marginalised groups, be they black, migrants, NESBs, or disabled. All of these groups include women (roughly half the world's population after all) and of these groups women form the largest section of non white males.
Is it an accident, do you suppose, that the majority of powerful positions in industry, education, politics, you name it, are held by ageing white men? No, non whites and other groups have been systematically discriminated against and excluded from power. And yet, as Affirmative Action becomes a possibility in Australia we start to hear that AA "favours women", that merit (read white male merit) is the only criterion and that women shouldn't really want to take on men's positions, it isn't natural, it's unfeminine, it's not comfortable.
AA does not favour women, but without AA white men will continue to be greatly favoured, enormously privileged and powerful. Tony Benn, born a Lord, drove the British press to a frenzy by not only walking away from his lordly privilege, but by actively espousing women's rights and, saints preserve us, socialism. He lost his place on the LP exec to a woman, and he was proud to stand aside.
By enabling the less privileged to be heard in decision making bodies, minorities and women are not favoured, their struggle is just as uphill, often working two jobs and taking twice as long to get half as far as the privileged, but white male hegemony is reduced; this is what they fear.
Jane Widdess
Victoria Park WA
Lurid
From the lurid cover and article entitled "Australia's Refugee Scandal", through to the spurious arguments and surely libelous editorial on multiculturalism and the total misrepresentations contained in the "Viewpoint" of a triple J radio interview with eminent scientist and environmentalist Paul Ehlich and environmental group Aesp — the level of "reporting" in issue 131 GLW could only be ascribed to either the gutter press or to blatant propaganda for the socialist-left Agenda. As informed, honest and accurate reporting, it was abysmal.
If humanity survives the rapidly escalating environmental catastrophe now threatening the planet's very existence and there is anyone left to write a history of Australia, what s/he will see, looking back through time, is a small population with a flourishing economy, whose customs, centring around trusteeship of the land they believed themselves a part of, sustained them for 50,000 years.
Then comes a blip. For a mere 200 years, people flock from all corners of the world with one aim in mind — individual wealth. To this end, every resource is cut down, dug up and shipped out as rapidly as possible. For a very short while there is peace and prosperity.
We in 1994 are now at a cross-road. The cost of our brief, unprecedented prosperity has exacted a terrible toll — our soils are in crisis, our waterways polluted and depleted, our coasts, forests, wildlife and flora either destroyed or seriously threatened. Unemployment is rife, social cohesion, disintegrating.
Time is short. We do not have 1,000 years or even 50. At the most we have 20 years in which to act.
I doubt anyone in GLW has bothered to read the works of Ted Trainer, a humble and humane man, speaker at the 1992 AESP National Conference. His Abandon Affluence sees the only path to sustainability as involving a total reversal of lifestyle, consumption, economic and work practises. This book makes the "share the wealth" mentality of the socialist-left appear what it is — a simplistic anachronism.
Diana Evans
Balwyn Vic