David Penberthy: Trump has cheapened the Kavanaugh conversation
IN a political climate where extreme voices are dominant, this squalid debate is an assault on liberal, humanist values. It will have repercussions around the globe, including here, writes David Penberthy.
THE debasement of human interaction is now so acute that something as serious as the question of sexual assault is being reduced to a form of barracking.
We are now encouraged to cheer for the man or the woman not on the basis of evidence, but where our prejudices lie.
I have no opinion on the guilt or innocence of President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is defending sexual assault claims brought by his 1980s high school contemporary Dr Christine Blasey Ford.
Being half a world away, with no knowledge of the veracity of the allegations, any thoughts I might have on the specifics of this case are without merit.
But the political debate swirling around this case, principally due to the extraordinary intervention of the most powerful politician on the planet, US President Donald Trump, has huge repercussions for the manner in which sexual assault cases are regarded and dealt with right around the world, including here in Australia.
I believe his comments offering some generalised take-out from this case are extraordinarily irresponsible, as they not only perpetuate but amplify the dangerous notion that every man should live in fear of a conniving woman who’s hellbent on besmirching his good name.
Trump’s comments also have the effect of trivialising or even erasing the proven fact that women suffer greatly at the hands of that minority of shocking blokes who don’t know how to behave.
Trump’s initial remarks about this Supreme Court battle were commendably circumspect.
The President even paid tribute to Dr Ford as a credible woman.
Since then though, in the hyper-charged American political environment, he has decided to go on the attack, rubbishing her testimony and offering a broader series of observations about the nature of sexual assault.
“You could be somebody that was perfect your entire life, and somebody could accuse you of something — doesn’t necessarily have to be a woman.
“But somebody could accuse you of something, and you’re automatically guilty,” the President said.
“It’s a very scary time for young men in America, when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of. This is a very, very, very difficult time,” he said.
The notion that there has never been a scarier time to be a man is not one that you would share with the family of Jill Meagher, nor the family of Eurydice Dixon, nor the families of the legions of other women who are no longer with us on account of male violence.
It’s also a notion that you would not share with the many thousands of women who are still alive but battling demons brought on by sexual assaults that have failed to find any redress within the criminal-justice system.
Trump’s comments reflect that marginal but resonant stream of male thought, found most commonly in the so-called men’s rights movements, that the system is now skewed so heavily against blokes that we can get fitted up willy-nilly for any imagined misdemeanour as part of some vast feminist conspiracy.
When you take a dispassionate look at the statistics, it is easy to see that this assertion is, not to put too fine a point on it, total crap.
There was a powerfully depressing piece of analysis conducted by news.com.au last year showing how it is hard to the point of almost impossible to secure a conviction for sexual assault within the Australian courts.
Freelance journalist Jane Gilmore interviewed a raft of rape survivors who had endured completely pointless trials which succeeded largely in panting them as reckless tarts who were almost complicit in their own attacks.
The article was framed around a comparative study by the Crime Statistics Agency that found that in 2009 and 2010, of the 3500 rapes reported to Victorian Police, just 3 per cent ended in a court conviction.
In NSW in 2015 there were 10,944 reports of sex offences made to NSW police, 1603 of which made it court, with 932 offenders found guilty for a conviction rate of about 5 per cent.
Surely any reasonable person of any gender would look at these statistics and say that maybe there’s never been a scarier time to be a woman, rather than a man?
The comments from Trump are not surprising — after all, here’s a bloke who was caught on tape boasting that when you are rich and powerful you can grab women on the crotch and get away with it.
But what surprises me is how many people are so keen to latch onto these assertions and hail Trump’s comments as pointing to a general truth.
Sure, I have seen a handful of cases over the years where decent men have been fitted up over baseless sexual assault claims as payback for failed relationships. But the overwhelming and statistically-proven truth when it comes to sexual assault is that it’s the women who are almost always the ones getting attacked, and the men almost always get away with it, because women don’t want to go through the horror of testifying or are torn apart by defence lawyers when they do.
In a political climate where the extremes are becoming the dominant voices — where you are either Alt Right or Antifa — this squalid debate is merely the latest assault on liberal, humanist values.
It is a bleak development for those who believe that everyone should be treated with respect, rather than through the prism of some idiotic, undergraduate gender war.