Melburnians are fed up that little has changed since the Jill Meagher murder, writes Wendy Tuohy

MELBOURNE’S outpouring of fury after the death of Eurydice Dixon is more than an expression of grief and despair it is the roar of a crowd fed up with the sense that little has changed since the murder of Jill Meagher, writes Wendy Tuohy.

JILL Meagher, Masa Vukotic, Eurydice Dixon: three young women walking near their homes, expecting to be safe.

Three young women with everything ahead of them, killed.

Meagher and Vukotic had their lives taken by men they did not know. A young man has been charged with the rape and murder of Dixon. The community’s outpouring of fury after her death while walking home from a comedy gig is more than an expression of grief and despair.

THOUSANDS UNITE AT VIGIL FOR EURYDICE DIXON

ELLIS DEDICATES WIN TO EURYDICE DIXON

It is the roar of a crowd fed up with the sense little has changed since thousands marched up Sydney Rd, Brunswick, to protest against tolerance of violence after the rape and murder of Jill Meagher.

We are fed up with the fact women still live in fear in their homes and on the streets.

We’re fed up with the fact the death toll of women dying at the hands of violent men is stubbornly stable at one woman a week.

Eurydice Dixon. Picture: Supplied

We’re sick of the anxiety we know we should not feel, but do, about our teen daughters launching into the world without us there to keep watch.

According to the researchers at Counting Dead Women Australia, in 2018, men have been charged with the deaths of 26 women. In the case of one more victim, the killer’s gender is yet to be determined.

Mothers and fathers feel powerless, and women across age groups are outraged that this keeps happening after decades of effort to get the message through that violence against women — and the sexist attitudes that foster it — are simply unacceptable.

Thousands gathered tonight at the park where Dixon’s body was found. They were grieving for a woman lost to what has aptly been described as an “epidemic” of violence against women in Australia, overwhelmingly carried out by victims’ intimate male partners or other men.

The Premier has been quick to respond with visible signs of action but CCTVs and foot patrols won’t stamp this out. The fact the one-woman-a-week toll grinds on does suggest our community tolerates a certain level of violence against women, or violence against women in certain circumstances. Changing this is the real work.

Thousands of people attended the Reclaim Princes Park vigil tonight. Picture: Jason Edwards

The fact our first female Lord Mayor in 30 years (elected hot on the heels of a sexual harassment scandal that unseated her predecessor), 52-year-old Sally Capp, confesses she is too afraid for her safety to walk after dark is a stinging symptom of a problem that needs to be named: gendered violence.

Expert researchers in the causes and potential cures to our problem with violence against women tell us attitudes to women are among the most powerful factors promoting a climate in which violence thrives.

Addressing these is not as TV-friendly as the sight of a guy in a cherry picker mounting cameras, and is even less appealing politically, because it involves confronting the uncomfortable fact that fatal use of violence is predominantly a male problem in our muscular culture, and that our attitudes towards women fuel it.

As hard as it is to hear for those of us with men all around us who would never commit violence on a girl or woman, when the Premier called for men to change behaviours, he was right.

Premier Daniel Andrews and his wife Catherine Andrews pay their respects at the vigil. Photo: Michael Dodge/Getty Images

No one with a boy — and I have two wonderful teenage boys — wants boys and men vilified, isolated, shamed, ridiculed or in any way forced to the margins of the discussion around stopping the rolling toll on women. We need to be in this tent together. Many invaluable male allies already are.

But, silly gender-culture wars aside, we need to acknowledge that, as RMIT criminologist and Our Watch board member Dr Anastasia Powell told the Herald Sun, it is “gendered norms” around the use of violence that must be acknowledged and combated.

Both women and men in Australia are far more likely to be killed by violent men than violent women.

Dr Powell identifies a root cause as “the way our culture sets (violence) up as a way for men to express and experience emotion and masculinity”, and reminds us it benefits men and boys, too, to “unpack harmful notions” around violence as an accepted norm.

If the death of another young woman results in no more than political point scoring and Right-Left screaming matches, it will have been just another waste.

If we can finally open our ears and minds to the fact we need to all commit to addressing attitudes to women, and to violence, in an honest way — including accepting the gendered nature of much of it — then maybe we can start to bring this bloody toll down.

WENDY TUOHY IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST
[e-mail]

MORE WENDY TUOHY