Winds of change blow cold through corridors of power

Prime Minister Scott Morrison with Australian of the Year Award winner and sexual abuse victims’ advocate Grace Tame. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

After watching Brittany Higgins tell the nation about being raped in Parliament House, I quietly scooped my jaw up off the floor and remembered the numbers. One in three women will experience some form of sexual or physical violence after they turn 18. In the past 12 months, 200,000 Australian adults self-reported being sexually assaulted. Of course it’s happening in Parliament House.

The sexual assault saga unfolding within government right now has spawned a national chant calling for “cultural change”.

I would like to point out that what has happened in Canberra in recent weeks is the definition of culture change. Women working in the highest echelons of power, finally feeling supported enough to call out rape in their place of work, is culture change in motion.

As much as we need to continue the push for our community to adapt and transform, we also need to stop and acknowledge profound, genuine change when it does occur. We need to take a good look around because, in many ways, this is what we’ve been working towards. A community where it doesn’t matter who you are or what horse you rode in on, there are real consequences for sexual violence. If you rape someone, or you are accused of raping someone, it will likely end up public knowledge. Welcome to a strange, new land.

The #MeToo movement in parliament came too late for the woman who reported allegedly being raped by Attorney-General Christian Porter in 1988. She took her own life last year, following a path well trodden by sexual assault complainants. It hit close to home for me, with my own sister suffering a similar fate last year. She died of a drug overdose two weeks after disclosing she had been raped by a close male relative. These women could not imagine a place or time where it would ever be possible to achieve relief or closure. They couldn’t imagine a society that would rally behind them. They saw no way out.

For my sister, the relief only ever came in a packet or a bottle. A needle in the vein. A blade slicing through the skin. Cultural change is happening but it’s come at a dreadful price. It’s taken many dead women over the years to point out that victims of sexual assault are serving a life sentence while there are little to no ramifications for perpetrators.

I trawled through publicly available ABS court statistics and survey data to find that approximately 2 per cent of all sexual offenders will be convicted in any given year, with not all those receiving a custodial sentence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just weeks before Brittany Higgins, there was Grace Tame. Intelligent, fiery and unashamedly complex. We don’t feel sorry for her, we want to be her. Every time she opens her mouth she crushes our collective myth of what victims of sexual assault should look and sound like.

The government unwittingly selected a weapon of a woman who would be used against them; one of our nation’s highest honours bestowed upon a sexual assault victim. The Prime Minister shaking her hand and emboldening these women within his own ranks, quite rightly, to come forward.

Our leadership thought sexual assault was some “other” that they could safely raise up but hold at arm’s length. What started as a politically correct show of support has ended up as a reality they weren’t equipped to deal with. There was no party line. They legitimised this issue in a way that no other organisation in this country could. And now there is no going back.

In the past women have reached out into the abyss and we have given them a carefully maintained silence that left them feeling stigmatised and unsafe to seek justice. Not anymore. Women who report are believed and rapists, at the very least, lose their job.

If this story has raised issues for you, contact Lifeline on 131 114.