What women want

While International Women’s Day is a time to celebrate what we have achieved, it’s even more important to look at the work we still need to do. We ask five Australian women what drives them to keep fighting

LAW STUDENT

BRITTANY HIGGINS

on paying it forward

The truth is: most women either have a story like mine or know somebody with a story like mine. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in five Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced some form of sexual assault. If you are a woman of colour, those statistics are even higher.

In 2021, it was moving to see women and men from all backgrounds coming together across the nation, taking to the streets and demanding change when it came to sexual violence. March 4 Justice and the national conversation about general violence was cathartic and saw the culture of silence fall to the wayside with an outpouring of disclosures from women who finally felt heard.

While 2022 was a year fraught with change and challenge, we saw consent education receive record- breaking funding, state legislative changes to affirmative consent, stealthing criminalised in various jurisdictions and the passage of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Work recommendations for improvements to workplace harassment legislation.

Inversely, the past year highlighted the costs associated with coming forward for victim-survivors. We’ve seen in various high-profile cases how defamation law, the justice system and media reporting can still operate in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases to silence victims on these issues.

We know the majority of women who have experience gendered violence do not report their allegations due to shame, victim blaming and fear. In Australia it’s estimated that only 14 per cent of sexual-violence victims report their assault to police. And the reality is that even when sexual assault is reported, prosecutions and convictions remain unconscionably low.