We are told, over and over, that we are living through a culture war. That the fabric of this country is under threat. That migrants need to assimilate faster, adopt “our” values quicker, prove their commitment to everything that supposedly makes Australia great.
Politicians meanwhile, are building entire campaigns on it.
But a single graphic, shared this week by advocate Sherele Moody, founder of Australian Femicide Watch, quietly dismantles the whole argument. It does not need commentary to land like a gut punch. It is just headlines, stacked one on top of the other, from a single seven day stretch in this country:
- One in three Australian boys believe gender equality has “gone too far.”
- A Sydney private school facing new allegations of a gang sexual assault.
- The Sydney Swans announcing sanctions over an incident that led to sexual assault allegations against one of its players.
- Three Scots College students charged with the sexual assault of a fourteen-year-old girl in a laneway.
- Two Perth men jailed for raping a fourteen-year-old girl in the back of a van.
- A Brisbane musician accused of murdering a woman in her own home.
- And women in politics publicly questioning whether a career in public life is worth the death threats, rape threats and violence they regularly experience.
If you want to know where the real threat to Australian values sits, it is not at the border. It is in laneways, in vans, in school corridors, in football clubrooms, and in the homes women are supposedly safest in. The rhetoric about migrants having to “accept our culture” only works if the culture we are protecting is actually one worth protecting. But what does this week tell us?
I keep coming back to the Sydney Swans case, because as more details drip out, the more horrific it becomes. What started as a vague reference to “an incident” has unfurled into allegations that are genuinely disturbing, and alongside it, the usual chorus has arrived on cue.
Commentary about what the woman does for work with insinuations dressed up as questions. The tired, predictable slut shaming that shows up whenever a woman accuses a powerful man or group of men of anything. Our appetite for protecting their reputations still outweighs our appetite for protecting women.
Social media used to get blamed for manufacturing outrage, for being a vacuum that distorted reality. I don’t think that is true anymore.
It is a mirror. Scroll through the replies under any story involving an alleged sexual assault by a footballer, a private school boy, a man with status, and you will see exactly what a third of Australian boys believe when they say gender equality has gone too far. You will see exactly why women in parliament are quietly deciding the threats are not worth it. The internet is not inventing misogyny, it is just showing us where it already lives.
Sherele Moody put it plainly in her own post reflecting on the week: “In my 55 years, I have never felt such fear for women and girls” as now.
She is not being dramatic. She has spent years documenting how often women in this country are killed, and still she says the volume of violence just in these seven days has shaken her. Moody also makes the point that matters most here, that these headline cases are only the ones we hear about. As she wrote, there are “thousands of acts of sexual violence happening every day across the country” that will simply never make the media.
That is the part that should stop us cold. Not the week we just had, but the thousands of weeks like it.
I am exhausted. I am exhausted by having to clarify “not all men” before I am allowed to say that most of the men doing this harm are, in fact, men. I am exhausted by watching patriarchal structures protect footballers, protect private school boys, protect politicians, while women are still being asked to justify their clothing, their job, their behaviour, their right to simply exist in public without violence attached to it. I am exhausted by men who have never carried a child, never feared walking to their car at night, never been told their lived experience is exaggerated, still believing they are entitled to legislate our bodies and dismiss our fear.
As a country we treat cost of living and tax reform as crises, and they are. But sexism, misogyny and gendered violence sit right alongside them, a national emergency we keep choosing not to name, let alone fund or fight the way we fight everything else.
Sherele Moody’s graphic, seven headlines stacked one on top of the other from a single week, is not an anomaly. It is a mirror held up to who we are right now. As Audre Lorde once said, “your silence will not protect you”. Silence has not protected these women or girls, and it will not protect the next ones either.
Enough.
Source: Instagram, @sherelemoodyfemicidewatch, Australian Femicide Watch / The Red Heart Movement.