It’s quite surreal, this is Australia, where we have arts festivals and sport and flat screen TVs and make jokes about democracy sausages. We have a rule of law and due process and elections. It is incomprehensible that here, in Australia, a 23 year old rape victim would be unable to find medical attention, trauma counselling, police reports or access to a lawyer, or that she could be refused help terminating a pregnancy that was a result of rape. That she would be deliberately denied those things by our government, to further its political ends, is unfathomable.
And yet, this is exactly what happened to Abyan, who was whisked out of Australia on a government charted plane on Friday, without having seen a doctor, specifically to ensure she did not have access to due legal process.
She had been begging for access to an abortion. Begging. For an abortion. After being raped.
She was ignored for weeks, but finally she was brought to Australia, her lawyer, George Newhouse, says she didn’t see a doctor on Nauru for weeks after the rape but when the government finally agreed to bring her back to Australia she was assessed by a doctor as being too ill to fly, she’d lost 10 kilograms and could barely stand. How does a pregnant rape victim become that ill without getting medical care?
She was here for only a few days, and she says she did not see doctor in that time:
I have been very sick. I have never said thate [sic] I did not want a termination
I never saw a doctor. I saw a nurse at a clinic but there was no counselling. I [also] saw a nurse at Villawood but there was no interpreter. I asked but was not allowed to talk with my lawyer.
Now she is back on Nauru, Newhouse says the only option available to her that “she will be forced to have the baby on the island”.
The unconscionable actions taken against a pregnant rape victim have had some public attention, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
Despite the fact that the Nauruan government released her real name, the Australian media has consistently referred to her by a pseudonym, for her own protection. Abyan. Sounds a bit foreign doesn’t it? And she’s an asylum seeker, not an Australian. After years of othering by Labor and Coalition governments, asylum seekers have become so dehumanised in Australian eyes that it’s difficult to to turn that around in the public perception and show her as a person, a young woman, as human and real as any 23 year old we see in our homes, our offices, our streets.
But what if her name was Jennifer or Emma? What if she had white skin and blue eyes and a job as a hairdresser? How would we react to a 23 year old woman from one of our major cities’ leafy suburbs who’d been raped, ignored, refused access to doctors, lawyers and counsellors?
It’s impossible to know because that would never happen to Jennifer or Emma, but if anything even close to it did happen all those politicians who’ve jumped on the violence against women bandwagon would be chasing cameras down the street to get on the record expressing their disgust and outrage.
Disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, September, 2015
Equal treatment of women, to me, is not a marginal issue or a population group or a portfolio where you go through the substance of an issue or the economy, and you say ‘oh, we’ll see if it affects women too’.
Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, August, 2015
Where are those staunch defenders of women now?
George Newhouse, Abyan’s lawyer, was on Radio National this morning, he was unequivocal that Abyan was not planning to ask for permanent resettlement in Australia, she’s not gaming the system or running a racket; she’s sick, traumatised, confused and desperate for help. She just wanted to talk to a doctor and a counsellor before going ahead with an abortion. In NSW it’s a legal requirement that women wanting an abortion have those things. The Australian government refused to allow Abyan access to services mandated for Australian women because they were afraid her lawyers might ensure she was given due process under Australian law if she did.
How did our immigration policy become so draconian that the Immigration Minister can brutalise a pregnant rape victim and have no qualms defending his actions with Stop The Boats rhetoric? How did our community become so desensitised to the brutality meted out to vulnerable women who come here legally seeking asylum that the government knows it can treat people this way and fear no political fallout?
How much worse can this get? A man was murdered, children have been sexually abused, women raped, men beaten, and now this. And still the government, in collusion with the opposition, claims this is the moral thing to do, that defending Australia from desperate people seeking asylum from savagery justifies more savagery in response.
There will undoubtedly come a time when this government, and the previous ones, will be called to account for their actions. As with the stolen generation, forced adoptions and institutionalised child abuse, officially mandated violence against asylum seekers will one day be the subject of public reprobation. But that will be too late for Abyan, and the hundreds of other men, women and children our government is abusing in our name.
And those of us who sit silently, ignoring the evidence, accepting the sophistry that justifies it and believing that legitimised systemic cruelty should pass without protest will be just as culpable.
I think though, that in the face of bipartisan intransigence, many of us who are repulsed by what has happened to Abyan, and all the others like her, don’t know what we can do to demand change. Julian Burnside has outlined a simple, quick, effective way of pushing the government and the opposition down a different path. His blog post from July this year is a quick how-to on writing to MPs about this issue in a way that demands response. Writing letters doesn’t really sound like much, but politicians are driven by public opinion. If they can be brought to understand that public opinion has turned against them they will act.
In an ideal world, governments would act on what they knew to be right, not what they thought would be popular. But we started down the path of institutionalised cruelty to legal asylum seekers because politicians thought it was a way to wedge each other and win votes. The only way to push them onto a different path is to make them see compassion as the vote winner.