Statistics tell us what women already know through lived experience: gender-based violence overwhelmingly impacts women at home, at work, and in every corner of public life.
We talk about family violence, we teach young people about coercive control, we ban the use of NDAs in workplaces, and we invest in respectful-relationships education. And yet, despite doing everything we claim is “the right thing,” we continue to confront events that shake our faith in the society we live in and the patriarchal systems underpinning it.
Last week in Victoria, a man from a high-profile family was convicted of rape. His identity, despite the victim publicly releasing her own statement, will be suppressed for three months at the request of his legal team. The suppression order is not to protect the victim. It is to protect him.
What followed was almost more disturbing than the suppression itself: media reports that read like character-driven pleas for sympathy. Stories detailing the man’s “quivering hands,” his “head in his hands,” his “sobbing,” his “loved ones gathered around,” the “tears in his mother’s eyes,” and his “private time with family.” The narrative being constructed, perhaps unconsciously or perhaps not, is one designed to humanise the perpetrator and soften the edges of what is otherwise an act of extreme violence.
This pattern is part of a broader issue in media reporting on gendered violence. Too often, headlines centre the man’s sporting achievements, professional reputation or “fall from grace,” while the woman he assaulted becomes a footnote. Language choices minimise the violence with words like “sex scandal,” “encounter,” or “misconduct” used while the perpetrator is described as a “promising young man” or “well-loved figure.” Victims, meanwhile, are scrutinised, anonymised or simply erased. These editorial decisions are not neutral. They reflect and reinforce the belief that male reputations deserve protection, that male potential matters more than women’s safety, and that violence is an unfortunate event rather than a deliberate act rooted in power.
I am a mother of teenage boys. I can well imagine the heartbreak, fear and grief I would feel if one of my children were in serious trouble. But I am also the mother of a teenage daughter, and I know that her life could be irreversibly shattered because a man, often a man with power, privilege or social standing, chooses to violate her.
When we suppress the identity of a convicted offender, when we allow journalists to centre his tears instead of her trauma, we are not delivering justice. We are safeguarding the abuser. And we are reinforcing the message that those with the right connections, the right lawyers, and the right family name will be insulated from the consequences that everyday women are forced to live with.
Our systems continue to fail women.
And those failures are not isolated to criminal courts. They are, as feminist advocates have long argued, woven through every institution built on patriarchal foundations including the family law system.
Journalist and advocate Sherele Moody recently reported on a family violence survivor who has lodged a formal complaint with the Chief Justice of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia after a judge’s deeply inappropriate conduct during her parenting case.
This woman—self-represented, already navigating the terror of confronting the man who abused her—was met with comments that would be shocking if they weren’t so depressingly familiar. The judge described the case as “he said, she said,” made a barking-dog gesture at her, and told her to “think biblically” about her abuser. When she raised concerns about repeated breaches of parenting orders and concerns directly related to her child’s safety, the judge told her he would “let them fight it out.”
She says he refused to look at her evidence. He dismissed her. He belittled her. He interrupted her repeatedly while allowing her ex-partner, represented by counsel, to speak uninterrupted.
The result? A courtroom environment so intimidating and hostile that she left feeling “distressed, silenced and unsupported”, the exact opposite of what a trauma-informed legal system is meant to deliver.
This is what patriarchy looks like in practice. Not always loud, not always overt, but quietly powerful, deeply entrenched, and devastating in its impact. It cloaks perpetrators in sympathy and anonymity. It demands emotional composure from traumatised women while excusing men for their violence. It upholds institutional norms that prioritise the comfort of abusers over the safety of victims.
And it tells women, again and again, that when we seek justice, we should be prepared to fight not only the men who harmed us but the systems that protect them.
Until we confront the patriarchal logic that underpins these institutions, until we stop sympathising with perpetrators and start centring survivors, until we build systems truly designed to keep women safe, the failures will continue and women will continue to pay the price.