Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Exercising our rights: women, violence and freedom

By Evelyn Tsitas - posted Wednesday, 25 March 2015


A bomb goes off. A machine gun is fired into a crowd. Hostages are held and killed in a café siege.  When an act of terrorism occurs, the message from authorities after the dust has settled is loud and clear – do not change the way you live, do not give into fear. That way the terrorists will have won.

However, when an act of violence occurs against women, the message is different. Simply by existing in the physical environment, we put ourselves at risk. We must curb our behaviour. Stay indoors. Be invisible. It is the only way to be safe.

In Melbourne the murder of Doncaster schoolgirl Masa Vukotic, 17, has caused the media and the public to question whether women can ever exist safely in society.

Advertisement

On Tuesday March 17, Masa left her home at 6.45 pm for her regular evening stroll. She was stabbed to death less than a kilometre from where she lived, in a middle class suburban Melbourne suburb.

As reported in The Age (March 20), Homicide squad chief Detective Inspector Mick Hughes told ABC Radio National that people ‘particularly women’ shouldn’t be alone in parks. Social media was quick to respond. Female commentators were rightly outraged.

Melbourne radio presenter Neil Mitchell jumped to his defence, saying that Inspector Hughes "was saying the bleeding obvious".

"It was a fair and reasonable thing to say - it's not nice, it's very sad, but we all have to be increasingly cautious.”

So, Neil Mitchell – is it fair and reasonable to say that women perhaps shouldn’t be alone anywhere? And how exactly do we prevent that from happening? When I was only a year or two older than Masa Vukotic, I caught a train into university just after morning peak hour. Busy reading my lecture notes, I didn’t notice that the train carriage suddenly emptied, leaving me alone with a man. It was only when I glanced up to check how close the train was to the city that I saw the man was blatantly masturbating and leering at me.

This was the era before iPods, so I didn’t have earphones in but I was reading. Am I to blame for not noticing what was happening until it was too late? And what could I have done? I thought of jumping off at the next stop, but I didn’t know the suburb, and the approaching platform was deserted, and if I got off, would the man have followed? Let me tell you what I felt – paralysed by fear. And this was not a man who was stabbing me to death. And this was at 10 am in the morning, on a weekday. I was going to university, not a nightclub, and it was winter in Melbourne, I was not dressed provocatively, I was dressed for warmth.

Advertisement

I was simply, like other women who have been randomly killed and attacked, suddenly within some person’s radar. Exactly like the hostages in the Sydney Lindt Café siege last December, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As noted by Melissa Davey in The Guardian Australia, “When someone [like Hughes] with considerable influence and power chooses to perpetuate myths about what puts women in danger and who is to blame for that, their status means people are listening.”

Melissa Davey called on Inspector Hughes to revoke his remarks. But the public are concerned. On March 20 The Age published interviews with locals who agreed they were concerned about their children’s safety – daughters in particular. One resident revealed he would now be driving his 21 year old daughter to and from university each day. Another young woman said the attack had installed a deep sense of fear and was causing her to skip late university lectures so she wouldn’t be on the streets after dark.

This fear was echoed in the Herald Sun (March 20) in a short interview grab with a school student from the area who knew the murdered schoolgirl and who said his mother wouldn’t let him leave the house or walk around Doncaster alone; “And I’m a guy. Whereas with a girl, it’s a lot worse, because they find it harder to defend themselves.”

Growing up as a Greek Australian girl my Aussie friends would laugh at my female cousins who had to be chaperoned everywhere they went. It seems the world has turned to this suffocating and closeted protection of women with police encouraging ‘females’ to walk together. Do not be alone is the message.

Yet keeping women ‘safe’ inside their houses, locked away, is not the answer. In the fairy tale, Rapunzel was locked away in a castle and fetishized. We do women collectively more harm than good if we banish them from the streets. And we must not forget that most often, violence against women is committed in the home, by someone close to them.

To say Masa Vukotic’s murder is close to home is for me quite literal – I live a suburb away from the murder site, I have friends who send their daughters to the same school that Masa attended, and I have a teenage children similar ages. My heart goes out to her parents.

Yet the murder has also made me question the issues of personal safety in an age of helicopter parenting. I am not going to demand my sons stop using public transport or having some independence as they move around the physical environment that is their city. Not because they are sons, not daughters, but because this was one awful but random act of violence and I cannot protect them from such evil by locking them up.

And yet in the fall out from Masa Vukotic’s murder, what comes up time and time again is that while we as adults are prepared to take risks, we will not take risks with our children. At a friend’s place for dinner the week of the murder, the meal was abruptly ended as the parents dashed off to get their son from the train station in a bustling, well serviced middle class suburb – at 9 pm. The young man in question is 20 years old and in tertiary education. His mother is a lawyer.

“You can’t be too careful these days,” she said. “Not after the murder – attackers could be anywhere.”

We rightly cast a critical eye over knee jerk reactions to hand over our freedom as a society when an act of terrorism explodes in our midst. News reports always follow of communities defiantly going back to places of such carnage and reclaiming the space, refusing to stop freely participating in society.

According to Premier Mike Baird, the reopening of the Lindt café in Sydney three months after 17 hostages were held in the café by gunman Man Haron Monis was an ‘incredibly important step’ for the city. (The Age, March 21)

But we also need to embrace the fact that this determination to move forward and reclaim the space holds true for attacks on women as well. As a single woman who catches public transport at night, who travels overseas alone, and enjoys walking after work, I am careful not to put myself in obviously dangerous situations, yet I refuse to curb my freedom just to be ‘safe’.

And yet – I do appreciate that I need to be sensible. I am realistic – there are certain places and times I do not feel safe in wandering alone, and no amount of protesting such as the long running Reclaim the Night marches, and SlutWalks, will change that.

Melissa Davey writes  “It is up to men not to harm, not women to change their behaviour.” And yet, I cannot but help feel that this is also an unrealistic response to the situation. The men who attack and kill women on the streets are not indicative of all men, which is why Inspector Hughes’ comments about women not being safe by themselves in public spaces is so concerning.

Evil and violence are part of our lives and no amount of protection will stop random attacks of extreme violence from happening. Instead of reigning in women’s freedom as a ‘realistic response’ to attacks, we must expect and demand that women be visible and able to participate fully in society without being cowered by fear or asked to change their perfectly acceptable behaviours – such as going for a walk without a chaperone.

No woman in Australia should have to succumb to the fear of violence by being banished from the streets. Just as no one – male or female – should have to be banished from our streets and cafes because of acts of terrorism.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

94 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Dr Evelyn Tsitas works at RMIT University and has an extensive background in journalism (10 years at the Herald Sun) and communications. As well as crime fiction and horror, she writes about media, popular culture, parenting and Gothic horror and the arts and society in general. She likes to take her academic research to the mass media and to provoke debate.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Evelyn Tsitas

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Evelyn Tsitas
Article Tools
Comment 94 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy