Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating—until one day she says her boss went too far.
Chase turned to the local police for help, but what happened next further complicated her life. Her quest for justice triggered a legal battle that dragged on for years, eventually reaching the US Supreme Court.
“This man has caused me to lose so much money that I had to move out of my place,” Chase says. “I went to a doctor, I had to get put on more medicine for my PTSD and my anxiety attacks and all that. My whole life has been flipped upside down.”
Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon spent years taking a close look at cases across the country in which people reported sexual assaults to police, only to find themselves investigated. In this hour, we explore one case and hear how police interrogated an alleged perpetrator, an alleged victim, and each other.
De Leon’s investigation is also the subject of the documentary Victim/Suspect, streaming on Netflix, which won the 2024 Emmy Award for outstanding documentary research.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2023.
By Maxim Bock, Queensland University of Technology
Fiji journalist Felix Chaudhary recalls how the harassment began: “Initially, I was verbally warned to stop.”
“And not only warned but threatened as well. I think I was a bit ‘gung-ho’ at the time and I kind of took it lightly until the day I was taken to a particular site and beaten up.
“I was told that my mother would identify me at a mortuary. That’s when I knew that this was now serious, and that I couldn’t be so blasé and think that I’m immune.”
Pressing risks of Chaudhary’s early career
Felix Chaudhary, now director of news, current affairs and sports at Fiji TV, and former deputy chief-of-staff at The Fiji Times, was detained and threatened several times during the period of government led by former Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama from 2007 to 2022.
Commodore Bainimarama, as he was known at the time, executed his military coup in December 2006 against Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and President Josefa IIoilo.
Although some media outlets were perceived as openly supporting the government then, not all relinquished their impartiality, Chaudhary explains.
“Some media organisations decided to follow suit. The one that I worked for, The Fiji Times, committed to remaining an objective and ethical media organisation.
“Everyone who worked there knew that at some point they would face challenges.”
Military impact on sugar industry
During the early days of the coup, Chaudhary was based in Viti Levu’s Western Division in the city of Lautoka, reporting about the impact of the military takeover of the sugar cane industry. It was there that he experienced some of his most severe harassment.
“It was just unfortunate that during the takeover, I was one of the first to face the challenges, simply because I was writing stories about how the sugar cane industry was being affected,” he says.
“I was reporting about how the military takeover was affecting the livelihoods of the people who depend on this industry. There are a lot of people who depend on sugar cane farming, and not necessarily just the farmers.
“I was writing from their perspective.”
A lot of countries, including Australia, in an effort to avoid appearing sympathetic to a government ruling through military dictatorship, turned their backs on Fiji, Chaudhary explains.
“These countries took a stand, and we respect them for that,” he says.
“However, a lot of aid that used to come in started to slow down, and assistance to the sugar industry, from the European Union, didn’t come through.
“The industry was struggling. But the Fijian government tried to maintain that everything was fine as they were in control.
‘Just not sustainable’
“It was just not sustainable. They didn’t have the resources to do it, and people were feeling the impact. This was around 2009. The military had been in power since 2006.”
Chaudhary chose to focus his writing on the difficulties faced by the locals: a view that was in direct contention with the military’s agenda.
He experienced a series of threats, including assurances of death if he continued to report on the takeover. His first encounter with the military saw him seized, driven to an unknown location, and physically assaulted.
Chaudhary soon realised this was not an isolated case and the threats on his life were far from empty.
“Other people, in addition to journalists, were taken into custody for many reasons. Some ended up dead after being beaten up. That’s when I knew that could happen to me,” he says.
“I figured I’d just continue to try and be as safe as possible.”
Chaudhary was later again abducted, threatened, and locked in a cell. No reason was given, no charges were laid, and he was repeatedly told that he might never leave.
Aware of military tactics
Having served in the Fiji military in 1987–1988, Chaudhary was aware of common military tactics, and knew what these personnel were capable of. Former army colleagues had also tried to warn him of the danger he was in.
“When I was taken in by the military, I was visited by two of my former colleagues. They told me if I didn’t stop, something was going to happen,” he says.
“That set the tone. It reminded me that I needed to be more careful.”
On another occasion, military personnel entered The Fiji Times offices and proceeded to forcefully arrest both Chaudhary, and his wife, the newspaper’s current chief-of-staff, Margaret Wise.
“The military entered the newsroom while we were both at work, demanded our phones and attacked [Margaret] physically. I came to her defence, and I was also attacked. These threats were not only to me, but to her as well.”
Chaudhary admires Margaret Wise’s incredible tenacity.
“She’s a very strong woman. Any other person might have wanted to run away from it all, but we both knew we had a responsibility to be the voice for those that didn’t have one,” he says.
Dictatorships have a ‘limited lifespan’
“She also knew that governments come and go, and that dictatorships only have a limited lifespan. On the other hand, media organisations have been here for decades, in our case, a century and a half. We knew we had to get through it.”
The pair supported each other and decided to restrict their social life in an effort to protect not only themselves, but their families as well.
Looking back, Chaudhary acknowledges the danger of that period, and questions whether he would have done the same thing again, if presented with a similar situation.
“I think I might have changed the way that I did things if I had thought about the livelihoods of the people working for The Fiji Times,” he says.
“I didn’t think about that at the time. Some people might say that was a bit reckless, and maybe it was.
“I kept thinking about my family, but then you have to think about the other families as well. Sometimes you have to make a stand for what is right, no matter what the consequences are.
“People think that’s bravery. It’s not really. It’s just doing what is right, and I’m glad I’m here today.
“I have a lot of respect for other people who went through what I went through and are still alive to tell the tale.”
Chaudhary maintains that anyone in a similar situation would do the same.
“What I do know is everybody, regardless of who they are, has the wanting to do what is right. And I think if presented with this sort of situation, people would take a stand,” he says.
Fiji TV dealing with harassment
Although journalists continue to experience incidents of harassment, the form of harassment has changed, with women often receiving the worst of it, Chaudhary explains.
“Harassment now is different. Back then, they had a licence to harass you, and your policies meant nothing, because they had the backing of the military,” he says.
“Nowadays, harassment is different in the sense that there is a lot of male leaders who feel like they have the right to speak to females however they want.”
Chaudhary, through his position at Fiji TV, has used his past experiences to shape the way he deals with cases of harassment, and especially when his female journalists are targeted.
“For us at Fiji TV, it’s about empowering the female journalists to be able to face these situations in a diplomatic way. They don’t take things personally, even if the attack is verbal and personal,” he says.
“Our journalists have to understand that these individuals are acting this way because the questions being asked are difficult ones.
“I’ve tried to make changes in the way they ask their questions. They are told not to lead with the difficult questions. You ask the more positive questions and set them in a good mood, and then move to the more difficult questions.
“The way you frame the questions has a lot to do with it as well.
“When the females ask, especially these sources get personal, they use gender as a way to not answer the question and just deflect it. So, now we have to be a bit more creative in how we ask.”
Things are improving
Nevertheless, Chaudhary maintains that things are improving, citing the professionalism of his female journalists.
“We are able to break a lot of stories, and it’s the female journalists doing it,” he says.
“They are facing this new era with this new government with the hope that things are more open and transparent.
The 2022 Fiji research report ‘Prevalence and Impact of Sexual Harassment on Female Journalists’. Image: Screenshot APR
“I’m really blessed to have four women who are very strong. They understand the need to be diplomatic, but they also understand the need to get answers to the questions that need to be asked.
“They are kind of on their own, with a little bit of guidance from me. We worked out how to handle harassment, and how to get the answers. They have kind of done it on their own.”
While asking the tough questions may be a daunting exercise, it is imperative if Fiji is to avoid making the same mistakes, Chaudhary explains.
“I think for me now, it’s just about sharing what happened in the past, and getting them to understand that if we don’t ask the right questions now, we could have a situation similar to that of the last 16 years.
“This could happen if we don’t hold the current government to account, and don’t ask the hard questions now.”
Fiji’s proposal to end sexual harassment
A 2022 research report, ‘Prevalence and Impact of Sexual Harassment on Female Journalists’, revealed that more than 80 per cent of Fijian female journalists have experienced physical, verbal and online sexual harassment during the course of their work.
The report by The University of the South Pacific’s Journalism Programme and Fiji Women’s Rights Movement also proposes numerous solutions that prioritise the safety and wellbeing of female journalists.
Acknowledging the report’s good intentions, Chaudhary argues that it hasn’t created any substantial change due to long-standing Fijian culture and social norms.
“The report was, for many people, an eye opener. For me, it wasn’t,” he says.
“Unfortunately, I work alongside some people who hold the view that because they have been in the industry for some time, they can speak to females however they want.
“There wasn’t necessarily any physical harassment, but in Fiji, we have a lot of spoken sexual innuendo.
“We have a relationship among Fijians and the indigenous community where if I’m from a certain village, or part of the country and you are from another, we are allowed to engage in colourful conversation.
“It’s part of the tradition and culture. It’s just unfortunate that that culture and tradition has also found its way into workplaces, and the media industry. So that was often the excuse given in the newsroom.
Excuse that was used
“Many say, ‘I didn’t mean that. I said it because she’s from this village, and I’m from there, so I’m allowed to.’ The intent may have been deeper than that, but that was the excuse that was used,” he says.
Chaudhary believes that the report should have sparked palpable policy change in newsrooms.
“It should have translated into engagement with different heads of newsrooms to develop policies or regulations within the organisation, aimed at addressing those issues specifically. This would ensure that young women do not enter a workplace where that culture exists.
“So, we have a report, which is great, but it didn’t turn into anything tangible that would benefit organisations.
“This should have been taken on board by government and by the different organisations to develop those policies and systems in order to change the culture because the culture still exists,” he says.
Maxim Bockis a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. Published in partnership with QUT.
Editor’s note: The author of this piece has requested to publish anonymously due to concerns about her safety and welfare. We know that victims who come forward – in Australia and around the world – often face relentless unwarranted public attack and criticism. BroadAgenda supports the writer and came to the considered judgement that it’s important to publish anyway.
I have a particular, personal interest in the topic of toxic parliaments and in the work that is underway to detoxify them. More on that in a second. But first to something that’s happening right now.
On 17 July 2024 I attended the launch of the new book Toxic Parliaments And What Can Be Done About Them by Marian Sawer and Maria Maley, both from the Australian National University (ANU). The event was hosted by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, with the keynote speech delivered by former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, followed by a panel discussion. You can listen to the discussion on YouTube.
Toxic Parliaments grew out of the workshop Parliament as a gendered workplace: Towards a new code of conduct, held at ANU in July 2021. The workshop also developed a model code of conduct which fed into the code of conduct eventually adopted by the Australian Parliament. Toxic Parliaments examines how the #MeToo movement and revelations of sexual harassment and bullying resulted in reform of parliamentary workplaces in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The book is open access and you can download it for free here.
Over mocktails and canapes after the launch, I chatted with people I knew and people I had just met. Some of the latter group asked me where I worked. I explained I’d previously worked at Parliament House, but don’t anymore. When they asked why not, I referred them back to the book’s title.
The entire story is long, complicated, and traumatic. I won’t go into it in any detail here because nobody wants a defamation lawsuit.
Let’s just say that I have experienced the most toxic elements of toxic parliaments. By that I mean rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination. Yes, I’ve managed to collect the full set of toxic parliamentary workplace experiences.
I realise that no one is giving out any medals for winning the Parliamentary Workplace Trauma Olympics, but if they were I would be among the frontrunners for a podium position.
For readers who may not have been following quite as closely as I have, I will backtrack a bit …
Kate Jenkins AO was the former Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Picture: UC
Set the Standard was effectively a more focused version of Respect@Work, targeted at the nation’s seat of power. It was initiated following media reports of sexual assault, sexual harassment and bullying in federal parliament, including former political staffer Brittany Higgins’s television interview in which she described her experience of being raped by a colleague at Parliament House.
Over 1700 people participated in the review. I was among them. The report included the headline figure that 51 per cent of all people in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces had experienced at least one incident of bullying, sexual harassment or actual or attempted sexual assault.
Upon its release, the Set the Standard report made news headlines not just in Australia, but around the world.
The report made 28 recommendations. Recommendation 2 was the establishment of a leadership taskforce to oversee the implementation of the other recommendations, ensuring ownership and accountability.
The Parliamentary Leadership Taskforce (PLT) was established in the 46th Parliament, and re-established in the current (47th) Parliament. It is made up of politicians from across the Parliament and has an independent chair. Following its initial establishment, the PLT implemented Recommendation 1, a Statement of Acknowledgement that included an apology for ‘the unacceptable history of workplace bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault’ in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces.
The Statement of Acknowledgement also contained the words: ‘We are fully committed to working across the Parliament to implement all of these recommendations within the timeframes proposed by Commissioner Jenkins.’
Progress on implementing Set the Standard
It has now been more than two-and-a-half years since Set the Standard was tabled, and more than two years since that commitment was made. The Parliament has not, as it turns out, implemented all the recommendations ‘within the timeframes proposed by Commissioner Jenkins.’
The delays have been criticised by the Greens and by some independent parliamentarians. By February 2024, less than half the 28 recommendations had been fully implemented. The explanation given for the delays by the responsible minister, Katy Gallagher, (who is also a member of the PLT) has been that ‘we are working hard to get it right.’
Kate Jenkins herself appears to be satisfied with this explanation. She praised the leadership shown by the PLT and the Presiding Officers, adding that she ‘disagrees vehemently’ with any media reporting that there has been no change in parliament since Set the Standard.
This may have been a reference to recent comments by independent senator Lidia Thorpe. Senator Thorpe has been a vocal critic of the toxic culture in Parliament House and claims there are people walking the corridors who have not been made accountable for their bad behaviour. While the government delays legislating the body that will investigate such issue and enforce penalties for perpetrators, I’d argue that her frustration is entirely understandable.
The long tail of trauma and the silencing of survivor voices
It is important to remember that the Set the Standard report only exists because brave people spoke out about their traumatic experiences in Australia’s parliament.
Those people demanded a safer workplace and genuine reform. The Australian public was outraged by the stories that emerged from the report and called on politicians to act.
Kate Jenkins and her team at the Australian Human Rights Commission can be justifiably proud of their work on Set the Standard. The report was comprehensive, thorough and trauma informed. Most importantly, it listened to the voices of people in parliamentary workplaces.
Unfortunately, the listening seems to have largely ended with the tabling of the report. While I have taken every available opportunity to be consulted on Set the Standard implementation, such opportunities have been rare. Disappointingly, Set the Standard did not include a recommendation for ongoing staff consultation.
While the PLT did eventually set up a staff consultation group, no mechanism has been established for ongoing consultation with people who have had traumatic experiences in parliamentary workplaces, but who — often for very that reason — no longer work there. Nor does the PLT appear to have engaged meaningfully with survivor advocates while undertaking its work.
People discussing Set the Standard often refer, as Kate Jenkins did in her speech, to ‘the long tail’ of trauma. What the report’s recommendations and their implementation have failed to do is to provide much in the way of solutions for the people who have been traumatised.
Apparently, contributing experiences and suggestions for the purpose of creating a safer workplace for other people – a workplace we may now be too traumatised (and not even welcome) to work in ourselves – is meant to be enough for us.
Complainants were able to access reparation payments and to participate in restorative engagement conferences. I have no way of knowing if a similar scheme was ever considered as part of Set the Standard. All I know is that no redress mechanism made it into the report recommendations.
In addition, the tendency of the media to turn the issue of workplace misconduct in federal parliament into a soap opera revolving around Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann has not done anyone any favours.
As Kate Jenkins noted in her keynote speech, the intense media focus on a single case runs the risk of people assuming the problem in parliamentary workplaces is confined to ‘a few bad apples’, rather than being a systemic issue. Public attention has been on the ‘omnishambles’ rather than on fixing the broader problems.
Also, the focus on politicians and political staffers has allowed the long-disregarded problems in the parliamentary departments that support them continue to fly under the radar. The ‘toxic workplace culture’ at the Department of Parliamentary Services, for example, has reached the point where Greens Senator David Shoebridge suggested during a recent Senate Estimates hearing that a new independent review should be considered – only two-and-a-half years after that same culture was examined as part of the Jenkins Review.
Survivors believe Parliament “…is very much a boys’ club and if you don’t adhere to or agree with the boys’ club unfortunately you are cast out.” Picture: Stock image
Listening to lived experience
The tone of Kate Jenkins’s speech and of the panel’s conversation as they discussed the implementation of the Set the Standard recommendations to date was overwhelmingly positive, indicating there has been significant progress.
But for many of us who have experienced the dark side of parliamentary workplaces, both before and after Set the Standard, this narrative feels disconnected from our lived experiences.
As I wrote this article, I asked some of the people I know who currently work at Parliament House, or who worked there until recently, how they feel about the progress so far. Many of these people have experienced burnout, bullying, discrimination, sexual harassment, or sexual assault during their time in parliamentary workplaces.
Here are some of the things they told me, speaking anonymously:
On the pace of change:
‘The Set the Standard recommendations have taken way too long to be implemented.’
‘Progress has been very slow, and things haven’t moved much in practice.’
‘There is a lot of publicity on the progress of the Set the Standard recommendations but not much tangible change in the workplace. People are still being bullied and required to work unreasonable hours.’
On whether Parliament House is a safe working environment:
‘I don’t feel that Parliament House is a safe workplace … I was still bullied post-Jenkins and didn’t feel supported at all. So many people I talk to had similar experiences and a lot of exceptional people have now left the parliamentary workplace to seek safer environments.’
‘Within the parliamentary departments, it is well known that there are members’ offices to which you never send female staff alone for any reason. While the number of these offices has been reduced by the demographic change that happened at the 2022 election, many remain. It seems redundant to argue that the building is safer for the Set the Standard recommendations when staff are still adjusting their business processes to account for the possibility of harassment, or worse.’
‘The place is toxic [but] senior management have done a good job in presenting a very different viewpoint.’
‘There is real abuse of power and people are too scared to speak up due to the real possibility of losing their jobs.’
‘There is no respect or genuine care for people [at Parliament House].’
On diversity and inclusion:
‘The place is very much a boys’ club and if you don’t adhere to or agree with the boys’ club unfortunately you are cast out.’
‘Accessibility is considered too hard and too expensive and therefore those issues are completely ignored.’
‘It’s evident from the recent treatment of Senator Payman that the Parliament is still struggling to accept diversity. Parliaments will remain unsafe to work in until diversity is fully embraced, not just for the photo shoots and quotas but for all that diversity brings to the table in life experiences.’
On the treatment of parliamentary department staff:
‘Implementation has not been accompanied by meaningful change within the three major parliamentary departments. The fragmented implementation has been very concerning for staff, with DPS, House of Representatives and Senate staff initially excluded from the PWSS process. This has led to a lack of trust in the process and the new structures from non-political building occupants.’
‘The non-political staffers at Parliament House have been wrongly assumed to have better and safer working conditions than political staffers. In comparison to political staff, non-political staff … enjoy less power and safety.’
‘[These] staff do not seem to have mattered as much to this government, which has been particularly detrimental to the efforts of such staff to obtain timely and proper justice in relation to very significant and permanent workplace injuries they have suffered, including sexual assault injuries.’
These are the voices that the Parliamentary Leadership Taskforce doesn’t seem to want to listen to. The people who won’t be featured on any discussion panels.
In the lead up to the book launch, I had been particularly interested to hear Kate Jenkins’s thoughts on the reforms that have been undertaken so far. But on reflection, it occurred to me that the real question is not whether Kate Jenkins — or an academic expert in the field, or a member of the Parliamentary Leadership Taskforce — is satisfied with Set the Standard implementation. The real question is whether the people the Statement of Acknowledgement was directed towards are satisfied.
And, like the people I’ve quoted above, I am not satisfied. Two-and-a-half years after the report was released, I feel used and discarded, disregarded and powerless, much as I did after being raped and assaulted.
Once more I am left behind, collateral damage, while others move onwards and upwards, free to build impressive careers. While people with higher profiles than mine congratulate each other on the positive changes they’ve made to parliamentary workplaces, I’m consoling former colleagues over the unjust and preventable collapse of their once promising careers and trying to talk them out of suicide.
If we want to make real and lasting changes to parliamentary workplaces, we can’t observe them through rose-coloured glasses. We must examine them unflinchingly, acknowledge uncomfortable realities, and confront problems head on. Until our leaders are willing to do that, our parliament will remain toxic.
This is really tricky because we are effectively defaming David Van, even though I’m sure he did actually assault her. (Because it’s not a proven allegation via a court.) I think we need to vague this up so we don’t get sued. Just say something along the lines of Senator Thorpe has been a vocal critic of the toxic culture in Parliament House and claims there are people walking the corridors who have not been made accountable for their bad behaviour. (We can link to external articles – I just don’t want to actually publish the allegation myself.
Of the 42 respondents in the survey, the youngest was 22, and the oldest was 51, with an average age of 33.2 years. The average amount of work experience was 8.3 years.
Most respondents (80.5 percent) worked in print, with the others choosing online and/or broadcasting. Most respondents answered that they were aware of sexual harassment occurring.
Researchers Laisa Bulatale (left) and Nalini Singh of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM). . . most respondents answered that they were aware of sexual harassment occurring. Image: RNZ Pacific
The ABC’s Fiji reporter, Lice Monovo is an experienced journalist who has worked for RNZ Pacific and The Guardian.
She said she was not surprised by the findings and such incidents were familiar to her.
“There were things I had encountered, and some close friends had, and they were things I had seen but what I did also feel was shock that it was still happening and shock that it was more widespread.”
After reading the preliminary results of the report, she realised that although women did take steps, including reporting harassment and approaching their employers or asking for help, still not enough was being done to protect female journalists.
Panel discussion on “Prevalence and Impact of Sexual Harassment on Female Journalists”. Panelists were Laisa Bulatale, Georgina Kekea, Jacqui Berrell, Lice Movono, Dr Shailendra Bahadur Singh. The moderator was Nalini Singh. Image: Stefan Armbruster/RNZ Pacific
“Their concerns and worries, and the things they went through were invalidated, they were told to ‘suck it up’, they were told to put it behind them.”
Movono added that often the burden and responsibility for the harassment were shifted to them, the victims.
“So no, I don’t think enough was done,” she said.
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement’s Laisa Bulatale said many of the women in the research experienced verbal, physical, gestural, and online harassment at work. She said it was not only confined to the workplace.
“A lot of the harassment was also experienced when they went and did assignments or when they had to do interviews with high-ranking officials in government, MPs, even rugby personalities or people in the sports industry,” she said.
She said they were justifiably hesitant to report these problems.
“They [female reporters] feared victim blaming and a lot of shame so a lot of the female journalists that we spoke to in the survey said they carried that with them, and they didn’t feel they knew enough to be able to report the incident.
“And if they did, they were not confident enough that the complaint processes or the referral pathways for them within the organisations they were working in would hear the case or address it.”
Georgina Kekea is an experienced Solomon Islands journalist and editor of Tavali News. She completed a survey of female reporters in the Solomon Islands’ newsroom.
“When I got the responses back, I guess for someone working in the industry, it just validated also what you have been through in your career. What all of us are going through as female journalists,”
Kekea said that there was not much support coming from the superiors in the newsroom.
“Mostly because I think we have males who are leading the team, not understanding issues which women face, and of course, being a Melanesian society, the culture plays a big part, and also obstacles men face when it comes to addressing women’s issues,” Kekea said.
Alex Rheeney is former editor of both PNG’s Post-Courier and the Samoa Observer.
He said he was not surprised by the panel’s discussion.
“Our female colleagues, female reporters, female broadcasters, they go through some very, very huge challenges that those of us who were working in the newsroom as a reporter before didn’t go through simply because of the fact we were male, and it’s unacceptable.”
“Why do we have to have those challenges today?”
He said that newsrooms should develop policies to look after the welfare and safety of female reporters.
“We just have to look at the findings from the survey that was done in Fiji.”
He was positive that the Fijian survey had been done but queried what the follow-up steps should be in terms of putting in place mechanisms to protect female reporters.
“I can only think back to the time when I was the editor of the Post-Courier, I had to drive one of my female reporters to the Boroka police station to get a restraining order against her husband.
“I got personally involved because I knew that it was already affecting her, her children and her family.”
Rheeney said that the media industry needed to do more.
The personal intervention he had undertaken, was a response to an individual problem. However, the industry needed to be able to do more, as harassment and violence against female journalists were in a state of crisis.
“We can’t afford to sit back and just wait for it to happen; we need to be proactive.”
Rheeney believed that the media industry across the Pacific needed to put more measures in place to protect female journalists and staff both in the newsroom and when out on assignment.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Media professionals have been urged to undergo gender sensitisation training to produce more inclusive, accurate and ethical representation of women in the news.
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement executive director Nalini Singh emphasised that such training would help avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes and promote diverse perspectives, ensuring media coverage reflects the realities of all genders.
She made these comments during her keynote address at a panel discussion on “Gender and Media in Fiji and the Pacific” at the 2024 Pacific International Media Conference at the Suva Holiday Inn in Fiji on July 4-6.
In her presentation, Singh highlighted the highest rates of gender violence and other forms of discrimination against women in the region.
She said the Pacific region had, among the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world, with ongoing efforts to provide protection mechanisms and work towards prevention.
Head of USP Journalism Associate Professor Shailendra Singh (from left); ABC journalist Lice Movono; Communications adviser for Pacific Women Lead Jacqui Berrell; Tavuli News editor Georgina Kekea; and Fiji Women’s Rights Movement executive director Nalini Singh during the panel discussion on Gender and Media in the Pacific. Image: Monika Singh/Wansolwara
She highlighted that women in Fiji and the Pacific carried a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work, spending approximately three times as much time on domestic chores and caregiving as men.
This limits their opportunities for income-generating activities and personal development.
Labour participation low
According to Singh, women’s labour force participation remains low — 34 percent in Samoa and 84 percent in the Solomon Islands. The underemployment of women restricts economic growth and perpetuates income inequality, leaving families with single earners, often males with less financial stability.
She highlighted that women were significantly underrepresented in leadership positions as well. In Fiji, women held only 21 percent of board seats, 11 percent of board chairperson roles, and 30 percent of chief executive officer positions.
Despite numerous commitments from the United Nations and other bodies over past decades, including the Beijing Platform for Action and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Singh pointed out that gender equality remained a distant goal.
The World Economic Forum estimates that closing the overall gender gap will take 131 years, with economic parity taking 169 years and political parity taking 162 years at the current rate of progress.
Singh shared that women were more negatively impacted on by climate change due to limited access to resources and information, adding that media often depicted women as caregivers and community leaders during climate-related disasters, highlighting their increased burdens and risks.
The efforts made by FWRM in addressing sexual harassment in the workplace was also highlighted at the conference, with a major reference to the research and advocacy by the organisation that has contributed to policy changes that include sexual harassment as a cause for disciplinary action under employment regulations.
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement’s programme director Laisa Bulatale (from left); Tavuli News editor Georgina Kekea; ABC journalist Lice Movono; and head of USP Journalism Associate Professor Shailendra Singh. Image: Monika Singh/Wansolwara
Singh challenged the conference attendees to prioritise creating safer workplaces for women in media. She urged academics, media organisations, students, and funders to take concrete actions to stop sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
“We must commit to fostering workplaces and online platforms where everyone feels safe and respected.
‘Free from fear’
“Together, we can create environments free from fear and discrimination. Enough is enough,” Singh urged, emphasising the need for collective commitment and action from all stakeholders.
The conference, the first of its kind in 20 years, was organised by The University of the South Pacific’s Journalism Programme in collaboration with the Pacific Islands News Association and the Asia Pacific Media Network.
It was officially opened by chief guest Deputy Prime Minister of Fiji and the Minister for Trade, Co-operatives, Small and Medium Enterprises and Communications Manoa Kamikamica.
Kamikamica said the Fijian government stood firm in its commitment to safeguarding media freedom, as evidenced by recent strides such as the repeal of restrictive media laws and the revitalisation of the Fiji Media Council.
Papua New Guinea Minister for Communication and Information Technology Timothy Masiu was also present at the official dinner of the conference on July 4.
Conference chief guest Deputy Prime Minister of Fiji and the Minister for Trade, Co-operatives, Small and Medium Enterprises and Communications Manoa Kamikamica (left) and Papua New Guinea Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Timothy Masiu. Image: Wansolwara
He said the conference theme “Navigating Challenges and Shaping Futures in Pacific Media Research and Practice” was appropriate and timely.
“If anything, it reminds us all of the critical role that the media continues to play in shaping public discourse and catalysing action on issues affecting our Pacific.”
Launch of PJR
The official dinner included the launch of the 30th anniversary edition of the Pacific Journalism Review (PJR) and launch of the book Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, which is edited by the Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Professor Biman Prasad and Dr Amit Sarwal, a former senior lecturer and deputy head of school (research) at USP.
The PJR is the only academic journal in the region that publishes research specifically focused on Pacific media.
The conference was sponsored the US Embassy in Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu, the International Fund for Public Interest Media, the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme, Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, New Zealand Science Media Centre and the Pacific Women Lead – Pacific Community.
With more than 100 attendees from 11 countries, including 50 presenters, the conference provided a platform for discussions on issues and the future.
The core issues that were raised included media freedom, media capacity building through training and financial support, the need for more research in Pacific media, especially in media and gender, and some other core areas, and challenges facing the media sector in the region, especially in the wake of the digital disruption and the covid-19 pandemic.
Ivy Mallam is a final-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific, Laucala Campus. Republished in collaboration with Wansolwara.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Work report for the ABF concluded that “gender inequality persists in the ABF, creating unsafe work environments for some women”.
Comments from a team leader about wanting to “get rid of all his part-time workers” who were all women;
misogynistic and belittling comments by a male supervisor to a female officer to the effect that she belonged in the kitchen;
a female officer constantly told to smile while working on sensitive issues;
co-workers withholding information from a pregnant officer on the basis that she was not going to be around;
leaders commenting that some women are not suitable for certain roles because of their childcare responsibilities.
Imagine this scenario. All across Australia, as children in pre-school colour-in dinosaur pictures and make clay cupcakes, a sinister thing is happening. It is revealed that 39.2% of them have been subjected to abuse. Some have been bashed, and some have even been sexually assaulted. What do you think would happen following this exposé? An uproar? Parents up in arms? Ministers losing their jobs? Now visualise this for the opposite age spectrum. Yes, we’re now imagining that this is across Australia but in aged care.
The only thing we don’t have to imagine is the 39.2% figure because this is an actual statistic which indicates the percentage of those living in aged care facilities who experience abuse in the form of neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse or sexual assault.
How can it be that this is met with deafening silence?
During the months that the Aged Care Royal Commission conducted its business, we heard tragic and horrific stories of vulnerable older people who were subjected to unimaginable abuse and neglect.
The Commissioners said it is a national shame that up to 50 sexual assaults take place every week in aged care. These are just the reported cases. How many more are silently ignored? We know that sexual assaults are under-reported. This is particularly pronounced amongst the older population and especially in residential aged care facilities.
Before the Serious Incident Response Scheme was introduced in April 2021 as a way to collect data about abuse, KPMG conducted a study of aged care providers who reported in 58.8% of sexual assault cases, there was no impact on the victim. It goes to show how little aged care providers understand sexual assault. We know that even if a woman is non-verbal, and has cognitive impairment like dementia, her body realises when it is violated. The poor understanding of sexual assault perpetrated against older women mean that cases are missed, and symptoms of trauma are misdiagnosed leading to additional medication given to ‘quieten’ the older woman, so she ‘settles down’. The other thing to note about older women who have been sexually assaulted in aged care is that half die within a year of the assault taking place.
Institutions designed to protect older women often fail them
Let’s presume that an aged care provider has staff trained to look out for sexual assaults, and know the protocol. They call the police and report the case. The police arrive on the scene, but give up investigations immediately because they are told that the older woman has dementia. So, of course, she is playing out her “rape fantasies”. (This is an actual quote from police following the report of rape in an aged care facility.) There is little understanding amongst the police of dementia, as recently witnessed in the tasering of a doddery, older woman with dementia holding a knife in an aged care facility.
Now, let’s presume that the police are trained in how to handle sexual assault allegations in aged care, and have gathered evidence to take it to court. Here, we have to presume that judges and the jury are fully versed with what sexual assault means, and how it impacts older women, including those who are especially vulnerable due to co-morbidities and cognitive decline. She knows what happened, but can she withstand the type of questioning which defence lawyers engage in to inject the element of doubt? Can judges and juries get over their unacknowledged ageist bias which commonly negates a wrinkled, bent-double older woman as a rape victim?
Lack of resources in the aftermath of sexual assault
The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children has identified ‘Recovery and Healing’ as one of the 4 pillars for action (the others being ‘Prevention’, ‘Early Intervention’ and ‘Response’). What happens to older women who have been sexually assaulted or subjected to other types of abuse in aged care? What access to ‘Recovery and Healing’ do they have? How many victims are given access to therapy? And how many more victims continue to be locked up in dementia units with their perpetrators?
When aged care providers do not have enough staff to provide meal support to their residents (one study conducted for the Aged Care Royal Commission revealed that 68% of the residents studied in aged care were malnourished or at risk of being malnourished), what hope can we have that those who have been abused are being taken care of, and provided with the healing they are entitled to? And that active steps are taken to protect them from further abuse?
There is lack of support for victims of sexual violence who live in aged care settings. Picture: Adobe Stock
It is instructive that the Australian government has not listed aged care facilities as a ‘primary place of detention’ for the purpose of our compliance with being a signatory to the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This is an important opportunity lost for external experts to scrutinise practices in all places where people are detained in Australia to ensure humane treatment. Residents in aged care facilities, especially those locked up in secure dementia units, are conveniently left-out.
The problems of chemical restraints which too many residents in aged care are subjected to are issues to be discussed at another time. This focus on sexual assaults in aged care is to highlight the problems associated with keeping older women safe when they are in institutionalised settings, and the challenges we face when it comes to the prevention and prosecution of cases. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of all the trauma some older women carry from years of abuse which could have begun as sexual abuse when they were children. There are also the Care Leavers (the ‘Forgotten Australians’) who have suffered a range of traumatic abuse in institutions as children and who are justifiably horrified at the thought of seeing out their twilight days in yet another institution.
Aged care is a feminist issue because the majority in residential aged care facilities are women (66%). It is a national shame that even in our dying days, women continue to be victims of sexual assault. And we are still not believed. Imagine that.
Ayoob Adel Ahmed was a 23-year-old Bahraini citizen when Bahraini authorities arbitrarily arrested him for the final time on 14 May 2015. During his detention, he endured numerous violations, including brutal torture, enforced disappearance, sexual harassment, and other abuses. The most severe violations and burdens, however, stem from medical neglect, which has transformed him from a healthy young man into a prisoner suffering from a permanent disability. He is currently serving two life sentences, along with a total of 98 years imprisonment sentence in Jau Prison on politically motivated charges.
Ayoob was first arrested on 15 June 2013 from his grandmother’s house, when masked plainclothes officers ambushed the home and arrested him without presenting any arrest or search warrant. He was then taken to the Samaheej Police Station. En route to the police station, he was subjected to beatings all over his body, especially on his broken leg, and to sexual harassment by Lieutenant Yusuf Mulla Bakhit. During his interrogation at the Samaheej Police Station, police officers tortured Ayoob, and this torture continued upon his arrival at Jau Prison. Prior to his arrest, he had been pursued by the authorities due to a ruling issued against him in absentia for participating in a pro-democracy march on 26 November 2012 in the Muharraq area. This march was met with repression by the riot police forces, resulting in his left leg being hit by a tear gas canister and immediately broken.
While serving his six-month prison sentence issued in absentia for the charge of illegal assembly, Ayoob discovered that he had been unfairly convicted in absentia on additional charges, resulting in an additional 12 years in prison. Additionally, the Jau Prison administration refused to provide Ayoob with necessary medical treatment, including crucial X-rays to monitor his fractured leg, despite having undergone leg surgery just over a month prior to his arrest. Despite severe pain and repeated requests for treatment, the prison administration delayed addressing his condition. Following a hunger strike, the prison administration agreed for Ayoob to undergo an operation to remove the iron rods from his leg and place them externally. However, complications persisted, with his leg remaining in an iron shackle for three months due to nerve damage from delayed treatment. Enduring prolonged pain and sleeplessness, Ayoob underwent another operation to remove the external iron and insert an internal plate. After four weeks of intense pain inside the hospital, only alleviated through sedatives that became ineffective, he escaped from the hospital.
On 14 May 2015, at dawn, National Security Agency (NSA) forces stormed a house in the Malikiya area where Ayoob and his friend were sleeping, arbitrarily arresting them both without presenting any warrant. Subsequently, the officers transferred Ayoob to the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) building, where he was interrogated for two weeks without the presence of his lawyer. During interrogation, Ayoob forcibly disappeared, and CID officers subjected him to physical and psychological torture. They beat him on various parts of his body, especially on his broken leg, deprived him of sleep and family contact, and threatened him with rape. As a result of the torture, Ayoob’s health deteriorated significantly, leading to symptoms such as blood in his urine and a risk of kidney failure. Under duress, he confessed to the fabricated charges against him. On 17 May 2015, Ayoob was brought before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) without the presence of his lawyer. The PPO charged him with 1) making an explosion, and 2) possessing and using explosives and endangering people’s lives and money for a terrorist purpose, ordering his detention pending investigation. On 27 May 2015, Ayoob was transferred to Jau Prison, where officers subjected him to further torture, insults, and threats, including beatings with hoses, kicks, and slaps, deliberately targeting his injured leg. A week after being transferred to Jau Prison, Ayoob’s enforced disappearance ended, as his family learned that he was being held in Jau Prison.
In July 2015, Ayoob was transported with a group of inmates by bus to the Jau Prison administration building. Inside the bus, a policeman intentionally obstructed the windows and delayed the bus for an extended period, allegedly with the intention to harm them, according to Ayoob’s account. This led to two detainees falling, with one experiencing convulsions and the other fainting. Subsequently, Police Officer Mohamed Suleiman beat Ayoob inside the prison administration building in the presence of First Lieutenant Mohamed AbdulHamid Maaruf.
Ayoob was not brought before a judge within 48 hours after arrest, was not given adequate time and facilities to prepare for his trials, and was denied access to his attorney before and during the court sessions. Furthermore, the court utilized the confessions extracted from him under torture as evidence against him in his trials. Consequently, the court convicted Ayoob between June 2013 and February 2019 of numerous charges, including 1) illegal assembly, 2) planting a fake bomb on Muharraq Bridge, 3) criminal arson, 4) causing an explosion, 5) possessing and using explosives and weapons endangering people’s lives and funds for terrorist purposes, 6) attempted murder, and 7) escaping from prison. He received two life sentences and a total of 98 years in prison. Notably, the first three crimes he was convicted of were alleged to have occurred while he was suffering from a recently broken leg and using crutches to walk, making his convictions questionable.
While serving his sentence in Jau Prison, Ayoob faced repeated verbal abuse and humiliation based on his religious beliefs and was deprived of family contact and visits. Additionally, due to the visitation restrictions that prevent visits without barriers, he has opted to abstain from visits. More significantly, he has been suffering from severe medical neglect, resulting in a significant deterioration in his health. Currently, he experiences severe back pain, damaged vertebrae, a left leg shorter than the right, and blood in his urine, putting him at risk of kidney failure. Furthermore, the iron rods that were supposed to be removed from inside his foot in January 2017 have not yet been extracted, causing difficulty walking, complications, and intense pain. Recently, he contracted a rare disease for which there is no treatment available in Bahrain, and he has not received any medical attention. Despite these health issues, Ayoob is denied medical appointments, X-rays, surgery, and proper medications. Consequently, he has undertaken numerous hunger strikes to demand urgent medical treatment.
Ayoob and his family filed complaints with various governmental and human rights organizations, including the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR) and the Ombudsman. However, these complaints have received little to no response or action from the authorities, exacerbating Ayoob’s already dire situation.
In 2023, Ayoob suffered severe symptoms, including blood in his urine and abdominal pain, yet he was only transferred to intensive care three days after experiencing these symptoms, and after continuous requests for medical attention. Furthermore, Ayoob’s family remained unaware of his condition while he was in intensive care, as the prison administration refused to give them information on his health condition. Additionally, prison officials denied him the opportunity to file a complaint regarding the delay he faced in receiving treatment and health care.
On 20 February 2024, Ayoob conveyed in an audio recording his ongoing denial of medical treatment. He emphasized that the deliberate withholding of necessary medication by the prison administration, as well as delays in removing the iron rods from his leg and addressing his damaged back, had rendered him disabled and incapable of walking properly, worsening both his leg and back conditions. Ayoob warned that such negligence amounted to a policy of slow death, not only depriving him of mobility but also violating his fundamental right to proper healthcare.
Ayoob’s arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, sexual assault, denial of access to legal counsel during interrogations and trials, unfair trials, discriminatory treatment based on his belonging to the Shia sect, deprivation of family contact and visits, and medical negligence represent clear violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Degrading and Inhuman Treatment (CAT), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Bahrain is a party.
As such, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls upon the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Ayoob. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate the allegations of Ayoob’s arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, denial of attorney access during interrogations and trial, discriminatory treatment based on his Shia sect affiliation, deprivation of family contact and visits, and medical neglect, while holding the perpetrators accountable. Furthermore, ADHRB sounds the alarm over Ayoob’s deteriorating health condition, urging the Jau Prison administration to promptly provide him with appropriate healthcare, holding it responsible for any further deterioration in his health. Finally, ADHRB calls on the Jau Prison administration to immediately grant Ayoob his right to regularly communicate with his family and receive assistance with his essential needs.
Husain Mohamed Falah was a 17-year-old Bahraini minor and high school student when Bahraini authorities arrested him from his home on 15 December 2014 without presenting any arrest warrant. During his detention, he endured torture, sexual harassment, denial of attorney access during interrogation and trial, and an unfair trial. He is currently serving a life sentence in Jau Prison, facing religious discrimination, medical neglect, and being denied his rights to education and communication with his family.
On 15 December 2014, at 4:00 A.M., plainclothes officers arrived with a 16-passenger bus, an armored vehicle, and more than 10 Jeep cars, and conducted a forceful raid at Husain’s family house where they were sleeping. They broke the doors of the house and the garage, confiscated his identification card along with his phone, and took him on the bus to the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) building without providing any arrest warrant or reason behind his arrest. En route to the CID building, officers blindfolded Husain inside the bus and hit him on the head. On the same day at 6:00 A.M., Husain’s parents received a 4-second call from him, stating that he was in the CID building. Two days later, at 4:00 A.M., officers returned to Husain’s home, raided it, and filmed the raid with two cameras without submitting a search warrant They searched Husain’s room, focusing on his personal belongings. They confiscated an old phone he had that did not have a SIM card and was not working. On 19 December 2014, Husain was brought blindfolded near his home, to a location where Bahraini authorities claimed he participated in “rioting and the killing of a police corporal”.
At the CID building, Husain was interrogated for a week without the presence of a lawyer. CID officers tortured him by completely blindfolding him, stripping him of his clothes, forcing him to stand for extended periods with his hands cuffed, pouring hot water on him, and spitting on his face. Officers also subjected Husain to electric shocks, sexual harassment, and verbal abuse, and prevented him from contacting his parents. Subsequently, he confessed to the fabricated charges brought against him under torture.
Following his interrogation, Husain was brought on 22 December 2014 before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO), which subsequently ordered his detention for two months, and his lawyer was not allowed to attend. He was then transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center, where he endured further torture. On 24 December 2014, Husain’s family was able to visit him for the first time since his arrest.
Husain was not brought before a judge within 48 hours after arrest, was not given adequate time and facilities to prepare for his trial, was denied access to his attorney before and during the court sessions, and was unable to present evidence or challenge the evidence presented against him. Furthermore, the court utilized the confessions extracted from him under torture as evidence against him in his trial. On 30 December 2015, Husain was sentenced to life imprisonment and deprivation of his Bahraini nationality after being convicted in a mass trial with 22 other defendants for 1) joining a terrorist cell to kill a police corporal on 8 December 2014, and 2) carrying out riots on 9 December 2014. Although Husain was transferred to the courtroom for the sentencing hearing, he was not allowed to enter and was forced to wait outside. Then the lawyer came out and informed the family of the judgment. His citizenship was reinstated on 27 April 2019, through a royal pardon. Husain appealed his sentence, and on 22 December 2016, the Court of Appeal rejected his appeal and upheld the initial verdict. Consequently, the Court of Cassation upheld the sentence on 5 June 2017.
Husain is currently serving his sentence in Jau Prison, enduring discriminatory treatment based on his belonging to the Shia religious sect and facing threats and deprivation of his rights by the prison officers from time to time on the pretext of taking revenge for the alleged murder of a policeman. In addition, he’s currently deprived of calling his family, experiencing issues within his eye retina that are getting worse as a result of medical negligence, and is denied his right to continue his university education. Husain’s family filed complaints to the Ombudsman, documenting the raid, torture, and eye conditions. The Ombudsman received these complaints and visited Husain with no result obtained. This mistreatment and medical neglect prompted Husain to go on hunger strikes every now and then to protest against the prison’s poor status and the violations to which he was subjected.
Husain’s warrantless arrest, torture, sexual assault, denial of access to legal counsel during interrogations and trial, unfair trial, deprivation of his rights to education and communication, discriminatory treatment based on his belonging to the Shia sect, and medical negligence represent clear violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Degrading and Inhuman Treatment (CAT), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Furthermore, the violations he endured as a minor contravene the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), to which Bahrain is also a party.
As such, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls upon the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Husain. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate the allegations of Husain’s arbitrary arrest as a minor, torture, denial of attorney access during interrogations and trial, deprivation of his rights to education and communication, discriminatory treatment based on his belonging to the Shia sect, and medical neglect while holding the perpetrators accountable. At the very least, ADHRB calls for a fair retrial for him under the Restorative Justice Law for Children, leading to his release. Additionally, it urges the Jau Prison administration to promptly provide appropriate healthcare for Husain, holding it responsible for any possible deterioration in his health. Finally, ADHRB calls on the Jau Prison administration to immediately grant Husain his right to regularly call his family and allow him to continue his university studies.
Sexual harassment of women journalists continues to be a major problem in Fiji journalism and “issues of power lie at the heart of this”, new research has revealed.
The study, published in Journalism Practice by researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of the South Pacific, highlights there is a serious need to address the problem which is fundamental to press freedom and quality journalism.
“We find that sexual harassment is concerningly widespread in Fiji and has worrying consequences,” the study said.
“More than 80 percent of our respondents said they were sexually harassed, which is an extremely worryingly high number.”
The researchers conducted a standardised survey of more than 40 former and current women journalists in Fiji, as well as in-depth interviews with 23 of them.
One responded saying: “I had accepted it as the norm . . . lighthearted moments to share laughter given the Fijian style of joking and spoiling each other.
“At times it does get physical. They would not do it jokingly. I would get hugs from the back and when I resisted, he told me to ‘just relax, it’s just a hug’.”
‘Sexual relationship proposal’
Another, speaking about a time she was sent to interview a senior government member, said: “I was taken into his office where the blinds were down and where I sat through an hour of questions about who I was sleeping with, whether I had a boyfriend . . . and it followed with a proposal of a long-term sexual relationship.”
The researchers said that while more than half of the journalistic workforce was made up of women “violence against them is normalised by men”.
They said the findings of the study showed sexual harassment had a range of negative impacts which affects the woman’s personal freedom to work but also the way in which news in produced.
“Women journalist may decide to self-censor their reporting for fear of reprisals, not cover certain topics anymore, or even leave the profession altogether.
“The negative impacts that our respondents experienced clearly have wider repercussions on the ways in which wider society is informed about news and current affairs.”
The research was carried out by Professor Folker Hanusch and Birte Leonhardt of the University of Vienna, and Associate Professor Shailendra Singh and Geraldine Panapasa of the University of the South Pacific.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) is working with journalists in the Middle East and Northern Africa to investigate various violations affecting the safety of journalists and their ability to do their work.
Shutterstock
“I find myself wishing there was more protection [for investigative journalists], a sense of safety and even simply just hope. I watch in awe as they investigate crimes that they unfortunately know they could well be victims of in the future, or in some cases already have been.“ Zaynab Al-Khawaja, GCHR’s Journalists Protection Coordinator, working with journalists conducting the investigations
With a strong gender focus, the GCHR ensures that the majority of the investigations are carried out by women, empowering them and shedding light on cases involving women.
One investigation highlights the story of an anonymous woman journalist who quit her job and relocated due to sexual harassment. She writes:
A large proportion of society is aware of widespread harassment in the streets, resulting from an exacerbated hypermasculinity. However, statements by several Iraqi women journalists confirm that this phenomenon did not spare women in press and media outlets, forcing a considerable number of them to quit journalism for good.
The investigation also reported that 41% of women journalists in Iraq have been victims of harassment, forcing 15% to leave their jobs and 5% to quit their profession for good.
This data aligns with UNESCO’s Chilling report, revealing increasing offline and online attacks against women journalists, including stigmatization, sexist hate speech, trolling, physical assault, rape and murder.
Another investigation looked into the imprisonment and silencing of journalists, some facing fabricated allegations of sexual harassment. GCHR collaborates with the NGO Vigilance and 40 partners on a joint appeal to end the persecution and detention of journalists and human rights defenders exercising their right to freedom of expression. GCHR also supported a journalist in the Middle East investigating the case of a disappeared journalist in Syria.
Since 2022, GCHR and UNESCO have joined forces to support investigative journalism, reducing impunity for crimes against journalists and enhancing their safety through the Global Media Defence Fund. Established in 2019, this fund has supported over 120 projects globally, directly benefiting over 5,000 journalists, 1,200 lawyers and 200 non-governmental organizations.
In 2022, UNESCO published recommendations on addressing violence against women journalists, based on The Chilling, a global research project by UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). All reports related to this project are available here on UNESCO’s website.
Lauren Chooljian from New Hampshire Public Radio reports on a widespread culture of sexual misconduct in the addiction treatment industry. Across the country, women seeking treatment are being harassed and assaulted by men in positions of power. The problem is so pervasive that it has a name among those in the industry: the 13th Step.
We begin with Chooljian explaining to host Al Letson the case that got her started on this investigation. It involved Eric Spofford, owner of New Hampshire’s largest addiction treatment network. After exposing allegations that Spofford was harassing patients, Chooljian, her sources and staff at New Hampshire Public Radio became the targets of intimidation and, in some cases, vandalism.
Chooljian then chronicles another case, this one in California, that illustrates how difficult it is to bring to justice wealthy, powerful people in the industry. Chris Bathum owned a network of treatment centers in California and Colorado and was routinely sexually assaulting clients and offering them drugs. He was also submitting false billing claims to insurance companies. We meet two women, Rose Stahl and Debbie Herzog, who were separately investigating Bathum. Stahl started as a client at one of Bathum’s centers and later worked for him. She pursued evidence that he was assaulting women at the center, while Herzog was looking into insurance fraud.
Stahl blew the whistle about Bathum’s inappropriate behavior to leadership within the company, but the actions they took did not stop him. At the same time, Herzog was facing hurdles in convincing law enforcement to pay attention to the case she was building about insurance fraud. Then serendipitously, Herzog and Stahl learn of each other’s efforts and team up to try to bring Bathum to justice.
The Law Council of Australia has warned that proposed changes removing cost barriers for applicants in sexual harassment and discrimination cases could result in “arbitrary and unintended consequences” such as clogging the courts with “unmeritorious” claims.
Before a parliamentary inquiry hearing into the bill next Wednesday, the peak legal body said in its submission it was concerned Labor’s bill too heavily tilted the balance towards those accusing sexual harassment and placed the burden of financial risk on those being accused.
Employers will be held legally responsible for failing to proactively take steps to prevent sexual harassment at work under a change that Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, Dr Anna Cody, hopes shifts the burden of progress in workplaces.
Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a local restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating – until one day she says her boss went too far and she turned to the local police for help. What happened next would lead to a legal battle that dragged on for years. The U.S. Supreme Court would even get involved.
Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon spent years taking a close look at cases across the country in which people reported sexual assaults to police, only to find themselves investigated. In this hour, we explore one case and hear how police interrogated an alleged perpetrator, an alleged victim and each other.
De Leon’s investigation is also the subject of a documentary, “Victim/Suspect,” now streaming on Netflix.
Join us for an eventful week in Australian politics as we unpack the latest developments from the heart of Parliament. The week kicked off when the Australian Greens threw their support behind the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund bill. While this move promises progress, we look into why it may have taken this long and discuss the need for further housing reforms.
And within this political manoeuvring, we examine how both the government and the Greens had to strategically position themselves. This led to a significant victory for both, with the Greens securing a $3 billion concession from the government for social housing through the HAFF, and the government getting one of key policies passed.
The Voice to Parliament referendum has been littered with a campaign of misinformation from the “No” side of the referendum. We uncover the outrageous claims being propagated, including the abolition of Australia Day and Anzac Day, compensation claims, reparations, and a push for Treaty, with many of these talking points have made their way into the discourse of Liberal Party politicians, such as Peter Dutton and Sussan Ley. We revisit our earlier prediction that fear-mongering would intensify as we approach October 14. The claims have become increasingly outlandish, leaving us pondering the eventual outcome of this misinformation campaign.
We also look at the revelations made by Liberal MP Karen Andrews about harassment within the party during Parliament question time. We contemplate the larger issue of gender dynamics in Australian politics and why speaking out about workplace harassment is more complicated than it may seem. There is a critical need for Parliament House to be a safe working environment for all, from staffers to parliamentarians, an issue highlighted by the independent member Kylea Tink, who highlights the urgency of systemic change.
COVID-19 seems like a hidden pandemic situation in Australia and we reflect on the stark contrast between the early days of the pandemic and the present, with daily case numbers averaging today just over 700, there are still many people dying from COVID-19 every week. Why have the effects of the pandemic being ignored? We explore the shift from community spread to hospital spread and the hidden risks associated with this development.
There’s also a current debate surrounding the role of journalists in the Australian media landscape. We question the trend of uncritically reporting opposition statements and the need for journalists to exercise judgment, discern newsworthiness, and hold those in power accountable.
Music interludes:
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This open letter to En Avant Toute and journalists at France 24 and France Info marked the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples last week. It has been sent to Asia Pacific Report and Pacific Media Watch.
Pacific Media Watch
A controversial report by a French metropolitan not-for-profit about sexual and sexist violence in France’s overseas territories — including Kanaky New Caledonia — has had its findings reported in mainstream French media, stirring strong criticism by Kanak social justice and human rights advocates.
The report has led to a condemnation and accusations of “colonialism and racism” in an open letter directed at the NGO, En Avant Toute(s), and two mainstream media outlets that carried news about the findings, France 24 and France Info.
“It is really about journalism, feminism, and decolonisation of knowledge production,” says an Pacific Media Watch correspondent about the issue.
The controversial En Avant Toutes report on Kanaky New Caledonia . . . no on-the-ground research. Image: En Avant Toutes/APR screenshot
“The problem is the organisation didn’t actually travel to New Caledonia. Instead, they conducted phone interviews with a select, small group of NGOs in New Caledonia’s Southern Province, leading to comments in the media about Kanak tradition and sexual abuse which were wrong.”
The open letter, sent to Asia Pacific Report, says:
Our approach is first rooted in our need to denounce the severity of the lies that have been mediatised and to minimise the harm done, but also to educate on the struggles of Indigenous peoples and the fight against sexual and sexist oppression, specifically in a colonial context, and so that the tools and resources that are deployed in these struggles serve the people who are affected first and foremost.
We are Indigenous, Kanak, French, women, men, people from Kanaky/New Caledonia committed to social justice in our country at a personal level, professional level, but also as volunteers, advocates and militants in associations.
This report was produced by the French association named En Avant Toute(s) and it attempts to explore the contexts of the French overseas territories when it comes to sexual and sexist violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people.
It also assesses the needs for their chat service, currently mostly operating in hexagonal France. We are alarmed by two main points: 1/ Misinformation in the media; 2/ How weak the report is as well as its colonial approach, which shows a lack of understanding of French overseas territories, and of Kanaky/New Caledonia more specifically, since that is what affects us.
The France 24 report on the alleged Kanaky “silence” over sexual violence . . . one of the criticised articles in the open letter. Image: France 24/APR screenshot
“What will the victims turn to? Customary law or common law?… It is not the same text. Customary law is based on ancestral practices. Sometimes, victims must apologize to their perpetrator to settle conflicts within a clan.’”
This information is shared once again in an interview published on July 29, 2023 by France 24 in which Garnier-Brun indicates that “in New Caledonia, the co-existence of common law and customary law can represent a risk factor for women in terms of their exposure to violence” and that “some Kanak tribes have traditions which demand that the victims of violence ask their perpetrators’ for forgiveness”.
We would like to ask you the following questions: What are these allegations based on? This is a scoop that Kanak women and men are finding out about with surprise and horror from our dear islands on which you have not had the pleasure to set foot on to conduct your research.
What do you know about our traditions, about Kanak culture, about the stakes at play in the coexistence of customary and common law? What do you even know about violence against women in Kanaky/New Caledonia to draw such dangerous conclusions, make them into statements easily shareable by French media, which don’t even seriously fact check the information, especially when we know how important and worrying the topic of violence against women is?
Kanak custom condemns violence against women, and does not protect perpetrators, contrary to what is suggested in these interviews.
Then, in an interview published on July 18, 2023 by Causette magazine, la Case Juridique Kanak (ACJK) is described as a “local religious community”. For your information, the ACJK is an association of volunteer lawyers who are mobilised around questions of customary law. Therefore, it is not a “local religious community” as the interview suggests.
It is clear, and we regret it, that these declarations belong to a time we wished was in the past, but apparently persists since it is resurfacing through your narrative. It is part of a discourse that suggests that Indigenous and colonised peoples, including the Kanak people, supposedly have backward traditions, unaligned with Western civilisation, which is seen as the reference, given that it is supposedly more advanced on the question of gender equality.
The mediatisation of this type of discourse is an insult, an example of colonial ignorance, a major contribution to misinformation and the reproduction of a backward, discriminatory, racist and colonial vision of the French overseas territories. Consequently, this misinformation makes us question:
Firstly, the legitimacy of the En Avant Toute(s) representatives to speak about sexual and sexist violence in the overseas territories, and more specifically, in Kanaky/New Caledonia;
Secondly, the fact that this information is shared by French media without any control or verification with knowledge holders in the country.
The production of colonial knowledge
En Avant Toute(s) is clear in its motivations. As is indicated in a publication made on the association’s Linkedin page, one of the objectives of the report was to analyze the situation in the overseas territories to think about the implementation of their chat service Commentonsaime.fr in our territories.
En Avant Toute(s) did not travel to our countries but spoke to some associations through videoconferences. When it comes to Kanaky/New Caledonia, En Avant Toute(s) was in contact with two associations: Le Relais and Centre d’Information Droit des Femmes et Egalité (CIDFE), both associations based and funded by the Southern Province, one of the three provinces in the country.
According to us, having only spoken to a small number of associations, En Avant Toute(s) is not in a position to produce an empirical, informed and critical report, which would allow a better understanding of violence perpetrated against young women and the LGBTQIA+ community in Kanaky/New Caledonia.
For this to be the case, they should have been in conversation with many more actors and partners across the country, to have a more extensive and representative sample.
Looking at the lack of sufficient data and the primary aim which was to analyse different overseas contexts to assess the possible implementation of the chat service, it seems that calling the document a “report” is a little ambitious, if not inappropriate.
The approach does not come from our territories and is not led or co-produced with local populations or associations. It would be more appropriate to speak of the beginning of a market research or a feasibility survey. Here, words matter, since the publication of a report confers authority and suggests expertise.
However, in our context, we do not think that En Avant Toute(s) is able to speak about sexual or sexist violence in Kanaky/New Caledonia in the media, nor to produce a report on the topic. We would like to invite the members of En Avant Toute(s) who have participated to this survey as well as the media who have participated to its legitimisation to think about the conditions that authorise individuals who have never set foot on, nor are implicated in, our territories, to publish “reports” and be interviewed by national media as experts of our contexts.
In addition, we condemn that the launch of the so-called report took place in hexagonal [mainland] France and that many associations committed to the struggle against sexual and sexist violence in our country were not invited to participate.
Indeed, we only learnt about this study through the media. We denounce this type of colonial practices, where resources are extracted from our territories so that organisations, companies, associations in France can benefit from them, without us being directly implicated.
We understand that the stakes are the possible implementation of a tool which would complement what is already in place to tackle sexual and sexist violence in our territories, and that the intention is commendable. Nevertheless, without any real collaboration with the most affected and informed people, we remain sceptical of its possible results.
We also cannot be convinced of the efficacy of such a tool when we have no information regarding the performance of the chat service in hexagonal France, nor any about the ways in which En Avant Toute(s) would adapt it to our territories.
Faced with these alarming observations and in order to minimise the harm done to the Kanak people in the name of tribal Kanak women, whose voices are absent from the report and in the media, here are our demands:
A statement written by En Avant Toute(s) to be published on all their social media platforms and on their website, which would refute the declarations made in relation to a so-called Kanak tradition that would require victims of sexual violence to ask their perpetrators for forgiveness in some tribes;
The deletion of this misinformation in the interviews published by France Info and France 24, with an explanatory note; and
A right of reply in the media that published this information, France Info and France 24, in order to deny these harmful declarations and enable the women who are involved in the struggle against sexist and sexual violence in Kanaky/New Caledonia to have their voices heard nationally.
Our primary aim remains social justice in our country, and it is only attainable if we pay attention to all the axes of oppression, including the ways in which colonialism and racism play a significant role in the oppression of women.
Racism and colonialism also impact [on] our relations as militants, advocates, members of feminist associations, and particularly when it comes to North/South and Hexagone/Overseas territories relations.
This requires that for all collaborative work with associations, groups and collective that are not based in our territories, there is a shared understanding of our historical and political contexts and of the power dynamics at play, an attention paid to not reproducing harmful discourses which participate in the silencing of colonised women, and the consideration of people who are involved in and from our territories as the most suitable to speak about the issues they face and struggle against.
Signatories La Pause Décoloniale (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Union des Femmes Francophones d’Océanie (UFFO) NC (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Arnaud Chollet-Leakava, Porte-Parole du Mouvement des Océaniens Indépendantistes (MOI) (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Oriane Trolue, Chargée de la condition féminine de politique décoloniale du Mouvement des Océaniens Indépendantistes (MOI) (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Hugues Vhemavhe, Sénateur Coutumier de l’Aire Hoot Ma Whaap (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Rolande Trolue, feminist and resource person (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Fara Caillard, Marche Mondiale des Femmes (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Billy Wete, pastor (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Morgane Lepeu ép. Goromoedo (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Denis Pourawa, Kanak poet-writer (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Teva Avae, artist (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Ronny Kareni, West Papua Merdeka Support Network & Rise of the Morning Star (West Papua)
Florenda Nirikani, Militante Éducation Populaire CEMEA Pwârâ Wâro (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Virginie Murcia, president of the Union des Groupements Parents d’Élèves UGPE (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Doriane Nonmoira, Union des Femmes Francophone d’Océanie (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Wendy Nonke, Mouvement pour un Souriant Village Mélanésien (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Patrick Tara (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Justine-Rose Boaé Kéla (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Swänn Iché (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Laurent Lhermitte, Les Insoumis du Pacifique (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Raïssa Weiri (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Marie-Rose Yakobo, student (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Yvette Danguigny, Association Natte Kanak (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Nathanaëlle Maleko (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
David Robert, Union Calédonienne (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Alexia Babin (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Pierre Chanel Nonmoira, customary leader (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Gladys Nekiriai (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Sabrina Pwéré (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Xavier Nonmoira, young Kanak revolutionary (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Adeline Babin (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Ghislaine Pwapy (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Valentin Nemia (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Célestine Beleouvoudi (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Mériba Karé (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Présence Kanak (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Jacques Guione, Association Djors (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Ludmila Jean, Association Djors (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Yvette Poma (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Marie-Madeleine Guioné, Kanak woman (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Augusta Nonmoira, Kanak woman (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Lucien Sawaza (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Monique Poma (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Jean Rock Uhila (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Vaïana Tiaore, Corail Vivant Terre des Hommes (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Laurie Anne Le Pen (France)
Aaron Houchard Mitride (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Roger Nemia (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Atrune Palene (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Amandine Tieoue (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Iouanna Gopoea (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Sylviany M’boueri (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Valentine Wakanengo (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Simane (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Jacinthe Kaichou (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Romain Purue (Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie)
Is it worse to commit the act, or to say that the act was done?
I grew up with a Mum who was a family law solicitor in a medium-sized country town. As you would expect, she had to keep her lips tightly sealed about the things she had seen and heard about what goes on behind closed doors in a small community, but occasionally I would hear her say something I’ve never forgotten: “Is it worse to do it, or to say it was done?”
Lately, Mum’s words have been echoing in my head, as I have watched a succession of women being publicly pilloried for daring to complain about the behaviour of their male colleagues.
For a while it seemed to be going so well. Back in March 2021, the then-PM Scott Morrison responded to allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct and sexual assault in parliament by saying: “Women are too afraid to call out bad behaviour for fear of losing a job or being intimidated in their workplace. That is not OK, and it’s not their fault, it’s the environment we have allowed to be created.” He added (apparently unironically): “This has been a very traumatic month.”
By February 2022, Parliament had made a public apology to victim-survivors. The apology was the work of a bipartisan committee and an important first step in building a culture where people are safe to report workplace violence and harassment. The apology boasted of a ‘trauma informed support for people who have experienced serious incidents’.
The subsequently established Parliamentary Workplace Support Service is at pains to emphasise the importance of confidentiality in its complaints processes, in order to provide an environment in which complainants are not victimised or bullied for speaking out. Put together, this sounded like a good step towards a world where a complaint of harassment is no longer considered a worse offence than the actual harassment itself.
Fast forward to July 2023. After more than two years of work, have we reached a point where ‘saying it was done’ is no longer a punishable offence? At the end of May, the Minister for Women, Senator Katy Gallagher, spent the best part of two weeks under what can only be described as a political attack over the timing of a complaint of sexual assault.
Over the course of the fortnight, it became clear that her crime was to have respected a complainant’s request for confidentiality.
The questioning was relentless and aggressive and made the very clear point that a complaint of sexual assault will not only leave you open to attack but may also expose anyone who supports you to harassment and aggressive questioning. In any context other than Parliament, the Opposition’s behaviour towards Senator Gallagher would have been seen as harassment and stopped. In Parliament, it was considered to be situation normal.
By mid-June, Senator Lidia Thorpe had raised an allegation of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching by another Senator. In subsequent days she was publicly accused of lying by the Senator and several news outlets took the time to note that the accused Senator had been ‘visibly shaken’ by the allegations, which he described as ‘untrue, outrageous, disgusting’.
None of the media I saw made any mention of Senator Thorpe’s obvious distress in the Senate chamber as she made the allegation, despite her agitated gestures and the tremor in her voice being clearly apparent in the recording. Speaking to Radio National later that week, Senator Thorpe said: “It’s been horrible. I became the perpetrator. I became the person that was demonised for speaking truth.”
She also noted that ‘it wasn’t until a white woman stood up and said: yeah, this happened to me too, that the media took notice. And I think that’s a great example of the …systemic racism in this country. I was not believed… and you wonder why women don’t speak out.”
This week we have seen a former Federal MP ‘outed’ as the source of a complaint about harassing emails from a Liberal party figure. Sydney radio station, 2GB publicly identified the complainant, despite the confidential nature of the complaint and the complaint process being made clear by party figures in earlier media reporting. The complainant has issued a press release in response, which describes her distress at being named.
If you were a young woman watching this, would you report a workplace sexual assault? What has our hypothetical young female complainant learned over the past three months?
Lesson one: people who attempt to apply basic rules of confidentiality to your complaint may be publicly attacked for doing so. Lesson two: if you are Black you won’t be believed unless you are supported by a white woman. Lesson three: even if the process in place to deal with your complaint is confidential, random media figures may take it into their heads to publish your name.
Kate Jenkins‘ Set the Standard report into parliamentary culture has not yet been fully implemented, although I know lots of people have been diligently working on the project. It’s critical that all people working in parliament feel safe to report sexual assault and gender-related violence. We need all parliamentarians and the media to respect the Set the Standard findings and strive for a world where reports of violence are taken seriously and treated with respect, not used to score political points or ratings. Everyone in Parliament has clearly memorised the talking points – we hear a lot about how harassment in the House on the Hill needs to stop, and yet the scapegoating of complainants continues.
It’s clear that, despite good intentions and fine words, we have not made substantial headway in accepting that women have a right to complain about inappropriate behaviour by their male colleagues. Indeed, when a woman stands up to recount an assault or other inappropriate behaviour, she is doing a service to others in her workplace – recounting her own difficult or traumatic experience in order to improve the culture of her workplace. Surely that is exactly the sort of person who should be supported and encouraged?
The reality is that the #Metoo movement rattled a lot of cages. There are a significant number of people out there who would very much prefer it if women would just shut up about their experiences. Who would prefer that approach so strongly, that they are prepared to harass and victimise those complainants and their supporters in the hope of putting them back in their box. In the last three months we have seen the backlash in full swing, and it’s really not pretty.
Sorry Mum. Apparently, it is still very much worse to ‘say it was done’.
Two Australian girls, Chloe Covell (aged 13) and Arisa Trew (also 13) have just won gold in the Street and Park divisions at the latest X-Games competitions in California. The X-Games is, to skateboarding, what Wimbledon is to tennis in terms of its prestige and world class competitors.
Such achievements are all the more remarkable for a sport that has a tradition of being dominated by men and where women’s competitions have had to overcome many serious barriers. This includes with the X-Games once cancelling the women’s vert division in LA less than ten years ago in July 2011 due to the organisers lack of faith in both the audience potential and more importantly, the talent.
Over the years however, as the just-released co-authored book ‘Skateboarding, Power and Change’ (by Willing and Pappalardo, Palgrave Macmillan) highlights, there have also been hard-won leaps forward. This includes calls for better pay and visibility by elite women skateboarders such as Cara-beth Burnside and Mimi Knoop whose actions included boycotting the X-Games in 2005.
There is also plenty of behind the scenes advocacy by people such as Kim Woozy who helped testify and bring in the ‘Equal Pay for Equal Play’ bill in California. Today’s generation of women and non-binary skaters have been able to build up their sport on the foundations of a history of women and LGBTIAQ+ led advocacy and the results are speaking for themselves.
Both Chloe Covell and Arisa Trew are also Olympic contenders for Paris 2024 as confirmed by Skate Australia, the national sport organisation for the sport. There are expectations both girls will also be a part of the Games in LA 2028 and back home in Australia for 2032. Last month on 24 June Chloe Covell, from northern NSW) won silver at the World Skate Skateboarding Street World Tour event in Rome, Italy, where skateboarders earn world ranking through points to qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Continuing the Australian skateboarder’s run of capturing the world’s attention, on 25 June Arisa Trew, from the Gold Coast, QLD set a world record in Salt Lake City, Utah USA as the first skater in a woman’s division to land a 720 trickon a vert ramp. A story by the Olympics News also emphasised that this was achieved in front of Tony Hawk who not only invented the trick but is also the world’s most famous skateboarder. Trew performed the same 720 trick at the X-Games in California this month, making her the first ever to win a competition in the women’s division doing so.
Each girl has their own style and brings something remarkable to skateboarding, with Covell’s street runs including highly difficult switch tricks (using the opposite stance one usually skates) and Trew’s world-record breaking ‘never been done’ (NBD in skaters’ terms) moments in park and vert competitions.
The future of skateboarding is not only looking more inclusive but also pushing aside old stereotypes that ‘girls can’t skate’ with a barrage of never seen before technical skills by both Covell and Trew. These girls are joined by other talented young girls and women skateboarders from Australia such as Ruby Trew, Haylie Powell, Liv Lovelace, and Felicity Turner.
At the same time, both nationally and on the international stage, there remain rules and categories in competitive skating that can exclude and misrecognise skaters’ authentic selves and erase their presence and achievements. This includes within the Olympic Games where research (such as by Willing and Barbier, 2021) on the gender binary highlights pressures placed on non-binary and transgender skaters to conform to unrealistic and unscientifically proven parameters of gender.
In Tokyo Games in 2021, Outsports highlighted how non-binary competitor Alana Smith was misgendered by sport commentators, who has since used the occasion to educate press on pronouns. In the documentary Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story (2022), a former USA Skateboarding team member and elite professional skater Leo Baker also talks about how he withdrew before the Tokyo 2020 Games during his gender affirmation due to not wanting to compete within such narrow frameworks of gender.
In the skateboarding research article ‘Before the Gold’ by Dr Neftalie Williams it is also pointed out that skateboarding, like other sports, is also not immune to issues such as racism. More broadly, as Professor Belinda Wheaton and Dr Holly Thorpe also outline in their book on Action Sport and the Olympic Games(Routledge, 2022), there are various structural conditions that also demand attention to make skating competitions such as the Olympics accessible to skaters from a variety of disadvantaged backgrounds. And as a recent panel at The Stoked Sessions Conference at San Diego State University that focused on looking at skating through an intersectional lens, this includes across issues connected to income, class, age, gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, conflict zones and geographies.
Photo features panellists Yulin Olliver, Di’orr Greenwood, L Brew and Amelia Brodka with Dr Indigo Willing and other speakers at The Stoked Sessions San Diego State University conference. Picture: Alec Beck
In skateboarding campaigns such as by the women’s run network Poseidon Foundation, skaters are also joining calls for the inclusion of WCMX and adaptive skateboarding to be included in the Olympics. Over a four day span at World Skate’s San Juan event in May 2023, interviews were conducted with competing skateboarders such as Tokyo Olympic medal winner Sky Brown advocating for adaptive skateboarding to have its place in the Olympics and Paralympic Games.
As Poseidon Foundation’s President Micaela Ramirez states, “adaptive skaters themselves are requesting their demo take place in Switzerland for the upcoming September competition.” She adds, “the high calibre of folks advocating for this cause is a clear indicator of the passion, significance and importance of providing an opportunity for adaptive skaters to showcase their amazing talents.” World-ranking and professional level WCMX and adaptive women skateboarders leading efforts to draw attention to their sports internationally include Tia Pearl and Kanya Esser in the US and Lily Rice in the UK. In Australia, Timothy Lachlan who openly identifies as a Queer skater also runs workshops to increase the participation of all genders through his network and coaching initiative WCMX and Adaptive Skateboarding Australia.
Another pathway that is far less talked about but requires urgent attention is how to ensure safety, respect, and a culture of consent in skateboarding as it continues to grow in popularity and status.
Many of the star skateboarders from Australia and internationally are also girls who are still under 16, and this demands assurances at all levels that they are well looked after as athletes, but also emotionally and psychologically. Furthermore, issues of sport integrity and abuse also affect all sports, and skateboarding needs to fasten its strategies for keeping everyone safe.
Currently, skateboarding may be way behind other sports too in this regard, as it has emerged from a subculture and youth culture that has not been restricted by rules, regulations and being an incorporated sport. While its comparative lack of structure allows for its social dimensions, spontaneity, fun, creative flair, and artistic side to thrive, there can be troubling gaps in support and protection of its participants too.
Current initiatives include the ‘Win Well 2032’ campaign, whose website emphasises values such as “how we win is just as important as when we win” and that participating sports including Skate Australia commit to “prioritising and focusing on the physical, mental, emotional, and cultural wellbeing of our athletes, coaches, staff, and sport as a whole, we will unlock our full potential and Win Well.”
The campaign is part of Australia’s High Performance 2032+ Sport Strategy and recognised by The Australian Institute of Sport and eight State/Territory Institutes and Academies of Sport, representing Federal, State and Territory Governments. National Sporting Organizations, including Skate Australia, are also now making a commitment to the objectives of and working with Sport Integrity Australia, where members can make formal complaints on issues from bullying to sexual misconduct.
Both initiatives are relatively new with Win Well 2032 having been launched this year and Sport Integrity Australia in 2020, so the overall impact they can make has not had much time to be measured in the world of skateboarding. Moreover, not all skateboarders are members of Skate Australia, making it difficult for complaints to be investigated. The impact of existing protection and support mechanisms for skateboarders at an elite competitive level, and especially athletes aged under 16, remains a critical area for more research as well as the gaps.
The “Consent is Rad” logo. Picture: Supplied
There are more ‘on the ground’ and community-led campaigns such as Consent is Rad, which I launched as a co-founder in 2019 at Pushing Boarders in Malmo, Sweden. Consent is Rad is an internationally focused community initiative co-founded by a team based in Australia and has an international focus.
Despite being volunteer run, its simple “no naming, no shaming or blaming” educational messages about challenging a macho ‘rape culture’ that has been long been a hushed up but harmful element in skating and embracing consent cultures in skateboarding has resonated worldwide. It has also received 2nd place in the Skate Rising Social Projects category in the Exposure Skate Awards in 2021, and that won equal first place in the Social Project of the Year Award in 2023 from Skate Like A Girl. Consent is Rad has collaborated with groups from Europe, the US and Australia and produced a range of educational resources.
Photo of Dr Indigo Willing holding a sign at the launch of Consent is Rad at the ‘Support Your Local Academic’ panel at Pushing Boarders, Malmo, Sweden 2019, taken by artist ‘Star Buttons Spark.’ Other panelists include Dr Sander Holsgens, Stuart Maclure, Dr Luke Cianciotto, Dr Adelina Ong and Sophie Friedel. Picture: Supplied
However, with women and non-binary led campaigns such as Consent is Rad, there is a risk that the information is only reaching those who are affected by sexual violence or are already allies and not ‘getting through’ to populations who need to be educated the most. In response to this, Consent is Rad has also worked in collaboration with a facilitator and team of overseas skaters on projects like the Break the Cyclecampaign that ran in magazines such as Thrasher that reaches a huge audience of boys and men.
In summary, skateboarding for girls, women and non-binary skaters has come a long way in providing opportunities for everyone to be able to participate at whatever level they want, including at the high-performance level of elite competitions.
The future will no doubt see many more switching up of traditions and NBDs. We should all get on board and support this trajectory and do so with more than just cheers from the stadiums and ‘heart’ emoji and ‘thumbs up’ clicks on social media. We need also need to bring in policies, safeguards and both community-led and institutional level strategies to ensure skaters can be safe from physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, free from discrimination, and able to just do what they love and have fun, which is the reason skateboarders started doing what they do in the first place.
Picture at top: Chloe Covell with her X-Games gold medal. Photo: Colin Bane.
The Border Patrol is one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies in the U.S., with roughly 19,000 officers. It also has one of the largest gender disparities – for decades, the number of women on the force has held steady around 5%. Despite years of demands for reform, the Border Patrol hasn’t managed to substantially increase the number of women in the agency.
Reporter Erin Siegal McIntyre set out to examine why this number has remained so low. She spoke with more than two dozen current and former Border Patrol agents and reviewed hundreds of pages of complaints and lawsuits in which agents allege sexual harassment or assault. Those interviews and documents reveal a workplace where a wide range of sexual misconduct is pervasive: from stale sex jokes to retaliation for reporting sexual misconduct and assault and rape.
Siegal McIntyre starts with the first class of women who were allowed to become Border Patrol agents in 1975. We hear from Ernestine Lopez, a member of that class. Days before graduation, she is raped by a classmate and reports it. She’s abruptly fired, leading her on a 12-year legal battle against the government. This is the first time Lopez, now 85, has told her story publicly.
Next, we hear from a young woman who loved working as an agent but left the Border Patrol at the peak of her career. Her supervisor had targeted her and other women on her team by hiding a camera in the floor drain in the women’s restroom. This is the first time she has spoken to a news outlet about her experience of reporting her supervisor and pursuing a case in court against him and the Border Patrol.
Then we follow the story of Kevin Warner, a Border Patrol probationary agent who was abruptly fired months after participating in a sex game along with a dozen other agents, including his superiors. Warner alleges that he was wrongfully discharged. Then Siegal McIntyre takes her reporting to a former chief of the Border Patrol, Mark Morgan. She asks about workplace culture, the low number of women in the agency and the lack of transparency around investigations of sexual misconduct in the patrol.
Support for Erin Siegal McIntyre’s work was provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Harnisch Foundation. Special thanks to Ruth Ann Harnisch, Deborah Golden and the Gumshoe Group for their legal support and to John Turner and Gary Kirk from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill.
The Whitlam government of 1972–75 transformed Australia. And yet the scope and scale of the reforms for Australian women are often overlooked. A new book called Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the revolution. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, chatted to the book’s editor, Michelle Arrow.
Why was Gough Whitlam – as a political figure – so interested in women’s rights?
Whitlam was part of a group of Labor figures in the 1960s who wanted to reform the Labor party to focus on human rights, not just worker’s rights, and to think about other kinds of inequality other than class. This meant he was much more open to action on Indigenous rights, on poverty and disadvantage, and of course, on improving women’s rights.
Why did you personally want to revisit the Whitlam period, with this focus?
There were two reasons I wanted to revisit the Whitlam era. The first was that in 2019 I was lucky enough to be part of a conference organised by the Whitlam Institute called ‘Revisiting the Revolution’. The conference was the brainchild of the late, great Susan Ryan and Leanne Smith, then the director of the Whitlam Institute, and it was held in old Parliament House, a place filled with history and meaning.
To be there with all those women who had played such a crucial role in the social change of the 1970s was tremendously inspiring, and editing this book was my attempt to recreate the experience of being at that conference, and to amplify these women’s voices.
The second reason is that since that conference in 2019, the impact of COVID, the March for Justice, and the impact of the Morrison government, we saw a feminist reawakening in Australia. I felt that Australia’s trailblazing feminist history had something to say to that moment.
Among feminists, many of Whitlam’s achievements for women are well known. But can you summarise them for us? Why WAS this period so groundbreaking?
Michelle Arrow is a Professor of History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Picture: Supplied
The Whitlam era was a period of significant reform in many aspects of life, but the scale and scope of reforms for women were remarkable. A few of the most significant reforms were:
Expanded access to child care, equal pay for work of equal value, the introduction of the supporting mothers’ benefit, cheaper, more accessible contraception, government funding for women’s refuges and women’s health centres, no-fault divorce, free university education, which was of particular benefit to older women, and a grants program of more than $3m for groups around Australia to celebrate and commemorate International Women’s year in 1975.
Much of this was spearheaded by Whitlam’s women’s affairs adviser, Elizabeth Reid (pictured at top), who was appointed in April 1973. She was the first women’s affairs advisor to a national leader anywhere in the world! She helped develop women’s policy machinery to make government more responsive to women’s needs. This was truly groundbreaking. Whitlam recognised women as a distinctive political group whose needs were not always met by policy settings that focused on men.
Not long ago, I interviewed Elizabeth Reid regarding her role as women’s advisor to national government — a world first at the time. It was astounding to think of an Australia without women’s refuges or the single mother’s benefit and paid maternity leave. It showed me how far we HAVE actually come when it comes to women’s equality. How has this book made you reflect on this historical period?
One of the lessons from the Whitlam era that I think is most important is that some of these significant policy changes – like the introduction of government-funded women’s refuges – were the product of radical activists and reforming governments working together, or at least working in mutually productive ways.
Elsie Women’s Refuge, the first feminist-run women’s refuge in Australia, ran for nine months on volunteer labour and donations before it received its first injection of funding from the Whitlam government. What governments do is crucial. But what activists do – outside of government – is just as important for creating the conditions in which governments can make change.
The cover of “Women and Whitlam.” Published by NewSouth
One commentator suggested this book shows politics can be radical. How does this collection of essays reflect that?
I think it reflects it in a number of ways. The formation of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972 was a radical move because it forced women’s political issues onto the national agenda in a way that they had never been there before, even though WEL was regarded as a reformist, rather than a revolutionary organisation. WEL interviewed every candidate running in the 1972 election and ranked them on their policy positions on women’s issues – the survey made a huge impact in the election campaign.
Second, it shows that Women’s Liberation was able to secure a seat at the table of the Prime Minister, to advise on government policy. Elizabeth Reid, Whitlam’s women’s affairs adviser, was a member of women’s liberation before she took the role. She was an activist and a tutor in Philosophy at ANU – not a professional bureaucrat – and she approached her role in a radical way.
She was just as concerned with changing the ways women thought about themselves as she was about providing better childcare.
This mixture of radicalism and pragmatism was a hallmark of the era, I think.
Third, Reid always spoke about how important it was to have allowed an active feminist movement outside government to shape decision-making inside government. There was a strong relationship between revolution and reform, and this book shows that.
What are the lasting impacts of the policy reforms of the early 70s?
There were two key impacts worth noting. The first was many of these reforms challenged the deeply ingrained idea that women’s sole, lifelong role was to be a wife and mother, dependent on a male breadwinner. The introduction of the supporting mothers benefit, which meant women could be mothers without marrying, or they could leave abusive partners. Funding women’s refuges gave women alternatives, as did the passage of the Family Law Act. Free higher education and equal pay (in theory, if not always in practice) meant that many women had a much firmer foundation for their independence, if they wanted it.
The second impact I think was Whitlam’s focus on women (and women’s increased political activism) established that women were a distinctive political constituency, especially for Labor. Over subsequent decades, we’ve seen working and middle class women shift more firmly into the Labor camp (when for much of the twentieth century many women were more likely to vote Liberal). In the most recent federal election, we have also seen that governments which ignore women, or fail to appeal to them, will pay an electoral price for that neglect.
What’s your favourite story or anecdote in this book? What’s something that really surprised you?
I think one of my favourite stories in the book is about the late Pat Eatock. Pat was an indigenous activist who played a very important role in establishing and maintaining the Aboriginal Embassy in 1972. She later stood for Parliament in the 1972 election for the Black Liberation Party – and Elizabeth Reid was her campaign manager.
Perhaps the detail of her story that I like the best was that Pat was the only candidate to achieve a perfect score on the Women’s Electoral Lobby survey – if only she’d been elected!
Some believe feminist progress has stalled since this era. How would you respond to that?
Sara Dowse (one of the book’s contributors) was asked this question recently, and her answer was really striking. She said that one of the things that made her feel that feminist progress had been made was that when she was a girl she was raised with a pretty narrow set of expectations for her life. Her granddaughters, however, had no such limits on their imagination or ambitions. And that was one of the goals of women’s liberation, to expand women’s horizons. I think we could regard that as a success.
However, there are still significant structural barriers in place for women. And we know those structural barriers are much more rigid for poor women, older women, CALD women and First Nations women.
We know rates of violence against women remain unacceptable, especially Indigenous women. But there has been a change in the ways that we discuss these issues publicly. In the 1960s. Domestic violence was not really discussed in public because it was not regarded as a public problem.
Feminism has transformed the ways we talk about violence against women and women’s rights but we don’t always have the best public policy responses. The new Labor government has taken some encouraging steps, especially on improving wages and conditions for female-dominated industries – again, as a result of years of feminist advocacy.
If we think about looking forward to the future, what do you hope readers take from Women and Whitlam?
This book pays tribute to the feminist activists of the 1970s, and I hope that it might introduce some of these women to a new generation. And by placing their essays alongside writing by younger feminists, I hope it can open up productive intergenerational conversations.
I also hope that the book shows us that there are many different ways to achieve reform, and that it a reminder that we need to use all the levers at our disposal if we’re going to make life better for all women – from radical protest to working with government. And most importantly, if you want a better world, you need to turn up and help make that change! These women are all fabulous role models for those who are trying to change our society, culture and politics for the better.
Picture at top: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam discusses International Women’s Year with two members of the National Advisory Committee, Ms. Elizabeth Reid and the Secretary of the Australian Government’s Department of the Media, Mr. James Oswin. Source: National Library of Australia obj-137047143
Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a local restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating – until one day she says her boss went too far and she turned to the local police for help. What happened next would put a detective on the hot seat and lead to a legal battle that would drag on for years. The United States Supreme Court would even get involved.
Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon spent years taking a close look at cases across the country in which people reported sexual assaults to police, only to find themselves investigated. In this hour, we explore one case and hear how police interrogated an alleged perpetrator, an alleged victim and each other.
De Leon’s investigation is also the subject of a forthcoming documentary, “Victim/Suspect,” which debuts May 23 on Netflix.
Updated: Ebrahim Yusuf Ali AlSamahiji was a 39-year-old Bahraini citizen and an employee at the Aluminium Bahrain Company (ALBA) when Bahraini authorities arbitrarily arrested him from his home on 15 October 2015 without presenting an arrest warrant. During his detention, he was subjected to torture, sexual assault, religion-based insults, provocation, insults, enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, denial of communication, reprisals, isolation, and medical neglect. He was sentenced in an unfair trial based on evidence extracted under torture in a terrorism case known as the “Nuwaidrat Warehouse Case” and is currently serving his life sentence in Jau Prison.
On 15 October 2015, at 3:00 A.M., masked plainclothes officers arrested Ebrahim from his home. They raided his house while he was asleep, awakening and terrifying his wife and children. The officers did not present an arrest warrant or state the reason for the arrest. They searched the house and confiscated electronic devices including cellphones and computers. Ebrahim was then transferred by the officers, some of whom were holding cameras, to a small black bus with tinted windows, while other police cars were surrounding the area.
Ebrahim managed to call his family when he arrived at the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) to inform them of his location, but the line was then cut. He then forcibly disappeared for 23 days. After that, he was able to make a second call, but the officers prohibited him from telling his family about his condition and what he was subjected to.
Ebrahim’s torture began when he was transferred to the bus on the day of his arrest and continued during his interrogation at the CID. CID officers threatened and severely tortured him to extract a coerced confession for a crime he did not commit. They beat him with batons all over his body, stripped him naked, stomped on his face, put a shoe in his mouth, and sexually assaulted him. The officers also verbally abused him by insulting his religion, his sect, and its religious leaders, and severely beat him when he refused their orders to repeat insults to his Shia sect. He was denied access to legal counsel during this time. Ebrahim initially refused to confess to the pre-prepared charges, but after being threatened with rape, he confessed to the fabricated charges related to the Nuwaidrat warehouse case. As a result of the torture, Ebrahim suffers from frequent headaches, back and leg pain, recurrent eye infections, and damaged teeth.
On 7 November 2015, three weeks after his arrest, officers forced Ebrahim to appear before the Public Prosecution Office (PPO) at dawn. He was deprived of food and sleep for three weeks, causing him to hallucinate. The prosecutor, in the presence of his lawyer, threatened to subject him to further torture if he did not confess to the charges against him. The officers also threatened to harm his family members if he did not confess. As a result, Ebrahim was forced to confess to the charges against him before the PPO. The lawyer noted that Ebrahim was narrating the events rapidly, as if he had been instructed on what to say.
When his family was finally allowed to visit Ebrahim at the CID, they noticed traces of beatings on his hands and legs and observed his difficulty in moving. He told his family about the violations that he was subjected to. After that, he was transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center.
In 2017, a police officer from the Dry Dock Detention Center entered Ebrahim’s cell and provoked and insulted him. In response, Ebrahim asked to see the officer in charge. Instead, a group of officers entered his cell, beat him, and took him to the officer in charge, who then ordered his transfer to solitary confinement. Consequently, Ebrahim was forcibly disappeared for two weeks. He filed a complaint with the Ombudsman about this incident, but the unit manipulated the case, portraying Ebrahim as the perpetrator. The Ombudsman concluded that he had violated the laws of the Reform and Rehabilitation centers and referred the case to the court. On 10 May 2017, the court sentenced him to one month in prison and a fine for insulting a public official. Ebrahim tried to appeal the verdict, but to no avail.
Ebrahim was not brought before a judge within 48 hours of his arrest. He was not given adequate time and facilities to prepare for his trial, which began eight months after his arrest. He was unable to present evidence or challenge the evidence against him, communicate with his lawyer during the trial, and was prevented from attending some sessions. Moreover, the court used confessions extracted under torture as evidence against him in the trial. On 28 December 2017, more than two years after his arrest, the Fourth High Criminal Court sentenced Ebrahim and nine other defendants to life imprisonment and revoked their citizenship in the Nuwaidrat warehouse case. Ebrahim was convicted of 1) joining a terrorist group, 2) possessing and manufacturing weapons, fireworks, and explosives, and smuggling them by sea for terrorist purposes, and 3) training in the use, manufacture, and smuggling of weapons, fireworks, and explosives in Iraq and Iran with the intention of committing terrorist crimes. Many of the charges brought against Ebrahim during the trial sessions were different from what he confessed to during the investigation, confirming that some of the charges were fabricated by the court. For example, he was accused of smuggling weapons by sea because he owns a cruiser. The weapons training charge was completely fabricated yet used against him during the trial. His family also believes that the court manipulated the case and added charges to Ebrahim AlSamahiji’s case that were originally intended for another defendant with the same first name, Ebrahim. Furthermore, the family believes that a third person, also named Ebrahim, was convicted on similar charges due to sharing the same name with both Ebrahim AlSamahiji and the co-defendant named Ebrahim. On 30 May 2018, the Court of Appeal upheld Ebrahim’s sentence, and the judge who issued the appeal ruling was the same judge who issued the initial verdict, in violation of basic fair trial rules. On 8 February 2020, the Court of Cassation reinstated Ebrahim’s citizenship but upheld the rest of the sentence. After the initial verdict in the Nuwaidrat warehouse burning case, Ebrahim was transferred to Jau Prison.
Ebrahim was repeatedly threatened, insulted, and provoked by officers at both the Dry Dock Detention Center and Jau Prison. He was repeatedly subjected to enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, deprivation of communication, and medical negligence for eye, dental, stomach, and knee issues. His family submitted several complaints to the Ombudsman and the Special Investigations Unit regarding his torture, unfair trial, medical negligence, enforced disappearance, solitary confinement, and communication cutoffs, but to no avail. Moreover, Ebrahim was subjected to reprisals several times after these units received complaints about his situation.
On 17 November 2022, widespread protests broke out in the political prisoners’ buildings in Jau Prison to protest the insulting and mistreatment of prisoner Sheikh AbdulHadi AlMkhawdar, a prominent cleric and opposition leader, by prison officers. This mistreatment prompted Sheikh AlMkhawdar to declare a hunger strike. Ebrahim was among the protesters in Building 8, showing solidarity with the Sheikh. The prisoners refused prison officers’ orders to return to their cells, demanding a meeting with the director of Jau Prison, Hisham AlZayani. The protests escalated after a delegation of prisoners met with AlZayani, who showed indifference to the insult that Sheikh AlMkhawdar had endured and to the Sheikh’s declaration of a hunger strike. The delegation then demanded a meeting with Sheikh AlMkhawdar, who demanded them to stop the protests during the meeting. The prisoners’ representatives agreed with the prison administration that prison officers would conduct a simple superficial search inside the prison wards to confiscate papers and banners used in the protests. However, the officers reneged on the agreement. Ebrahim said in an audio recording that officers began tearing up the furniture in Building 8, where he was held, and confiscated his and his colleagues’ personal belongings while they were praying Friday prayers, preventing them from continuing their prayers. Ebrahim objected to this search, telling the officers that they had broken their previous pledge to conduct a superficial and unprovocative search. The officers then accused Ebrahim of incitement and of possessing a private cell phone inside the prison, and transferred him to solitary confinement for six days in retaliation.
After his solitary confinement ended on 23 November 2022, the Jau Prison administration continued to take retaliatory measures against Ebrahim. He was isolated by being transferred to Building 2 and placed with foreign criminal prisoners who were addicted to smoking and drugs. In an audio recording, Ebrahim reported that his cellmates would not stop smoking, causing him to almost suffocate on 30 November 2022 due to his asthma, which was exacerbated by the smoke. Additionally, he complained in the same recording about blood being scattered all over the place resulting from prisoners’ deliberate self-inflicted wounds during bouts of hysteria. He expressed concern that he could be infected with AIDS.
Ebrahim’s contact with his family was frequently cut off during his isolation due to the frequent breakdown of phones inside the building, often caused by prisoners cutting the phone wires. Additionally, he reported that these prisoners were using his own personal belongings.
During his isolation, Ebrahim suffered several asthma attacks due to exposure to smoking by the addicted prisoners who shared the same cell with him. Despite his family’s repeated requests to see an asthma specialist doctor, the prison administration consistently referred him to the prison clinic doctor, who, without conducting any examination, always claimed that Ebrahim was not suffering from anything. His wife submitted several complaints to the Ombudsman regarding his situation in isolation, demanding proper treatment and transfer to another building suitable for his health condition. However, the Ombudsman’s response was always that Ebrahim was in a building suitable for his status and classification in prison and that he had no health issues, completely ignoring the slow death he was suffering from.
On 4 January 2024, Ebrahim was attacked by two foreign criminal prisoners in the cell where he was isolated, resulting in a quarrel and an injury to his left hand. Subsequently, the prison administration forcibly disappeared him for a week. His family was left in the dark about his well-being, fate, and whereabouts, only to later learn that he was held in solitary confinement. Ebrahim was subsequently moved back to the same cell with the prisoners who had attacked him in Building 2 at Jau Prison. After enduring over a year in isolation, Ebrahim was eventually relocated to Building 8, specifically designated for political prisoners.
Ebrahim continues to suffer from medical neglect while experiencing tooth pain, colitis, stomach inflammation, and chronic eye inflammation. He also endures knee pain resulting from an untreated old knee fracture. Additionally, he grapples with complications from gallbladder removal surgery, gastric fluctuations due to stomach sensitivity to medications, and chronic injuries stemming from torture. Despite his repeated requests over the years for treatment and his deteriorating health condition, the Jau Prison administration persists in denying him his right to proper medical care.
Ebrahim’s warrantless arrest, torture, sexual assault, religious-based insults, provocation, insults, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, denial of communication and access to a lawyer during interrogation, unfair trial based on evidence extracted under torture, retaliation, isolation, and medical negligence all constitute clear violations of the Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Bahrain is a party. Moreover, the violations he faced during his imprisonment, particularly medical negligence, constitute a breach of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Ebrahim. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, provocation, insults, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, denial of communication and access to a lawyer during interrogation, religion-based insults, retaliation, and isolation, and hold perpetrators accountable. ADHRB further calls on the Bahraini government to compensate Ebrahim for the violations he suffered, including injuries resulting from torture. ADHRB warns of Ebrahim’s deteriorating health condition resulting from years of medical neglect and urges the Jau Prison administration to urgently provide him with appropriate and necessary medical care, holding it responsible for any further deterioration in his health.
Having initiated one of Australia’s most successful campaigns against sexual assault, Chanel Contos shares some valuable advice: “Be ruthless with structures and kind with people.”
Chanel believes the decision to focus on changing the culture, rather than demonising individuals, is the main reason for the success of her Teach Us Consent campaign. As a result of Chanel’s initiative, Australia will soon see consent education introduced nationally in every school at every level.
In February last year, Chanel posted an Instagram poll, asking “Have you, or has anyone close to you, ever been sexually assaulted by someone who went to an all-boys school in Sydney?” The post went viral and Chanel was soon inundated with replies from all over the world. Seventy per cent of respondents answered, “Yes.”
With over 200 responses within 24 hours, Chanel quickly realised an issue she and her friends were discussing privately was not isolated to a few exclusive Sydney schools. Teenage boys are routinely raping and sexually assaulting teenage girls, but rape culture is so normalised in our society that, often, neither perpetrators nor victims understand what has happened between them is a criminal act.
The problem, identified by Chanel, is that neither girls nor boys receive consent education at school. It isn’t until they leave school that young women realise they have been raped or sexually assaulted – often by boys they trusted, and considered as friends. It’s unclear how many young men gain sufficient insight to understand that actions they considered “normal teenage behaviour” were not only illegal, but hugely damaging to the young women involved.
Inspired by the response to her poll, Chanel, now working with a team of experts, set up a website called “Teach Us Consent” and started an online petition asking for sexual consent education in Australian schools. The petition quickly gained more than 44,000 signatures supported by over 6,540 stories of sexual assault.
Recently, I interviewed Chanel Contos for an episode of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences in Australia’s ‘Seriously Social podcast’. As the mother of 9 and 12 year old girls, the importance of her work really struck home to me. As an older feminist, I finished the interview simply bursting with pride that young women of Chanel’s generation are taking up the cause of women’s safety and equality with such thoughtfulness, insight and skill.
Chanel, herself, was sexually assaulted at just 13 years old, but it was not until she left school she discovered the boy who sexually assaulted her went on to do the same to one of her friends.
She says, “I got really, really emotional about the fact I could have prevented it happening if I had fully understood what was going on; if I’d reported him or held him accountable in some way. But I didn’t.”
“I didn’t know that someone you knew and trusted could do something like rape you. I thought rapists were that stereotype of someone who is going to kidnap you and hurt you. I didn’t realise that sexual violence can occur without physical pain being inflicted. And because I thought what happened was normal, I didn’t tell anyone. I just thought that was part of being thirteen.”
“I thought, maybe if he knew what consent was – how important it was – maybe he wouldn’t have done it to me.”
Chanel’s initial plan was to solicit some testimonies from girls within her own circle and pass them on to local boys’ schools. But then she decided on the Instagram poll – and it went viral.
She says, “I was getting testimonies faster than I could physically read or post them.”
Chanel couldn’t help but be touched by the responses. She told me, “… those stories – every single one of them – was so genuine … None of them were conventional or whatever. Everyone had their own voice and that made their stories feel so real … It was hard to ignore that.”
When, inevitably, the media got hold of the story it took Chanel’s campaign to a level where it simply couldn’t be ignored.
The Teach Us Consent campaign is designed to change lives. But it has also changed Chanel’s life.
She says, “If we think about the day before I launched the petition I was a big-time, chilled out, uni student. Doing my Masters degree and living in London during the COVID lock-down, I was spending a lot of time inside; sleeping in, staying up late. And then, almost overnight, after the petition started, I didn’t sleep for like three or four days.”
Chanel spent the next 18 months working on her Master’s thesis during the day, then switching to “Australian time” and working on the Teach Us Consent campaign all night.
She says, “It was a massive life change, but it means that now I get to work in gender equality and violence prevention and human rights, which is something I always wanted to do; I just didn’t really think I could do it.”
As a direct result of her efforts, NSW Police ramped up Operation Vest, their anonymous online tip site, Chanel met with the Prime Minister and, earlier this year, Ministers of Education from around Australia unanimously committed to mandating “holistic and age appropriate consent education in every school every year, from foundation until Year 10.”
Chanel was surprised that, once consciousness was raised about this issue, cultural change happened incredibly quickly. It went from cynical responses like, “What do you want the school system to do about it?” to everyone agreeing – the public, schools, police and politicians – that immediate action is required.
Chanel marvels at the people who were “willing to put the most intimate parts of their lives on a public forum for the benefit of the greater good” and credits their selfless generosity for helping to effect this tangible change.
Not all campaigns are as successful as Chanel’s, and certainly few get results as quickly. I asked her, “Why do you think your style of protest got the results it did?”
First, Chanel thinks that people had a strong, emotional response to the testimonies posted on the Teach Us Consent website. To date, more than 6,500 stories of sexual assault have been submitted.
But, having given it a great deal of thought, Chanel thinks what really made her campaign unique was “the fact that no individual perpetrator at any point got any blame. There was no individual finger-pointing.”
Chanel’s campaign was never about blaming perpetrators, it was about fixing the culture that was creating the problem. The mantra guiding Teach Us Consent was: “Be ruthless with structures and kind with people.”
She says, “I feel like that’s what the campaign did, which is why it had such an impact.”
Towards the end of our interview, I asked Chanel, what she would do if she had a magic wand.
At first, she says she would abolish normalised violence. But, as the discussion continued she revises her wish and decides that granting empathy to everyone would have the same result and a wider impact.
The success of the Teach Us Consent campaign should give us pause for thought. Of course, it is only natural to want to respond to sexual assault with anger and blame. But Chanel’s counterintuitive, empathetic approach encourages everyone to focus, not on who is to blame, but on how we can all do better.
“Well sometimes I don’t feel like I belong and that I’m taking up someone else’s space […] I don’t want to paint this big dark picture, but that’s the easiest way for me to describe it – that I’m occupying their space. [That’s] how sexism makes me feel”.
Everyday sexisms are part of the fabric of university life, they are built into the spaces we move through, the interactions we have, and the disciplines we work in. And yet they are almost entirely absent from university Gender Equity Plans, policies regarding sexual harassment and assault and discussions about workplace-based discriminations.
Partly, this is because of the slippery nature of everyday sexisms. That is, they happen in a moment, often unexpectedly, in a question, a comment, or glance; or in the way your idea might be ignored and then repeated by a cismale colleague to fanfare. (Editor’s note: Cis is short for cisgender and it’s a term that means whatever gender you are now is the same as what was presumed for you at birth.)
We see everyday sexisms when we look around at our workplaces, at their leaders, at those who have research only positions – and we don’t see people that look like us.
As three queer researchers who have all experienced everyday sexisms, we wanted to investigate if and how these are understood by universities, the extent to which they are experienced and to develop creative interventions that enable universities to address everyday sexisms differently. We developed our research project Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms with this in mind, as well as with a focus on the intersectionality of experiences of sexism.
We applied for Australian Research Council funding to do this work, based on our pilot research during the start of the COVID pandemic, and no-one was more surprised than us to be successful in the heyday of the Morrison years. Our work uses the term ‘sexisms’, as we understand that such oppressions are experienced differently by people who identify as women as well as gender diverse people. Our research has four phases.
First, we completed an audit of every Australian public university website (N = 37) that identified where the concept of “gender equity” appears. We can share that our findings were that university websites tended to reproduce colonialities of gender, in that they siloed identity and gender equity to specific places. Second, we interviewed key stakeholders, such as complaints officers, women STEM leaders, and First Nations women academics.
These interviews served two key purposes – they helped us to develop vignettes about everyday sexisms that were used in phase three of the data collection for the project, a large-scale survey. The vignettes were designed to tap into the extent to which academic workers recognise sexisms in everyday interactions. The interviews also gave insight into experiences of everyday and structural sexisms from university workers.
The interviews revealed some of the ongoing issues, tensions and problems in relation to gender equity and higher education across disciplines as well as at the administrative levels of the university.
What we found here was disturbing in that the gendered and racialised experiences of participants highlighted how little is understood about microaggressions and how these accumulate to produce exhaustion and burnout.
The interviews also demonstrated that the conclusions Sara Ahmed draws in her book Complaint! ring true in the Australian context, where policy functions to victimise the complainant while universities rally round perpetrators – especially those who are seen to be ‘useful’ to the academy in terms of intellectual esteem and funding success.
We are currently working on phase three, which is the distribution of a large-scale survey we hope will capture how Australian academic workers experience and understand everyday sexisms. We are interested in how everyday sexisms play out differently within different university contexts. We are about to begin the final phase, a series of creative focus groups where we will be presenting our data-so-far and working together to develop responses to everyday sexisms.
If you are interested in participating in an online or a face-to-face creative focus group held in Sydney or Melbourne during early 2023, please contact us (email contacts below).
The Jenkins Review was initiated after women bravely came forward to share their experiences. This vanguard was followed by others who told their stories to the review team confidentially.
I was one of them.As the #MeToo reckoning for Australian politics played out in the media, traumatic incidents from two decades earlier that I had tried hard not to think about resurfaced.
I realised the things that happened to me as a young intern in a federal politician’s office, involving the politician’s chief of staff, were not just bad experiences. They were incidents of rape, unwanted sexual touching, and sexual harassment. They were abuses of power.
To say that 2021 and 2022 have been extremely difficult for me would be an understatement. Trying to process those experiences and decide what to do about them has made the last year one of the hardest of my life. My mental and physical health, my career, and my family have all been negatively affected.
Meanwhile, the life of the man involved has not been affected at all.
While I have thought about those incidents every day since they resurfaced, he probably has not thought about them for many years. I understand that the options available to me to try to hold him accountable for his behaviour, or to receive any kind of compensation, range from difficult to impossible.
When I talk to people about my experiences, they often ask me what I want now. I want what any person who has been harmed by an individual, a group, or an institution wants.
People want to be listened to when they share their traumatic experiences. They want those experiences acknowledged. They want those responsible to apologise. They want individuals to be held accountable for their behaviour. They want reasonable compensation. They want steps to be taken to help ensure that the things that happened to them do not happen to others. Above all, they want to be treated as people.
Assault, harassment, and bullying are all dehumanising experiences.
One of the worst aspects of the assaults I experienced was the realisation that the perpetrator did not care who I was, what I wanted or did not want, or what my goals and ambitions were. He saw me only as a body he could use.
When people report their dehumanising experiences, they are often met with a dehumanising response from the police, management, the HR department, or others. As a result, their original trauma is compounded.
I believe the review process, the resulting Set the Standard report, and the Parliament’s response to the report have aimed to respond in a humanising way, and have generally succeeded in doing so. The review team listened to and acknowledged people’s experiences and produced a comprehensive and powerful report, with recommendations focused on ensuring parliamentary workplaces are safer for everyone in future.
In February 2022 the Parliament implemented the report’s first recommendation by apologising for the past mistreatment of people in parliamentary workplaces. For me, hearing those speeches was a cathartic moment. There were tears involved, so I was glad I watched in private. And it’s not every day that you get an apology from a prime minister.
All political parties have agreed to implement the report’s 28 recommendations in full, and that work continues to progress. In my view there are two key things that were not included in the recommendations that the Parliament also needs to implement: consultation and compensation.
The Jenkins Review centred on the voices of people from parliamentary workplaces and did not prioritise some voices over others. But the implementation process has been driven by the parliamentary leadership taskforce whose members are all politicians.
No employees or former employees are represented on the taskforce, unlike in NSW where the equivalent advisory group includes representatives of current and former staff. This needs to change.
The Australian Parliament should also establish a standing staff consultation body, one that includes representatives of workers in all parliamentary workplaces as well as former staff and survivor advocates.
Some of the people who have been bullied, harassed, or assaulted in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces have been able to access financial compensation.
Others may be eligible for compensation, but have been so traumatised by their experiences that they are not in any position to jump through all the required bureaucratic and legal hoops. And some fall into a kind of legal black hole, with few if any options for compensation available.
The Australian Parliament is now aiming to set the standard for other workplaces in responding to misconduct.
It could demonstrate that commitment by putting its money where its mouth is and setting up a redress scheme for people who have been traumatised by their experiences in parliamentary workplaces.
On Sept. 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in Tehran, Iran, while in police custody. Amini was arrested by the Guidance Patrol, the morality squad of the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran that oversees public implementation of hijab regulations, for not wearing a hijab properly.
Soon after the news of her death was broadcast and a photograph emerged on social media of her lying in a Tehran hospital in a coma, people throughout the country became enraged.
All Iranian women who are routinely humiliated because of their gender can empathize with her. But Kurds and Kurdish women in particular understood the political message of her death at the hands of police and the state’s subsequent violent response to the protests.
The huge wave of protests in Iran following Amini’s death represents a historic moment in Iran. People have taken to the streets shouting slogans against the compulsory hijab and denouncing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
In this photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, on Sept. 21, 2022. (AP Photo)
The Girls of Revolution Street
Although the current uprising may seem unprecedented, it is in fact part of a deep-rooted and longstanding resistance movement by women in Iran.
Decades later, in 2017, Vida Movahed climbed onto a platform on Enghelab (Revolution) Street in the centre of Tehran, took off her headscarf and waved it in the air as a sign of opposition to compulsory hijab.
She was followed by other women and the movement quickly became known as The Girls of Revolution Street or Dokhtaran-e Khiaban-e Enghelab.
This recent uprising is a link in a chain of protests that together have the potential to bring about fundamental change in Iran.
It began with the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009 followed by popular uprisings in 2018 and 2019. The Green Movement was largely peaceful, but the uprisings grew increasingly more confrontational with each wave of repression.
Women have been in the lead in all these protests, posing a real challenge to the regime. They’re the leaders of transformative change, the vanguard of a potential revolution, challenging the legitimacy of the current government..
The current protests are focused on two main demands: dignity and freedom. Both have been absent from political life in Iran, and both have a prominent presence in almost all slogans during this uprising, particularly “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Members of the Iranian community and their supporters rally in solidarity with protesters in Iran in Ottawa on Sept. 25, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
The recent uprising makes it clear that the demand for radical change in Iran today is strong and significant.
With every wave of protest, the desire for freedom gets stronger, the voices get louder and success is within reach. Once again, Iranian women are at the forefront of demanding transformative change.
With the strong support this time of men, political and ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups, they may be leading their country closer to a freer and more just society.
Feature image: Protestors take part during a demonstration in front of the Iranian embassy in Brussels, Belgium on Sept. 23, 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini. Photo: Shutterstock
Remember when AFLW Carlton forward Tayla Harris got predator trolled simply for doing her job?
In case your memory needs jogging, back in 2019 a photograph taken by AFL Media senior photographer Michael Willson depicted Harris’ powerful kicking style, became subject to floods of vile online commentary.
Here’s a pic of me at work… think about this before your derogatory comments, animals. pic.twitter.com/68aBVVbTTj
At the time, Harris correctly identified the harassment as “sexual abuse on social media“. In other words, she was sustaining an injury in an unsafe workplace. And this made what happened an occupational health and safety issue – not just for her, but potentially for every athlete.
For anyone interested in enrolling in a full-time PhD from February 2023, the University of Canberra is offering a scholarship to research ‘Online trolling and e-safety: Women athletes and women working in the sports industry’ together with Sport Integrity Australia.
The Information session on the Women in Sports Industry partnership scholarships, will be held in person and on-line.
Where: Clive Price Suite (1C50) @University of Canberra When: 27 September 5:30 until 7pm AEST
What: Meet our industry partners and researchers, hear about our research in Women in Sport, and discuss your career goals
Cyberhate in Australia is no small matter. The nationally representative polling I commissioned from the Australia Institute in 2018 found the upper cost of cyberhate and online harassment to the Australian economy is $3.7 billion. That figure only counts lost income and medical expenses — so the real cost is far greater.
The same polling also showed women were more likely to report receiving threats of sexual assault, violence or death; incitement of others to stalk or threaten them in real life; unwanted sexual messages and publication of their personal details.
Research around the world also repeatedly finds people of colour are attacked more. It further illustrates that being both a woman and a POC makes you extra vulnerable on the Internet.
As I discuss in my best-selling book, Troll Hunting, we know women in the public eye – people including but not limited to: journalists, politicians and sportspeople – are frequently subject to extreme and ongoing cyberhate that leads to real-life harm. In the most egregious cases, they may be killed.
Once I started investigating and reporting on cyberhate in the Australian press back in 2015, Aussie women in sport started telling me their own stories of being hunted online.
These women were not just elite athletes like Tayla, but also female umpires, sports journalists and administrators.
Heather Reid was the former CEO of Capital Football in the ACT. She gave up her career because of extreme and sustained cyberhate, and her organisation did very little to support her.
Although Reid had her day in court and won, her life was impacted in ways the justice system could never repair. She moved away from Canberra – a city she loved – with her partner. Reid also suffered extreme, ongoing health impacts as a result of stress associated with the vitriolic and homophobic online hatred against her.
Back in 2015, she told me: “This is my workplace and nobody should have to put up with abuse or harassment at work.”
One last example: Freelance sports journalist and academic Kate O’Halloran has been the target of trolls on numerous occasions. At one stage, the predator trolling was so severe, O’Hallaron found herself afraid to leave the house.
Like Reid, she cops abuse that not only targets her gender, but her sexuality.
Myself and my colleagues at the University of Canberra concur with Harris, Reid and O’Halloran; we do not believe your gender – or sexuality – should make you unsafe at work (or destroy your career).
What we would like to know is: What’s the scale of this abuse against female athletes, non-binary folks and those working in the sports industry? What forms does gendered abuse take online? Most importantly, how can we stop it?
Dr Catherine Ordway lectures in sports integrity and ethics at the University of Canberra. (She’ll also be your primary supervisor if you successfully win this scholarship to investigate cyberhate against female and non-binary athletes. I’m also on the advisory panel!)
Dr Ordway says: “Cyber violence against women and girls has now being recognised as, not only a work, health and safety issue, but a broader human rights issue. Sport was designed by and for men.
“The deepest level of toxic, misogynist attacks are reserved for women who ‘dare’ to play, watch and work in sport – particularly if they are non-white, non-binary, and/or non-conformist in the cis heteronormative mould of femininity”.
C’mon. Use the email address above to register your interest. You know you want to! (And it’s important you do.)
Some passages in this article were taken from a piece I previously wrote for the ABC. They are based on my own original research.
This PhD research is proudly supported by the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation at the University of Canberra (home of BroadAgenda, publisher of this article!)
Feature image at top: Women soccer players in a team doing the plank fitness exercise in training together on a practice sports field. Picture: Shutterstock
You can’t manage what you don’t measure and you can’t fix what you can’t see.
And what is clear for everyone to see reading the results of Australia’s first gender equality audit in the public sector is that women have a long way to go to achieve genuine equality.
No surprise there, but for the first time we now have the most comprehensive data on which to make evidence-based decisions to finally fix the problem.
Around 300 of Victoria’s public sector organisations employing more than 450,000 workers in total participated in Australia’s first mandatory workplace gender equality audit.
Under the landmark Gender Equality Act, all state government departments and authorities, emergency services, councils and universities must measure workplace gender inequality to make improvements.
This means that, on average, men took home $19,000 more than women across the 2020-21 financial year. In comparison, in the private sector, Australia’s national gender pay gap was 22.8% or $25,792 as calculated by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
Women’s participation in the paid Victorian workforce increased substantially over the past 5 decades, rising from 43.8% in 1978 to 62.3% in June 2022.
Dr Niki Vincent says: “The data also disproves the claim from some that the gender equality pendulum has swung too far and men are now the victims.”
But as the data shows, workplaces still reflect the fact that the world of paid work was designed for men.
These findings are captured in our Baseline report, which also found:
Women were significantly overrepresented in part-time and casual work, with 42% of women working part time, compared to 15% of men.
More than three-quarters of workers using formal flexible work arrangements were women.
Almost 8 out of 10 parental leave takers were women, and their leave lasted an average of 8 times longer than men’s.
Women were 50% more likely to say they experienced sexual harassment than men but they rarely made a formal complaint about this. Sexual harassment occurred most frequently in majority-men and frontline sectors, such as transport and police and emergency services.
The gender composition of governing bodies across defined entities overall was largely balanced between women and men. Victorian Government targets in place since 2015 requiring 50% of new government board appointments to be women have been successful in generating greater gender balance in public boards in Victoria.
The audit results for every organisation have been published on our publicly accessible portal and while I am sure this has caused some discomfort, the aim is not to name and shame but to make each organisation publicly accountable for making progress towards equality.
The fact that more than 97% of workplace gender audits are compliant, and 100% of the gender equality action plans are compliant proves there is a real commitment and that change is in the air.
The data also disproves the claim from some that the gender equality pendulum has swung too far and men are now the victims.
Despite some men claiming they are more likely to be discriminated against in promotions, men still make up the majority in leadership. Despite women making up 66% of employees in the public sector workforce, they make up only 45% of those in senior leadership roles and more than 3 in 5 chief executives were men.
The baseline report shows Victoria’s public sector organisations are performing well in comparison to the private sector in some areas – and while there is still much progress to be made, there is a real appetite for change.
Addressing workplace gender inequality will lead to improved outcomes for women’s economic security, workforce participation and health and wellbeing, as well as overall national growth and economic productivity.
But this is more than simply reporting data. Organisations must now act on the information by implementing Gender Equality Action Plans and reporting on their progress every two years.
I am proud to say we now have more transparency than ever before to understand the state and nature of gender inequality impacting a large component of Victoria’s workforce and I am confident that Victoria will continue to lead by example in addressing the systemic drivers of gender inequality within the workforce.
Nothing to Hide is Australia’s first mainstream anthology of trans and gender diverse writing. In this excerpt, Stacey Stokes writes about her tough and painful journey to become a woman. This excerpt is published with full permission.
Content notification: This post discusses sexual violence, stigmatisation and discrimination based on a person’s gender identity.
When I was three years old, I started wearing my sister’s old dresses. They seemed so pretty to me. My favourite was the colour of a Cherry Ripe wrapper. The soft satin felt nice on my skin, and I loved the way it swirled around my legs. My parents must’ve told me that I wasn’t allowed to wear dresses because I hid them in a box deep inside an unused wardrobe, and wore them only when I thought I was alone.
One night, I went to my hidey spot and discovered that all my pretty dresses were gone. Who had taken them? Did they know that I’d put them there? I didn’t know. I was devastated, and afraid that I’d be told off by my dad at any moment for my secret, lost collection.
After all my pretty clothes had been taken away, I had to find new forms of beauty. Like fire. I loved the way that I could make it appear whenever I wanted and watch it dance around in its beautiful red colours.
When I was four, I set fire to the lounge room by inserting rolled up paper into the pilot light of the wall heater, then using the lit paper to make little fires on the carpet. My parents asked me if I had set the fire, but I shook my head. Then they asked who did it. ‘A little boy with brown hair, a Transformers Tshirt and grey pants,’ I replied. That’s what I was wearing, of course, but I was no little boy.
When I started primary school, I’d choose to play the princess in make believe games with the boys. It didn’t make me popular. I liked playing with the girls, but soon they began to exclude me too. I started to hate school, and did everything I could to avoid it.
One school day, I told my mum that I was sick, and I stayed at home alone watching daytime television. Mum was doing the washing, dad was at work and my brother and sister had gone to school, so I had the run of the house.
I sat crosslegged in the lounge room with the sun streaming in, watching our old boxy TV that looked like it had been sitting there since the Cold War era. TV was my window into the real world. At 12 o’clock, Jerry Springer came on. It was an episode about transgender people, and the audience cruelly pointed and laughed at all the guests. It hurt me terribly to see them being laughed at.
At the end of the show, Jerry talked about being transgender. He said, ‘If you want to be a girl, then you can be a girl. All you have to do is want it enough.’ So every night before I went to sleep, I concentrated as hard as I could on my dream of being a girl. But every morning, I woke up to find that I still had a penis.
My penis was so embarrassing to me. It was a dark and horrible shame that I didn’t want anyone to know about. When I dressed in trousers to go to school, I’d tuck it back and pretend it didn’t exist. I’d never, ever wear shorts, even in summer, because I couldn’t stand the sight of my little bulge. I refused to participate in sports carnivals, because they insisted that everyone wear shorts. I never even learnt to swim because I’d never,ever wear bathers.
My mum is bipolar, and she was always in and out of psychi atric wards when I was growing up. In fact, a family member told me I was conceived in one. My mum’s condition had a large influence on everyone in my family, but challenged her the most. She’s a smart, caring and nonjudgmental person who was deeply maternal, but the medication the doctors put her on really dumbed her down.
When the meds stopped working or when she’d refuse to take them she’d get sad and cry a lot, or would stay up all night babbling on about things that made no sense, and laugh hysterically. My dad was deeply avoidant and just buried himself in his work.
Cover image: Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia. Picture: Supplied
When I was 10, my parents separated for good. My mum took me up to NSW and my sister stayed in Victoria with Dad. I got sent back down to Victoria to see Dad from time to time, but I didn’t know how to act like a proper boy, which I knew I had to do in front of him. It made me feel awkward and withdrawn. My mum was either dumbed down from her medication or she was in hospital. I felt so alone, with no one I could tell my secrets to.
I started missing so much school that the truancy officers started knocking on our door. My dad was so worried that I was falling behind that he got a Family Court order to say that I had to see a child psychologist. When I went to their office, the psychologist held up a picture of two dogs having sex and asked me if anyone had ever done that to me.
My first thought was, ‘No, this is the first time an adult has shown me pictures of animals having sex, you pervert!’ They didn’t ask me anything about wanting to be a girl, and I didn’t know how to bring it up. They declared me a strange, troubled boy, and sent me back to Victoria to live with my dad and my sister.
When I got back to Victoria, my sister told me I was gay. She tried to tell me that it was okay to be gay, and that I shouldn’t be ashamed. I kept telling her I wasn’t gay, but she didn’t believe me.
Her boyfriend at the time wasn’t as nice about it. He called me ‘fag boy’, and would stick his tongue in my ear and ask me if I liked it. I didn’t, it made me feel upset and dirty. My dad joined in, and started calling me ‘poofter’ as a nickname.
My dad decided I needed to be toughened up, and he sent me to a Catholic boarding school, wherethey trained us to be ‘Christian soldiers’. All weekend, we were made to march or pray to Jesus. I didn’t fit in, and the boys kept themselves entertained by taunting me. They covered me in shaving cream while I was sleeping and heated up bits of metal with lighters, burning me with them, which scarred me for life. It got so bad that I ran away from school one night and slept in a public toilet. I called my mum the next day, and she drove down from NSW to come and get me.
I think my dad gave up on me after that. Back at Mum’s, I enrolled in a new school, which I was hoping would be a fresh start. I decided to make myself over as a ‘metal head’. I grew my hair long and got a guitar that I never did learn how to play. I would blast ‘Cemetery Gates’ by Pantera so loud that sometimes the police would come round to tell me to turn it off. I started smoking and drinking, and Ioften hosted drunken parties at my place when Mum was in the psychiatric unit. I stopped eating and lived off coffee and alcohol, and I lost heaps of weight.
Eventually people started mistaking me for a girl because I was so skinny and longhaired. Whenpeople got a better look at me they would all react differently; girls would usually say sorry, assuming they’d offended me. Guys would do adoubletake and then call me a ‘fucking faggot’.
When they pointed and yelled this at me out of car windows, it reminded me of the audience on the Jerry Springer show, treating the transgender people like circus freaks. I imagined how much worse things could be if I actually transitioned.
Eventually, I dropped out of school altogether. I stayed up all night drinking and smoking and playing PlayStation. Somehow, I got a girlfriend, and for the first time in my life I felt I finally had someone I could trust. She would come over, stay the night, get changed into her school clothes and go to school, leaving her original outfit behind. All her clothes fit me really nicely, which I’d wear alone in the house while she was away. I thought I looked pretty nice, and things were going well between us. I even started to consider telling her about the real me.
Instead, one night she looked at me and told me she wanted to cut off my hair. ‘It looks too girly,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I replied. She disclosed to me that her dad, who was no longer in her life, had had a ‘sex change’ just before she’d met me.
She said that she’d never forgiven her dad, and that she’d sent him a letter telling him that she hated him and wanted nothing to do with him. While she told me this story, she kept using ‘him’ over and over again.
‘He’s dead to me,’ she said as she ended her story. I was devastated to discover that the first person I felt I could trust hated transgender people. I felt more alone than ever.
I started to feel that my body was a stranger’s. I hated what I saw in the mirror. I didn’t know who Iwas or what to do, so I just drank, smoked and slept with every girl I came across. My girl friend and Isplit up, and I moved up to Newcastle. In 2000, I was such a drunken mess that when the Olympic torch went right past my flat, I was too smashed to even stick my head out the window and look.
My flat was practically empty of furniture, and there was even a bullet hole in one of the windows thanks to some local criminals who did a driveby shooting at my house after I pissed them off somehow. When 9/11 happened I only found out because they interrupted DragonBall Z—the only show I’d wake up before midday to watch—to show the footage.
I had a new girlfriend by then. I often asked her to dress me up in her clothes, which were little miniskirts and tight cocktail dresses. My favourite was a green velvet dress that I paired with some knee high boots. She said I looked better in it than she did, which meant a lot to me, but we ended up splitting up because of my drinking.
My dad put a lot of pressure on me to move back to Victoria, because he was worried that I’d die or end up in jail if I stayed in Newcastle. He gave me a job in his office, where my brother also worked, and I got to know him a little. I told him that Dad thought I was gay, which really frustrated me because I knew that I liked girls.
Determined to prove how not gay I was, I slept with every girl that I could. I even called my dad to tell him I wouldn’t be coming into work as I’d torn my penis during sex. My brother, who overheard the conversation, drove over to see if that could really happen, and went really pale after seeing all the blood.
I eventually got sick of my dad’s homophobic taunts, and decided to try and get my high school certificate at Victoria University. I made some nice female friends who also thought I was gay, mainly because I had stopped trying to have sex with women all the time. I had replaced that addiction with playing World of Warcraft obses sively as a female character. My beautiful avatar was a Night Elf, who was tall with long, platinum blonde hair past her waist, and an everchanging array of dresses that noone could take off her.
A beautiful girl started coming over and just sitting with me while I played World of Warcraft. She called me at night and we’d have long phone conversations, talking about anything and everything, and that’s how I started falling in love with her. She seemed to truly care about me.
We started dating, and soon after I asked her to dress me up in her clothes. She put me in a stunning blue dress that matched my eyes. I asked her if she’d still love me if I was a girl, and she said that she would as long as she could see my beautiful blue eyes. But she didn’t think I was serious.
Despite my new love, I was still drinking a lot and got arrested for drunkenly climbing the roof of a restaurant, apparently looking for a table with a view. I got charged and pleaded guilty, and copped a big fine.
My girlfriend became pregnant, and soon we had two beautiful baby girls. We married, and I landed a job as a maritime security officer. I was desperate to get on the straight and narrow to support my family, and I swore off booze and smokes.
One night, I asked my wife if she’d leave me if I got a sex change. She thought about it, and said that she definitely would.
I was crushed. It brought me right back to the shame I felt when I’d first seen the audience laughing at Jerry Springer’s transgender guests. I started drinking again. I was passive aggressive, and increasingly painful to be around, as I projected my unhappiness onto everyone around me.
My house stopped feeling like my home, it just felt like a stranger’s. I had such bad anxiety that I developed an eye twitch and had trouble swallowing food. I kept drinking more and more, and alienated my family through my increasingly toxic behaviour.
“I started to feel that my body was a stranger’s. I hated what I saw in the mirror,” writes Stacey. Photo: Shutterstock
One day, my kid’s teachers got so concerned that they called child protection, who started asking me lots of questions about domestic violence and child abuse. Pretty soon, the police took over asking all the questions, and I ended up in jail.
When I finally got bail, I moved in with my nan and my mum, who were living together back in Victoria. It was at my nan’s house that I really had time to stop and think about what I’d done, and how I had pushed everyone away with my awful behaviour. I decided that since I was now a complete outcast,I might as well transition after all. How could things get any worse? I went to court back and forth, and disclosed to my defence lawyer that I was transgender.
My lawyer disclosed this to the judge during my sentencing hearing. The judge said that I wouldn’t have any trouble with that since I wouldn’t have access to women’s clothes anyway. The judge said that I could minimise my harassment by growing a beard, cutting my hair and using my deadname. Basically, don’t be trans and you won’t be harassed. It really made me wonder about how out of touch the people who decide our fates really are.
In prison, I began an epic battle to receive genderaffirming health care with longstanding help from a community legal service. It took years to get a referral from a doctor to get on hormone replacement therapy, to be allowed female clothing and for staff to refer to me with female pronouns. I’ve been on female hormones for years now, but I am still not allowed to legally change my gender marker as the government says it may ‘offend’ the community. I’ve only stayed sane because of an incredible social worker who has volunteered their time to support me and help me lodge endless paperwork.
A men’s prison is not a safe place for a trans woman. Since I’ve been inside, I’ve been bullied, bashed and raped. I have nightmares most nights and I have tried to end my life many times. If it wasn’t for the external support I’ve received, I probably would’ve kept on trying until I succeeded.
Despite the cruelty I’ve been exposed to in prison, I’m still glad that I finally know who I am. I’ve learnt that I can live without alcohol, and that I don’t need sex to make me happy. I am still haunted by some of the things I have done, and I am terribly sorry about the harm I’ve caused to the people who loved me. I wish I had been able to live as my true self when I was younger, as I might’ve been able tospare many people a great deal of pain and projected anger.
I still haven’t gotten out of prison yet, and some days it’s tough in here. But I am grateful that my body is now mine, and that I am starting to love the person I see in the mirror.
Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia is out now.
Please note: the photos in this story are stock images.
