Australian 'mateship' is burying sexual violence against women

Years ago, in my early 20s, I was at an office Christmas party in Melbourne when a senior male colleague slapped my bottom as he walked past. He winked, said "goodnight" and cruised off with his posse of other drunk male executives.

My shock turned into anger and then concession.

"Probably best to ignore it," I remember telling myself begrudgingly after I computed how the odds were stacked against me in a complaint. He was a partner; I was a junior.

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Though I was one of the luckier ones not to be traumatised by such an incident, years later I realised I was also a statistic in Australia's growing record of sexual violence against women.

Sexual harassment of and violence against women is a global problem and not unique to Australia. What is unique, however, is how the global #MeToo movement to fight sexual violence against women seemingly passed the country by.

Until now.

Allegations that parliament staffer Brittany Higgins was raped by a male colleague in a minister's Parliament House office and, separately, that Australian Attorney General Christian Porter raped a 16-year-old girl in 1988 have resulted in a critical mass of anger that has finally brought women to their feet.

Australia's Attorney General Christian Porter. Photo: AFP alt=Australia's Attorney General Christian Porter. Photo: AFP

This week, women all over Australia took to the streets for #March4Justice rallies against sexual assault, as the fight against violence towards women leapt from the locker rooms of football and rugby players into the offices of government.

While it is not just women who are victims of sexual attacks, they are the targets in the vast majority of cases because these attacks are about power. And, in a power play against men - especially one of strength - women have an Achilles heel.

Like all forms of bullying, including racism and other forms of discrimination, sexual harassment is about those who wield power savouring the perverse satisfaction of abusing it against those who don't.

Sexual assaults have dominated Australia's headlines for years, especially in sports.

There are endless torrid accounts of women being forced into sex after matches and in players' hotel rooms.

Each time women complain, it ends with a cursory apology or a dismissed court trial, deepening the wound of injustice for women.

In 2004, Jeff Bond, a sports psychologist, spoke about the macho culture of football clubs in a local article about a harassment case: "In these male contact sports you have these highly aggressive, risk-taking, competitive sportsmen who are purposely trained to conquer ... it's almost legitimised tribal warfare."

We know this "warfare" isn't confined to sports arenas but other places of power, boardrooms, schools, and now parliament.

While many sexual scandals are also consensual, many aren't. And not all sexual assaults involve rape; some involve "jocular teasing" in the shape of derogatory comments.

Australia is a masculine, "blokish" country where footy players, CEOs and real estate agents are revered as superstars and spoilt to the extent that they can get just about whatever they want.

This is why, ironically, the government itself ran a series of television adverts aimed at curbing Australia's "boys being boys" attitude in 2018, part of its "Stop it at the Start" domestic violence campaign.

In a further irony, that campaign had been unveiled by Porter, then social services minister, and Michaelia Cash, then Minister for Women, for whom Higgins worked after her alleged rape.

In one particularly confronting ad, a schoolboy complains to his father that he got a detention "just for flicking up a girl's skirt". His father, indignant, says, "What? That's it?" only to have his young daughter at the back of the car say, "Yeah, I mean I have already accepted that as I grow up I'll probably be harassed and even abused."

As the ad shows, the glaring fact is that too often, sexual harassment is condoned in Australian homes.

Australia's #MeToo campaign didn't take off as it did in the United States, with which it shares very similar social and corporate cultures, mainly because of its tougher defamation laws.

Law professor Karen O'Connell said on The Conversation that these laws had been used to thwart claims of sexual harassment.

"What most of these cases have in common is that the men involved have sued or threatened to sue for defamation," she said.

Tarana Burke, founder of the MeToo campaign, also believes harsh defamation laws have debilitated the movement in Australia.

The thing is, women are assaulted not only by their physical attacker but by an entire system bound together by a code of Australian "mateship" (otherwise known as soft corruption) that has sold out on ethics and morals by burying the complaints that would otherwise threaten its collective power.

What Australian leaders have said about the Higgins and Porter allegations says a lot about this.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Photo: EPA alt=Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Photo: EPA

Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared Porter "innocent under the law", Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton referred to Higgins' allegations as "she said, he said", and Higgins' former employer Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, who was accused of mishandling the case, apologised for calling her a "lying cow".

I am betting many people who have tried to lodge a bullying or harassment complaint at an Australian workplace can recount how their managers or a friendly "human resources" worker tried to coax them out of the complaint - a bit like Higgins - or hired enough lawyers to turn it against them.

There are even senior women who know better but have decided to turn a blind eye so they too can keep their jobs and stay inside the power club.

The only way to take down the system, as women in Australia realised this week, is to pit system against system. And that is exactly what happened when they marched in solidarity.

It's early days but this keeps up, Australia's #MeToo movement stands a fighting chance this time around.

Su-Lin Tan is an Australian journalist and political economy correspondent for the Post

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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