Bondi Junction attack: Women are sick of being afraid | The Saturday Paper

How could anyone stab a nine-month-old baby?

Why would a man target women going about their business in a shopping centre?

The man stabbed to death four other women – a university student, an artist, an architect and mother of two, an ecommerce assistant who was happily planning her wedding. Tragically, a 30-year-old refugee working his first day shift as a security guard at the centre was also killed.

Most of the people injured and hospitalised in the attack were also female, prompting the commissioner of New South Wales Police Force, Karen Webb, to say it was “obvious” the offender targeted women and avoided the men.

What was obvious to the most senior police officer in the state had not been so plain to armchair detectives, who jumped to incorrect conclusions about the offender’s motivation – that he was an Islamic extremist; that he was a young Jewish man, wrongly identified in media.

There was also, later, a focus on the perpetrator’s mental health – he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The mental health system in this country has been beset with problems for years, but as Professor Patrick McGorry, who has worked with people with schizophrenia for three decades, told the ABC’s Rafael Epstein, people with this diagnosis are less likely to commit acts of violence, not more.

Further, we typically don’t see acts of mass violence being perpetrated by mentally ill women.

Extreme acts of violence of any type perpetrated by women are extraordinarily rare.

On the other hand, our nation’s memory is stained by horrific attacks by male perpetrators – from the Bourke Street Mall car killings, to the Lindt Cafe siege, to Port Arthur, to the Hoddle Street massacre, to the Belanglo State Forest backpacker murders and now Bondi Junction.

Regardless of the sex of the victim, Australian Bureau of Statistics research shows 95 per cent of Australians who experience violence suffer at the hands of a male perpetrator.

When women are angry, or isolated, or depressed, or distorted by extremist ideology, or mentally ill, the statistics show that, overwhelmingly, they don’t resort to violence.

It is only if men take the burden of male violence away from always being a problem for women, if they look into their hearts and acknowledge there is a problem, that we will ever move forward.

Source: 12ft