Category: Australia

Eggs and water balloons thrown as protesters face off at Women Will Speak rally in Melbourne | Women | The Guardian

About 20 people initially attended the planned #WomenWILLSpeak rally that commenced at about 11am, Victoria police said in a statement.

They were outnumbered by 150 protesters from another group, who were “throwing eggs and water balloons at the speakers involved,” the statement said.

A 36-year-old Brunswick woman was arrested at the scene for allegedly assaulting police and was released pending further inquiries, police said.

A live stream of the rally posted on YouTube by Women’s Action Group showed a barricade of police officers in yellow vests separating the #WomenWILLSpeak event from a large crowd gathered with signs.

In the same live stream, some of the protesters in the Women Action’s Group camp can be seen holding signs reading “trans women are men”, “inquiry into gender medicine now” and “no male cheats in women’s sports”.

On Wednesday, a Facebook page titled Trans Queer Solidarity posted about the rally, saying: “We need to out-number them and limit their recruitment like we have before.”

Source: Eggs and water balloons thrown as protesters face off at Women Will Speak rally in Melbourne | Women | The Guardian

The report on murdered and missing Indigenous women and children fails to hold anyone to account. It’s not enough.

After two years and 16 hearings, the Senate Inquiry into Missing and Murdered First Nations women handed down its report yesterday. While important, it was not the moment of reckoning many of us had hoped for.

The Senate inquiry was introduced and spearheaded by Dorinda Cox, the West Australian Greens Senator, who today called the report’s recommendations “weak” and “toothless”.

What the inquiry found is precisely what First Nations women have been saying for decades: that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children are disproportionately impacted by men’s use of violence.

That their stories and lives are ignored by mainstream media.

That police often fail to adequately investigate, search for, or respond to calls for help from First Nations women and children.

And that the data is shockingly incomplete and inadequate. No one is accurately keeping count.

First Nations women represented 16% of all Australian women homicide victims, despite comprising between 2–3% of the adult female population.

First Nations children represented 13% of all child homicide victims.

Not only are First Nations women and children more likely to go missing, they are less likely to be found.

First Nations women are also disproportionately misidentified as the perpetrator, instead of the victim, criminalising First Nations women and creating yet another barrier to getting help.

Source: The report on murdered and missing Indigenous women and children fails to hold anyone to account. It’s not enough.

The letter that helped expose the North Shore Rapist

One of the women who survived the North Shore Rapist helped unmask her own attacker, penning a powerful letter that argued “the community should have the right to protect themselves” in a way she could not have protected herself.

The NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a 2020 ruling that had suppressed Graham James Kay’s name and allowed him to distance himself from his attacks on eight women and girls in the late 1990s.

Kay’s attacks have continued since his release from prison without substantial punishment, and he has since been released back into the community, prompting The Sydney Morning Herald to challenge the suppression order.

Among the pages of evidence provided to the court was a short but powerful letter written by one of the women Kay stalked and assaulted more than 20 years ago.

The woman feared Kay had continued to exhibit “predatory behaviours” since his release from prison, two decades after he attacked her and seven other women and girls.

“The community should be given the opportunity to protect themselves, and they can only do this if they know his identity,” Kay’s victim urged the court in July.

Kay had also been treated softly by the courts before his string of attacks in the 1990s.

He had followed and groped women, spied on other women inside their homes, and been a domestic violence abuser. But despite being brought before the courts five times, he was only punished with good behaviour bonds.

Kay served 18 years in jail for the attacks before being paroled in 2015, but his offending continued.

In 2018, the serial rapist planted a “slobbery kiss” on the cheek of a 16-year-old girl working in a grocery store after the government allowed him to walk around without an electronic ankle monitor.

It was only because of media publicity that the girl knew her assailant was the infamous North Shore Rapist and reported the unwanted kiss to the police, the court found on Tuesday.

Kay was given a good behaviour bond but spent more time in prison because he had a sex worker at his home, in breach of his release conditions.

Despite that, Kay’s restrictions were relaxed again in 2020, and two years later, he stalked and indecently assaulted a terrified woman in Sydney’s CBD.

By then his name was suppressed and crucial details hidden from the public – until the Herald’s legal win this week.

Herald editor Bevan Shields said challenging the suppression of Kay’s name was an “important fight”, but the masthead was spending an increasing amount of time and money challenging similar orders in the courts.

[Ed: This matter needs to be referred to the Judicial Commission. It is an extraordinary demonstration of how the judiciary is failing women in their efforts to protect perpetrators. Thank goodness for Justice Sarah McNaughton now making the correct decision.]

Source: 12ft

Australian Lawmakers Tinker Around Hague Convention Flaws – The Diplomat

Today, three-quarters of Hague Convention cases are brought against mothers who are fleeing domestic abuse with their children. A convention designed to protect children now does the very opposite.

In her address to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June, Reem Alsalem, the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, stated, “In the current application of the Hague Convention, a child can, and is, returned in many cases to their abusers… this, as any other form of violence against women and girls, cuts across institutions and rights and conventions.”

Late last year the Australian government made a weak attempt at rectifying these problems by making an amendment to its Family Law Act, stating “allegations of family and domestic violence can be considered before return orders are made for children under the Hague Convention.”

Yet the use of the word “can” rather than “must” effectively rendered the amendment useless. Most judges see the Hague Convention as a jurisdictional law, rather than one pertaining to child safety. The word “can” is simply not strong enough to change this line of thinking. Family courts themselves – worldwide – have also become incredibly suspicious of mothers who raise accusations of domestic abuse, something also recently highlighted by Alsalem.

Last week a multi-party Senate committee made further recommendations to amend the Family Law Act so that in any Hague Convention case there should be more consideration of the child’s perspective, including if a child objects to a return order. If applied this would be an important addition to the law, but, again, may come up against a legal wall of courts that simply don’t consider child welfare to be what the Hague Convention is about, or are suspicious of any evidence of domestic abuse brought to their attention.

If the Australian government persists with protecting the Hague Convention – with only minor attempts to curb its faults – then its current rhetoric on seriously addressing domestic abuse will ring hollow.

[Ed: There is an urgent need to introduce to the Hague Convention and to our family law generally a presumption in favour of mothers retaining care of young children of whom they have had primary care unless there is strong evidence to putting in question their capacity to care for them. In the absence of this, women and children will continue to be victimised through the court system by men set on vengeance.]

Source: Australian Lawmakers Tinker Around Hague Convention Flaws – The Diplomat

Blind Eye: We Should Heed UN Report Warning Against Australia Becoming A ‘Pimp State” – New Matilda

Calling prostitution ‘sex work’ doesn’t make it less harmful. Michelle Panayi explains why Australia must take seriously calls from a high-ranking United Nations expert for a rethink on the way we allow society to treat many women and young girls.

Australia must act on this warning given that prostitution is mostly called “sex work” which normalises it, and full decriminalisation or legalisation of prostitution exists in the majority of states and territories.

The Special Rapporteur’s report on Prostitution and Violence Against Women and Girls highlights that prostitution is a system of violence which reduces women and girls to commodities and says in effect that all women have a price.

In addition, the report says that payment and/or promise of payment is the most visible sign of a person being purchased rather than freely giving consent, and that many survivors referred to it as “paid rape”.

Furthermore, violence, poverty, manipulation, lack of physical and mental safety, discrimination, and lack of real alternatives serve as coercion. And international law has established the issue of “irrelevance of consent” within the framework of trafficking crimes and the exploitation and prostitution of others.

The Special Rapporteur also highlights that the term “sex work” wrongly depicts prostitution as an activity as dignified and worthy as any other work, fails to take into account the serious human rights violations involved, and “gaslights” victims and their experiences.

Countries that have legalised or fully decriminalised prostitution have, according to the report, increases in the demand for prostitution, recorded higher rates of sex trafficking, violence, abuse and rape and increased prospects for money laundering and drug trafficking. I add that the 2015 NSW parliamentary inquiry into brothel regulation found that a substantial section of the industry had gone underground under full decriminalisation.

The Special Rapporteur rightly asserts that the equal participation of women in society is impossible to achieve when prostitution is normalised as it dehumanises women and girls, and is fundamentally based on unequal power relations between women and men.

[T]he perceived right of men to purchase a sex act normalizes the violence inflicted on women through prostitution. It also reinforces sexist views including that women are simply receptacles for men’s sexual “needs”. As such there is also a strong correlation between men’s use of prostitution and rape.

It is the Equality or Nordic model as it sometimes called which exists in countries such as Sweden, Iceland, France, Ireland, and Canada, that the Special Rapporteur’s report says should be adopted by all nations.

This holistic model decriminalises prostituted persons and focuses on funding specialist exit programs to help them leave this industry and addresses the underlying causes of prostitution. And it criminalises the sexual act buyers, pimps, and brothel owners.

The Special Rapporteur’s report makes numerous other findings and recommendations that States should adopt. This includes that pornography is filmed prostitution and its consumption is linked to male violence against women and children, such as rape. And so countries should criminalise the possession, production, and hosting of it.

Source: Blind Eye: We Should Heed UN Report Warning Against Australia Becoming A ‘Pimp State” – New Matilda

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess says mix of ideologies promoting violence behind rise in terror threat level – ABC News

The head of ASIO says the targeting of Australia’s youth and the rise of a violent mix of ideologies that defy logic are among the major reasons Australia’s terror threat has been raised.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess says Australia’s terror-level threat has been raised to “probable” due to a rising mix of ideologies where more people think “violence is permissible”.

Mr Albanese earlier said the raised level had been driven by increases in youth radicalisation, online radicalisation and the rise of “new mixed ideologies”.

[Ed: When will they mention the danger posed by extreme trans ideology as found in the posts recorded on TERF is Slur?]

Source: ASIO director-general Mike Burgess says mix of ideologies promoting violence behind rise in terror threat level – ABC News

Court approves puberty blockers for 12-year-old child | The Australian

A Victorian court has granted permission for a 12-year-old child to be prescribed treatment to block the onset of puberty, despite a hospital raising concerns that the father had not been consulted, and pointing to “ongoing uncertainty” about approvals for the treatment of children with gender dysphoria.

Judge Melinda Richards last week ruled that the mother’s consent alone is enough to allow the hospital to prescribe puberty blockers to the biologically male child, who first presented as a girl aged seven when she told her mother she was “no longer her son, she was her daughter”.
The child’s mother is supportive of the child taking puberty blockers, but the hospital raised concerns with the Victorian Supreme Court over whether they could do so without the father’s consent.
The court heard the father had not been involved in the child’s life since she was one year old. Around that time, the mother took out a family violence intervention order against the father for a one-year period.
The case comes as the Family Court continues to grapple with the complexities of gender identity, especially in the context of children, medication and surgery.
In a separate matter, a judge determined a father’s refusal to conform with traditional gender norms left his three children “confused” and encouraged them to “question their gender identity” after they all began identifying as non-binary, ruling the two youngest children would not be permitted to see their ­father for an extended period.
In another case, the mother of a 13-year-old with gender dysphoria abruptly withdrew an application seeking a Family Court order to allow the child to take ­puberty blockers after trying to have the independent children’s lawyer assigned to the matter thrown off the case.
All Family Court judges were last year presented with a legal paper from a top barrister arguing the court must reassess how scientific advancements should apply to the family law system.

Source: Court approves puberty blockers for 12-year-old child

Maternal Health Matters Survey

This survey aims to understand how expectant mothers access information about pregnancy, birth, after the birth and maternity related matters.

This survey is aimed at expectant mothers or mothers who have been pregnant in the past 5 years.

About Us: Maternal Health Matters is an incorporated organisation and registered charity with the goal: to ensure all women receive respectful maternity care. That is respect for women’s autonomy, dignity, feelings, choices, and preferences. It is care that delivers better maternal health outcomes and a better maternity care experience

Source: Maternal Health Matters Survey

Wagga Wagga Base Hospital maternity patients say investigation ‘glossed over’ their trauma – ABC News

  • A complaint was filed on behalf of 30 women who say they had traumatic birthing experiences at Wagga Wagga Base Hospital
  • The women say the investigation by the Health Care Complaints Commission did not address their claims
  • The first hearing of the Select Committee on Birth Trauma takes place in Sydney on Monday, September 4

Source: Wagga Wagga Base Hospital maternity patients say investigation ‘glossed over’ their trauma – ABC News