Brittany Higgins and former Australian of the Year have delivered a powerful speech at the National Press Club.
Brittany Higgins began the address, speaking about her experience over the past year since deciding to go public with allegations she was raped by a colleague in parliament.
Higgins referred to the draft National Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, saying it was too vague and lofty.
Grace Tame also began by talking about her experiences of child sexual abuse.
“I was targeted, stalked, isolated, groomed, and repeatedly raped as a minor by a known serial paedophile,” Tame said.
“Child sexual abuse is the epitome of evil. It is also disturbingly common. Perpetrated not by monsters on the fringes of society, but by everyday citizens, hiding in plain sight. One in six boys and one in four girls is abused before their 18th birthday.
“We tend to think of child sexual abuse in terms of physical acts but in reality it is mostly invisible, characterised by calculated, insidious, systematic psychological manipulation that leaves its survivors with lasting internalised complex trauma.”
Grace Tame concluded with three key asks of the government.
“The first is for a government that takes the issue of abuse in all its forms seriously. The second is for the implementation of adequate funding for prevention education to stop these things before they even start. The third is for national, consistent, structural change,” she said.
Source: Grace Tame & Brittany Higgins address National Press Club
After having watched the Tame and Higgins speeches and responses, I was a bit disappointed that there were no references or questions/responses to a general problem of the status of women in a country like Australia. In other words, the discussions by the two young women speakers about their experiences in no way led to questions about the political/sexual status of women vav the male sex. What I am referring here to is of course is the wider issue of the problem of the female sex to be regarded at a minimum as in itself having the human rights of being recognised as half of the human race. Instead of having to fit in with a culture where there is one sex which operates as the yardstick about what is right and wrong, which leads to women, I stress here the female born sex, as continually have to try to be heard or understood, led alone being understood as having a unique, different position of half of the human species. Resulting to perhaps learning as a nation that there are two different forms of experiences and feelings based on the differences between the sexes. While we have only one sex as the common yardstick, ie. as the origin of meaning and of difference. My example would be the current issue of transgender. Transgender is an experience among some people as a sense of having a gender identity which does not correspond to the sex of the body, but the effect of this issue on each sex is incomparable. Transmen (ie. female born people who identify as men) are entirely differently regarded qua people, compared to transwomen (males who identify as women). The latter bring with their transition the power to identify and demand its right to do so, while so-called transmen are usually regarded as victims of an unimaginable goal to be accepted as men. In other words, the culture has as norm the dominant status of the Phallus