Between Here and Change

What do these rallies mean to you?

Today’s piece contains distressing content related to domestic violence, please proceed with caution.

Next week, my second book is due. I am exhausted. I am operating on passion, fumes, corn chips and the belief that I can sleep for a week after it has been handed in. What you are about to read will likely be a story that will exist within the pages of this book. I wanted to save it for then, but right now - this is the only thing I can muster, and it’s the only thing I can think about. Sorry in advance for the double up.

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On Saturday, I spoke at the Sydney leg of the national rallies to end gender-based violence. These were brilliantly and efficiently planned by What Were You Wearing, please donate to them if you can.

I was riddled with anxiety and a panic attack in the days leading up to the march. I believed it was not my place to speak and not my space to occupy. I was terrified, I didn’t prepare notes and I knew that anything that came out of me would be purely because of adrenaline, because of how I felt in that environment. Thousands of women, and hundreds of men, marched through the city of Sydney to demand a seismic, immediate change in social views toward, and governmental responses to domestic and family violence. Prevention requires more than a ‘generational attitude change’ when 32 women are dead at the hands of men by April.

If you’re looking for a practical read with tangible solutions, read this from Jess Hill.

On a sunny Saturday, light filling the fountain at the centre of our Hyde Park landing spot, thousands of women stood side by side to converse about the way violence impacted us. We listened to the parents of victims, we listened to the children of victims, we held compassion and nuance for the complexities of violence, of mental health and we showed empathy to the men who were brave enough to go against the grain of Australian attitudes as allies and stand with us. Women and non-binary people took a men’s issue, and voiced every way we could solve it. We dug through the layers of men’s violence, a ‘problem’ that was raping us, assaulting us and killing us, and we peacefully asked for help to fix it.

By the time I got up to speak, my heart was pounding in my throat. What can I possibly say to these thousands of people that they don’t already know? I looked at the cameras that were stuck in my face, the microphones set up to capture every moment of trauma and emotional expression, I was disgusted. I was livid.

I saw reporters from Channel 7 capturing content for the evening news, after funding the lifestyle of a rapist the two years prior. I watched as outlets worked for interviews and imagery of women who were exhausted, so tired of talking to women about an issue that has never been our fault, or our responsibility to fix, and the publications working hardest to protect perpetrators now wanted the fifteen second vox pop that would land well in the 6pm time slot. The very thing protecting the problem suddenly wanted to film the solution, because it was news-worthy.

source: Wayne Taylor, image used in The Age

In part, because white women protesting are more news-worthy than murdered minority women. That is truth of these outlets and their coverage. They are the gatekeepers of what is made invisible, what is celebrated, what is problematic, what is a policy to be changed or a topic to be muzzled. As the sun went down and speaker after speaker relentlessly went to the depths of who they are, and the things that have happened to them, I wanted to weep. This was fodder for them. This was just another article on their front page contributing to a sea of news that never dares mention the men at fault. Women are the face of men’s violence, there is no other way to look at it.