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What is happening to women?

By Mary Bryant - posted Wednesday, 7 March 2007


On Saturday night a friend was over for dinner, she is a school counsellor and as we both have young girls reaching adolescence we started the scary conversation about young women at school.

We could have started the conversation about their obsession with body image, about the fears of eating disorders or the rise of self-harm and cutting among young women. We could have talked about the growth of anxiety management programs in schools and family conflict.

But we didn’t: instead we started with the stories about the now common practice of having security guards at school-age kids’ parties. It is big news to us (generation X’s) because it is hard to imagine the need to have security guards standing outside your home.

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The cost, the fear of strangers, dealing with anger and violence, when the whole idea of a party is to have fun. It seems so strange and yet now it is common practice.

Other parents may say “no” to parties, regarding it as all too hard, but then young people turn to parks, beaches and other kids’ parties for their evening get-togethers.

By the end of the night my head was spinning with stories of young women being sexually assaulted while onlookers did nothing to help; young girls saying that using contraception was not sexy any more; little 13 and 14-year-olds offering oral sex to young boys thinking they would retain their virginity. It's hard to imagine how this is a step forward in equality of the sexes.

A recent study of adolescent sexual behaviour in the United States showed that more study participants reported having had oral sex (19.6 per cent) than vaginal sex (13.5 per cent), and more participants intended to have oral sex in the next six months (31.5 per cent) than vaginal sex (26.3 per cent).

Adolescents evaluated oral sex as significantly less risky than vaginal sex on health, and in social and emotional consequences.

It made me wonder about what has happened to women: to our liberation, freedom and to the role of women in our society.

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The New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found the recorded rate of sexual assault had risen 132 per cent from 1990 to 2004. Assault had risen by 105 per cent in the same period. The recorded rate of "other" sexual offences also was higher, up 85 per cent.

Women retire with half the super of men and yet we live longer. In terms of employment and pay equity the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission warns us that: “There are a number of studies which suggest that women are less likely to benefit from a culture of individual bargaining than men. For those women on enterprise agreements, the level of wages negotiated tends to be lower. (In May 2004, women on registered collective agreements received average hourly earnings of $22.50 compared to men's $25.10, and on unregistered collective agreements received $20.30 compared to $22.00: ABS Employee Earnings and Hours Cat No 6306.0 May 2004 ) The average weekly earnings for full-time women workers is still only 84.4 per cent of their male equivalents.”

The best indicators available on violence against women published in the ABS personal safety survey 2005 shows us that it is possible to estimate that approximately one-in-five women (19 per cent) have experienced sexual violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15 and one-in-three women (33 per cent) have experienced physical violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15.

You have to ask what the expectations of civil society are and whose responsibility it is for these rights and values to be enacted. The Howard Government demonstrated its absence of regard when they took the decision to downgrade the Office of the Status of Women by its removal from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet - the policy powerhouse of the government - and to relocate it to the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and its renaming as the Office for Women.

The role models for women flop between the likes of Paris Hilton and skinny young things that love the success of money.

Shows like Desperate Housewives don’t even blush at the defamatory language that gives them permission to portray women as body obsessed, desperate, sexually driven women capable of deceit and violence with no spirituality or capacity for lasting relationships. Forget about being PC: my niece has had the board game of Desperate Housewives on her Christmas list she was 13. Some say it’s harmless, as did my sister in law, but what are the messages young women receive about themselves, their sisters and their future?

It may be that we soothe ourselves that our daughters will survive or that this is the new generation Y - but it’s a chilly balm. They are not surviving, they are enduring.

It is true that discrimination and violence are not new phenomena, but what is missing is hope. There was a wave of feminism that rolled from the 60s and into the 80s that gave birth to the hope that violence would be reduced, that women’s access to fair employment conditions would improve, that women would be able to be free.

If you have never considered the social costs of these violations of women’s rights then just start with this. The human impact of domestic violence is incalculable, in a report published in 2000, Impacts and Costs of Domestic Violence on the Australian Business/Corporate Sector, staff absenteeism and replacement costs alone were estimated to cost employers over $30 million a year while the total cost (including direct and indirect costs) to the corporate/business sector was estimated to be around $1 billion a year.

A more recent, and very detailed, study by Access Economics, commissioned by the Office for the Status of Women (OSW), The cost of domestic violence to the Australian economy, Part 1 and Part 2, 2004, estimated that the total cost of domestic violence in 2002-03 was $8.1 billion. This estimate includes the costs of pain and suffering, health costs and long-term productivity costs.

There are things we can do: we can stop watching shows that degrade women; we can stop buying magazines that promote women as non-thinking skinny things; we can stop voting for leaders who show no commitment to civil liberties and equality; we can stop accepting violence and women’s position as status quo.

We can write letters when advertising exploits women; we can work together to talk about how to make parties safe for young women; how to oppose work practices that discriminate against women and how to ensure that women enjoy the same civil liberties as their male counterparts.

The thing is we have to just do it!

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About the Author

Mary Bryant is currently the Manager of a Bereavement Counselling Service at St Vincent's Hospital Sydney. She has been employed as a social worker/counsellor/ educator for over thirty years.

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