uoegendered

Day Six: Sexual violence in universities – an opportunity for substantive, systemic reform?

If there has been so much talk and activism around sexual violence in universities, why has there been so little progress in reducing the violence itself? Allison Henry offers some answers from the Australian context.

Image source: Shutterstock.

Allison Henry

Decades of inaction

Student leaders, survivors, sexual violence advocates and feminist activists have campaigned for decades to raise awareness of sexual assault and sexual harassment in Australian university settings and agitated for improved institutional responses.

The release of the first comprehensive national survey data in the landmark Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2017 Change the Course report, released just a month before the #MeToo movement exploded globally, shocked the Australian university sector into action. Over the past six years many universities and residential colleges have reviewed and refreshed their sexual violence policies and response pathways.

Yet a second survey – the National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) released in 2022 – demonstrated that this heightened institutional attention on sexual violence had failed to reduce the incidence of sexual assault and sexual harassment in Australian university settings. Furthermore, there had been no increase in student awareness of university support and complaints policies, no improvement in reporting rates, and continuing high levels of dissatisfaction with university complaint processes.

My doctoral research focused on student peer-to-peer experiences and took a system-wide structural approach to interrogate why there had been so little progress in reducing campus sexual violence over the past decade. My thesis critically examined the regulatory initiatives and oversight mechanisms adopted by various actors between 2011 and 2021, arguing that substantive progress in tackling sexual violence in Australian university settings had stalled due to a combination of factors including an over-reliance on the self-regulating university sector to lead the reform effort, as exemplified in Universities Australia’s Respect.Now.Always campaign; the failure by the national higher education regulator TEQSA to hold institutions accountable; and the indifference of governments.

My research found that the legislative and regulatory levers available in Australia’s higher education system had not been effectively activated – political disinterest and the absence of even a latent threat of genuine and enforceable institutional accountability were critical factors in allowing universities and residential colleges to adopt tokenistic responses.

“The actions universities have taken to address this to date have not been good enough. We have the research. We have the evidence. We know the scope of the problem. We have to act.”
Commonwealth Education Minister Jason Clare

Fortunately, one of these factors has now shifted markedly, and had ripple effects. The Albanese Labor government’s University Accord process has signalled that student and staff safety is an area of urgent concern, with the Accord Panel acknowledging in their July 2023 Interim Report that “Sexual assault and harassment on campus is affecting the wellbeing of students and staff, and their ability to succeed.”

“Our universities should be places of learning, not rape factories.”
Senator Larissa Waters

On a parallel front, parliamentarians from across the political spectrum have begun speaking out about the crisis of campus sexual violence.

The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee tabled a unanimous cross-party report on sexual consent laws in September 2023. The scathing report described the university sector and TEQSA’s response to sexual violence as “unacceptable” and “a shameful state of affairs”, with the committee chair Liberal Senator Paul Scarr stating in parliament that the committee “lacks confidence that the university sector as a whole will respond appropriately to the crisis without strong intervention”.

This long-overdue political interest has provided media opportunities for student leaders and advocacy groups to highlight the experiences of student survivors and push for reform.

A fresh approach

In response to the Accord Panel’s interim recommendation a cross-jurisdictional Working Group, informed by a Stakeholder Reference Group, was established to address improvements in university governance, with a particular focus on recommending immediate measures to improve student and staff safety and address gender‑based violence in university settings.

A draft action plan addressing gender-based violence in higher education has now been released for further consultation and detailed design work. Centring the voices and needs of victim-survivors, it proposes several promising accountability and transparency measures:

a new National Student Ombudsman aimed at ensuring students have access to an effective, trauma-informed complaints mechanism;
a new National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence, detailing expectations around critical incident management, provision of support to students and whole-of-institution data collection and transparent reporting, amongst other issues;
the establishment of a new unit in the Department of Education to oversight the new National Code and undertake targeted compliance activities, removing these responsibilities from TEQSA;
annual reporting by higher education providers through the Commonwealth Minister of Education to Parliament; and
a commitment to enhance the oversight, standards and accountability of student accommodation providers regarding their gender-based violence prevention and response.

The draft action plan is open for consultation until the end of January 2024. Meanwhile, the Accord Panel’s final report is due in December. The final outcomes won’t be clear for a while, but after decades of inertia it feels like we may be on the verge of a massive shift: meaningful institutional accountability and transparency in the management and prevention of campus-based sexual violence is within reach.

Author Bio

Dr Allison Henry is a Research Fellow and Associate with the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW. She completed her PhD on ‘Regulatory responses to sexual assault and sexual harassment in Australian university settings’ in May 2023, for which she received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis. Dr Henry was a member of the Commonwealth Department of Education’s Gender-based Violence Stakeholder Reference Group. Previously, Dr Henry was the Campaign Director of The Hunting Ground Australia Project from 2015-2018, a collaborative impact campaign that was instrumental in raising awareness of sexual violence on Australian university campuses.

DAY FIFTEEN: Speaking for ourselves: the PEN international women’s manifesto

Today’s post examines the impact of the PEN International Women’s Manifesto in the struggle for women to speak and write freely without censorship or violence.

Image above: PEN International President Jennifer Clement, First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon (holding Women’s Manifesto), Publishing Director and manifesto advisor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey OBE, and PEN International board member Margie Orford

Margie Orford

No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonised.’
Susan B. Anthony, American civil rights campaigner, 1900.

In 2016 as the PEN International Women’s Manifesto to protect freedom of speech and of creative expression for women writers, poets, and journalists was being collectively drafted, those words rang chillingly true. That was the year when Donald Trump, riding a right-wing, anti-feminist wave, swept to power in the United States. Four years later Trump is on his way out but the global political stage is crowded with so-called strongmen – Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsinaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, Modi in India – who centralise power around themselves. This power, patriarchal in nature, is premised on the lethal binaries of race, religion and, above all, gender and has resulted in attacks on and the curtailment of women’s freedoms in both the domestic and the public sphere. This is most visible on the internet, where many of us conduct parts of if not most of our public and professional lives, where the attacks on the free and authoritative speech of women are frequent and vicious and often have lethal effects in women’s off-line lives. These are attempts to silence women, to expel them from the public sphere – the realm of free speech, politics, decision and authority that is gendered as masculine, and to sequester women in the domestic or private sphere, which is gendered as feminine. As Jennifer Clement, President of PEN International – the first woman to hold that position, writes,

In drafting the PEN International Women’s Manifesto, we needed to acknowledge women’s inequality in the world and how the violence against women was also a censorship issue. It needed to have a humanist position, which addressed that lack of knowledge or, more to the point, missing knowledge. We don’t even know what the world has lost.
Jennifer Clement, President PEN International

The particular remit of PEN International is literature so let us turn to literature to understand how old and how lethal this prohibition is on women’s free speech: to The Odyssey by Homer. Mary Beard, in her astute analysis of women and power, brought to our attention the scene where Penelope, the faithful weaving wife of the wandering Odysseus, comes down from her private quarters to the public part of her own home. There she addresses her adolescent son, Telemachus, and the suitors and adult warriors. Telemachus, both threatened and threatening, tells his mother that because she is a woman she has no right to speak. That she has no right to what he calls muthos, the ancient Greek word that means ‘public speech’. He orders her to return to the woman’s quarters and she obeys. Why?

Put yourself in Penelope’s place. To speak publicly is to speak with authority. To claim an authority that has been, and in many quarters still is, fiercely defended as a masculine domain and she is in a room filled with armed men. In front of her is a son whose very authority, whose ‘honour’, whose masculinity depends on his ability to silence a woman. To expel her from the public sphere, to defend with violence if necessary, that as a domain for men only. It is – a dangerous moment and Penelope, wise and politically astute, falls silent. Censured – a woman speaking in public of turn. Censored – a woman who is ‘spoken for’, not a woman with a right to speak for herself. Hers is the silence of half of history, half of humanity. What would she have said? How different might literature and history have been if she had spoken and written? How can we end this deathly silence?

Activism, like art, is an act of imagination.

So let us return to that scene of Homer’s and to the confrontation between Penelope and Telemachus. Let’s imagine that when Telemachus ordered Penelope back to her quarters, when he denied her the right to muthos– public speech – that she refused to go. Let’s imagine that Penelope insisted on speaking and that when she spoke she was not alone. Let’s imagine that the wiser, more confident men had intervened. Let’s imagine they said:

Telemachus, be silent. Listen to the words of this woman. This space of public speech is one that is to be shared. She is wise and will have good counsel for she has experienced the pointless slaughter of the Trojan wars too. Listen to her.

Shifting the social balance of gender, power and speech is at the heart of what the Women’s Manifesto addresses – opening up ways of imagining and working for a different future, an equal future.

The PEN International Women’s Manifesto

PEN International Women’s Manifesto. Reproduced with permission

The first and founding principle of the PEN Charter asserts that ‘literature knows no frontiers’. These frontiers were traditionally thought of as borders between countries and peoples. For many women in the world – and for almost all women until relatively recently – the first, and the last and perhaps the most powerful frontier was the door of the house she lived in: her parents’ or her husband’s home.

For women to have free speech, the right to read, the right to write, they need to have the right to roam physically, socially and intellectually. There are few social systems that do not regard with hostility a woman who walks by herself.

PEN believes that violence against women, in all its many forms, both within the walls of a home or in the public sphere, creates dangerous forms of censorship. Across the globe, culture, religion and tradition are repeatedly valued above human rights and are used as arguments to encourage or defend harm against women and girls.

PEN believes that the act of silencing a person is to deny their existence. It is a kind of death. Humanity is both wanting and bereft without the full and free expression of women’s creativity and knowledge. As Salil Tripathi, chair of PEN’s Writer’s in Prison Committee, writes:

Women who defend human rights, women who speak in public, and women who engage in controversial debates have been subjected to insults by latter-day Telemachuses all the time. Some have been vilified, like Priyamvada Gopal in the UK when they speak on race and colonialism, some have been attacked for campaigning to have a British currency note with the image of a woman, like Caroline Criado Perez, some have seen their morphed images spread on the Internet, like Rana Ayyub in India, some have been insulted by heads of state, like Maria Ressa in the Philippines. Some, like Nasreen Soutedeh in Iran, remain in jail, some, like Asli Erdogan in Turkey, face prosecution, and some, like Svetlana Aleksiyevich in Belarus, are questioned by those with power because they speak truth to those with power. And then some, like Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta and Gauri Lankesh in India have been murdered.
Amnesty International has shown, through detailed research, how mobs on the Internet seek to silence women who engage in the public sphere. Recognising the Women’s Manifesto is but the starting point in understanding the restraints being placed on women. It is incumbent on all those who care for free expression to make sure that their voices are not silenced; that their access is not withdrawn; that they are not shouted down; and to do that, the world needs to read more women, and listen more to women, and on all issues, not only about issues that the patriarchy decides as ‘women’s issues.
Salil Tripathi, chair of PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee

The Women’s Manifesto endorses the internationally recognised human rights principles: non-violence, safety, education, equality, access, parity. This provides the frame for action and activism, has been widely used for PEN’s advocacy for the rights of imprisoned women writers and has, as Jennifer Clement says, been widely taken up.

Within months of the Women’s Manifesto passing by unanimity at the PEN congress in Lviv, Ukraine, many organisations asked if they could sign on as supporters. These included United Nations Women, the International Publishers Association (IPA), Ana Ida Gannon Centre for Women and Leadership at Loyola University, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Moomin Characters Ltd, as well as several literary festivals. At present, UNESCO has taken the manifesto as the heart of its global work on gender with pilot programmes, which include PEN VIDA UNESCO Counts, in several countries in South America.
Jennifer Clement, President PEN International

In addition, prominent women endorsed the document such as First minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, Her Royal Highness Princess Nandi of the Zulu Royal House. Noma Dumezweni, Sofi Oksanen and Dareen Tatour, who says of the Women’s Manifesto:

This document is about me. It represents me as a woman, as a human being. It represents the pain that I feel as part of the women’s community… It summarizes in a real way the things I have faced
Dareen Tatour, Palestinian poet, photographer and social media activist

The Women’s Manifesto has been crucial for a number of PEN’s cases. Here are some that you, as readers, can become involved in:

Take action for Sedigeh Vasmaghi

Take Action for Chimengül Awut

Take Action for Paola Ugaz

Iran: Temporary release of Nasrin Sotoudeh welcomed while calls for her unconditional release continue

and the long term case of Narges Mohammadi released recently.

PEN has advocated for Tsitsi Dangarembga, shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize, who is currently facing trial in Zimbabwe, and has campaigned successfully with many African PEN centres for the justice for the Ugandan writer, Dr Stella Nyanzi

Video above: Ugandan academic activist and poet Dr Stella Nyanzi. Source: Youtube.

The Manifesto is used by PEN Centres all over the world for advocacy but it is also used for the creating new ways of thinking about writing as Nadia Davids, President of PEN South Africa, where the Women’s Manifesto is widely used writes,

I used the manifesto for a suite of third year English lectures at the University of Cape Town and it always prompts a really generative conversation among the students- allowing them to carefully consider the relationship between freedom, creativity, the ownership of the self, our inalienable rights over our own bodies and how that may connect to creating a body of work… We read the Manifesto in relation to two other texts: Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Alice Walkers response to Woolf, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens and this invites us to consider the relationship between the psychic and the physical, and how the right to roam uninterrupted allows for the mind to wonder and make.
Nadia Davids, President of PEN South Africa

Dr Margie Orford is an independent scholar and the author of the internationally acclaimed Clare Hart novels, a literary crime series focused on gendered violence that has been widely translated and is currently being developed as a television series. A Civitella Ranieri fellow and a Fulbright scholar, Dr Orford is an honorary fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and Community Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at University of Edinburgh. She was the patron of Rape Crisis in South Africa, president of PEN South Africa, a member of the executive board of PEN International and is a co-author of the PEN International Women’s Manifesto.

You can follow her on twitter @MargieOrford

DAY FIFTEEN: Playing politics to get sex workers’ rights on the agenda

Playing politics: so what do you do to get your voice heard – as a small South African sex workers rights advocacy organisation -during an election campaign? Run for President!

Picture above: ‘Campaign’ materials for SWAG. Reproduced by permission

Ishtar Lakhani

Studies show that female sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women. As a result of criminalisation, stigma and discrimination, sex workers are unable to report violence perpetrated against them by clients, law enforcement officials and members of the community. Criminalisation also increases risk of violence as sex workers have to work in isolation far from the reach of healthcare and justice services and have no access to labour protection for the work that they do. As sex worker rights activists in South Africa we decided that the best way to ensure that sex workers and their issues are represented in political spaces, was to create our own sex worker-led party, as the saying goes, nothing about us, without us.

It is 2019, time for South Africa’s general election. The media is bloated with the usual pre-election diet of scandal, corruption, and political statements. I am in a meeting having the usual vent about the state of our nation with a collection of social justice activists. Many of the organisations represented in the room have decided to lay low until the election is over, reasons being: “trying to get the media to cover anything that isn’t election related right now is useless” and “what’s the use of lobbying, in 3 months’ time we’ll have start again with new people?”. I understand these approaches. Given the serious lack of resources experienced by social justice organisations, it is essential to pick your battles wisely. It is necessary to be strategic on when, where, how and on what you deploy your ever-shrinking reserves of energy, time and money.

However, we at the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) saw the 2019 South African National Elections as a prime opportunity to deploy our creative activism.

At SWEAT (a South African based human rights non-profit), a core part of the work is advocating for the full decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa. This position is supported by rigorous research, international human rights frameworks, and most importantly, by people who sell sex themselves, so I will not dive deeply into why you should support decriminalisation. Merely to say, if you support human rights, you should support decriminalisation. Now back to the elections.

We asked ourselves: in a pre-election context, how do little-old-us gain access to these influential spaces and people? We certainly did not have access to the kind of money needed to buy a plate at political fundraisers. None of us had any desire to learn how to play golf. And we did not have the patience or moral ambiguity to implement the long-game strategy of joining a political party, rising through the ranks and eventually become president. So, we thought: if we can’t beat them, join them.

The idea of a sex worker for president is not new. Emboldened by the story of Gabriela Leite, the first sex worker to run for Brazilian Congress in 2010, we decided to start our own sex worker-led political party. SWAG, the Sex Worker Action Group (to be perfectly honest, we chose the acronym before we chose the name because who doesn’t like a good acronym?). Now that we had a name, we could really start organising. But when we looked at what it would take to formally register SWAG, the wind was quickly taken out of our sails. None of us had the stamina to climb Mount Bureaucracy. We looked back on our campaign objective: to put sex workers rights on the political agenda. Surely we didn’t have to have an “officially” recognised political party to do that? And so we decided to confidently ignore and navigate ourselves around Mount Bureaucracy. We created a logo and campaign badges, t-shirts and posters (a campaign isn’t a campaign until you have SWAG). We placed our realistic political party posters up on lamp posts directly under our oppositions. With the help of social media we only needed a handful of posters strategically placed and photographed at multiple angles to give the illusion we had national coverage. We even filmed a low budget but surprisingly convincing campaign video, complete with our candidate shaking hands with hard working people, kissing babies, and saying inspiring one-liners like “Your Rights, Your Freedom, Your SWAG”.

Video above: SWAG campaign 2019. Source: Youtube.

So, what did all this “fun and games” really achieve one might ask? Firstly (and importantly), it was enormous fun. When you are involved in the serious work of human rights activism, there is very little frivolity and burnout is common. This campaign gave us and our organisation a much needed energy boost. Secondly, people believed the campaign!

We were caught off-guard at the amount of support we received. This led to conversations, platforms and events where we could talk about the rights of sex workers in South Africa.

It became abundantly clear that South Africans were hungry for something different and more progressive than we had given them credit for. Finally, one of the biggest impacts of our SWAG Campaign was that the 2 largest opposition political parties both included the rights of sex workers as an issue that needs addressing in their election manifestos, something that has never been done before.

Image reproduced by permission of SWEAT (Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce)

This Campaign showed us what we could really achieve with a passion for human rights, a little bit of money, and a lot of SWAG. 2024, watch this space!

Ishtar Lakhani is a feminist, activist and trouble maker in the field of social justice advocacy. Her passion lies in using creative activism to advocate for the rights of sex workers and the full decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa.

You can find her on twitter @IshtarLakhani

DAY FOURTEEN: No Problem, I understand : digital antagonism and the algorithm

Zelda Solomon discusses the problems of digital discrimination and the racist underpinnings of algorithms, through the incident with An Nguyen, a Vietnamese curator due to exhibit at the Affordable Arts Fair, only to be rejected because of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associations with ‘Asianness’.

Picture above: “Compassion through Computation: Fighting Algorithmic Bias.” Credits: World Economic Forum. Source: Creative Commons.

Zelda Solomon

One of the first examples I saw of anti-Asian discrimination in response to corona-virus was that of An Nguyen, who is a Vietnamese curator that was due to exhibit an installation at the Affordable Arts Fair in Battersea, UK last March. In a screenshot of an email posted to her social media, dealer Raquelle Azran wrote to her:

“The corona virus is causing much anxiety everywhere, and fairly or not, Asians are being seen as carriers of the virus. Your presence on the stand would unfortunately create hesitation on the part of the audience to enter the exhibition space”

and cancelled Nguyen assistance at the event.

In her caption, An Nguyen wrote in response:

“It is the systematic structure of knowledge production that informs some of us that normalising non-aggressive discrimination is acceptable which needs to chang.e”

Picture above: Screenshot of the email sent by Raquelle Azran to An Nyuyen.

Re-reading these lines, I find myself turning to the suggested prompts.

The phrases “No Problem, I understand.” “I understand.” “No worries, I understand” are written in inoffensive blue, padding the screen in discreet boxes. These are the outputs of an algorithm that likely recognised the phrases “sorry” and “cancel” in Azran’s email and generated the pre-written responses. I didn’t notice them on my first reading, which I assumed was due to my eclipsing outrage and identification with Nguyen. However, technology’s ability to evade suspicion is partly by design; input technologies like predictive text are built to optimise user efficiency, marketed as objective, neutral tools that serve only productivity. We are not meant to see any motive or meaning in them.

In the bygone age of digital utopianism, Nguyen’s predictive text might be excused as a simple glitch. However, as theorists such as Ruha Benjamin and Saifya Noble have made clear, encoded bias is part of a larger, and growing, industry of control.

One case study Benjamin references in her book “Race After Technology,” (2019) explores the racial weighting behind selective encoding, citing how Google Maps read the name “Malcom X Boulevard” as “Malcom 10 Boulevard.” She explains how from an industry perspective, the translation of roman numerals is a feat, revealing the racial biases behind technological ideals of progress. As Benjamin writes, the glitch is not an “aberration, but a form of evidence illuminating underlying flaws in a corrupted system.”

Women of colour are often found in the intersections of oppression in the new digital world.
Saifya Noble

Noble opens her text “Algorithms of Oppression” (2018) with a Google search experiment she conducted in 2014, where she found the search terms “Black girls” “Latina girls” and “Asian girls” resulted in pornography pages, while then same is not found when searching “white girls”. Noble outlines that the prioritisation of racist and sexist content when searching for women of colour is not solely reflective of user-desire, but a product of bias engineering masquerading as objective coding.

*Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. “Google has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls” From* Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Reprinted with permission by NYU Press, in TIME Magazine, MARCH 26.

The fact Nguyen’s device could interpret something as complex as human interaction but failed to recognise racism reveals what is categorised as valuable information. Nguyen’s exclusion is thus two-fold; the first at the hands of a gallerist who deemed her Asianness threatening, and the second at the hands of an algorithm that failed to recognise it.

As Jennifer M. Piscopo eloquently outlined in last year’s blogathon, we are witnessing an age where women, and more-so women of colour, are receiving an onslaught of abuse online to the extent it is re-shaping what it means to be a woman in public life. Theorists such as Benjamin and Noble are building on this research, looking to the encoded systems that facilitate and reproduce oppression online. They encourage us to approach advancing technology with a critical eye, and refuse to greet the sexist or racist glitch with the predicted : “No problem, I understand.”

References

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology : Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Newark: Polity Press.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression : How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

Zelda Solomon is a 4th year History of Art student at Edinburgh University. She is on the Edinburgh College of Art Board for decolonising the curriculum and was previously the Black and Minority Ethnic Liberation Officer for Edinburgh University Students Association (EUSA). She co-founded the SexyAsiansInUrArea theatre company that recently released a short film on preforming Asian identity for RUMAH festival. She is currently focusing on how race is represented in the digital age.

You can follow her on Instagram @zeldasolo

DAY THIRTEEN: A Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre: A Call to Action

While domestic and family violence is prevalent across Australia with a murder rate of one woman per week, there remains an absence of centres that offer support to women survivors over the long term. This post focuses on the establishment of a Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre, by the UNSW School of Public Health and the Illawarra Women’s Health Centre and their partners.

Picture above: Flyer for the Photographic Exhibition #voicesforchange

Patricia Cullen and Sally Stevenson

Domestic and family violence is a public health emergency and occurs in epidemic proportions in Australia. One woman a week is murdered. One in three have experienced physical violence since the age of 15. One in six have experienced emotional abuse by a current or former partner.

But what is so often missed in the reporting of domestic violence, the reporting of cold-blooded murders, of vicious assault, of long-term abuse – all acts of violence akin to crimes of war is what happens after. What happens over time, in the years and decades after the abuse has stopped, or the women and children have managed to escape their own private conflict zone.

Vicki Roach – survivor and advocate. Photograph by Sylvia Liber. Reproduced by permission

Research shows – clearly and without doubt – that left untreated, the traumatic consequences of domestic and family violence can have lifelong physical and mental health consequences. They are significant, long lasting and evidence-based; impacting women, children, future generations, our community, our economy and ultimately, our country.

Research shows – clearly and without doubt – that left untreated, the consequences of domestic violence result in increased rates of heart disease, diabetes and chronic pain, increased rates of mental health disorders including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance use, and are overrepresented in prison.

Research shows – clearly and without doubt – that it has a devastating impact on the development and wellbeing of children.

But we don’t talk about that. And we certainly don’t provide adequate and accessible publicly-funded services that support women who continue to suffer the trauma and pain that the violence and abuse has embedded in their bodies and their minds – that remains long after the violent hands, the abusive and demeaning words and all the controlling behaviours of their intimate partners has stopped. We’d rather not think about it, we’d rather not pay for it, in fact as a society we’d really rather not be bothered about it.

Women recovering from complex trauma and PTSD caused by family or intimate partner abuse require a range of support services depending on their circumstances: counselling, social support, parenting support, financial advice and support, and/or legal support. These services are most efficiently and effectively provided in one -safe- place, from a case managed team of professionals.

There is no such service or centre available anywhere in Australia.

There is nowhere in the public health system, or across the community service sector, where women can access integrated, comprehensive long-term support to recover from the health impact of complex trauma.

And that’s why we – the UNSW School of Public Health and the Illawarra Women’s Health Centre – with our partners are campaigning to establish a Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre.

This specialised Centre will offer a whole-of-organisation trauma sensitive approach that enables recovery from domestic and family violence trauma and helps to break the intergenerational cycle of violence. A range of holistic, and free, health, legal and psychosocial services will be provided. The Centre represents an investment that will provide significant financial and social returns to both the Commonwealth and NSW Governments, and the community. As a first of its kind in Australia, and designed to be easily replicated across the country, it will transform domestic, family and sexual violence response and recovery services.

As part of our campaign during the 16 Days of Activism, we are holding a photographic exhibition: Resistance, Resilience and Recovery.

‘Women resist violence, are fundamentally resilient – and have the right to recover from domestic and family abuse. We are calling on the community to support this right to recover.’

The exhibition is a community ‘call to action’ to support the establishment of Women’s Trauma Recovery Centre. The images here are from that exhibition, taken by award winning photographer Sylvia Liber.

For more information, visit the Womens Trauma Recovery Centre’s website and Facebook.

Dr Patricia Cullen is a Research Fellow and Co-lead Child and Adolescent Health Theme Early Career Fellow, at the National Health and Medical Research Council Population Health, UNSW. Sally Stevenson AM is the General Manager of the Illawarra Women’s Health Centre.