I’ve been thinking a lot about the #metoo movement and the stories women have been bravely sharing about sexual assaults, domestic violence and unwanted advances.
It’s about time gender inequality and violence against women dominated the agenda – hopefully, this is the start of real change.
I’ve lived for almost six decades on three continents and, while I’ve been in a few quite dangerous situations, I’m one of the lucky ones who has not been attacked or harassed.
I’m conscious that my privileged background – I am a white woman, who was raised in South Africa at the height of apartheid – provided a buffer from the horrendous violence suffered by millions of women and children in the country of my birth.
Social factors and injustice have a great deal to do with how much violence – and consequently deprivation and poor health – communities, and in particular women and children endure, and there is a lot of evidence to support this.
I grew up in a stable home with three brothers and a father who was gentle with his sons, my mother and me. He helped shape those boys so they were always respectful to women. I wonder if this was due to his own background – he grew up with four sisters and a brother, and while his own father died when he was just 16, he came from a close, supportive family.
My mother, on the other hand, grew up in very deprived circumstances and experienced a lot of violence and insecurity as a child during the Depression. Her early life left her nervous and unsure of herself and she often told us children about her childhood, with an alcoholic, unemployed father and her mother eking our a living as a dressmaker, and how the family was regularly evicted from the room they were renting because they could not afford to pay the next month’s rent.
She covered up the worst of these stories for most of her life, and it was only as a frail, old woman confined to a nursing home bed, that she began recalling some of the childhood assaults she had endured. It was heartbreaking to listen to her. I am conscious that a lot of those experiences were recounted at a time when she was not in full control of what she wanted to say. I believe that these were not repressed memories. I think she lived with these feelings every day. She is gone now, but her strength is still my inspiration.
As a young woman I dated boys and men who respected my choices and opinions. Like all girls, I found myself in a precarious situation or two, but I was one of the lucky ones who emerged unscathed. Most young women and girls do not.
As a reporter on a newspaper in the 1980s in South Africa, I was given a fair shot at covering all the news rounds I wanted to, and I got jobs in the sub-editor’s room and on the news desk that had long been the preserve of men. I experienced the occasional sexist behaviour, like the time the day editor asked me when was I going to buy my next bottle of bleach to cover my roots! He gave me a hard time every day, but he was an older, black man who had returned from exile to work in South Africa after the African National Congress was unbanned, and to him I was just an uppity young white woman who had no knowledge of what he had gone through. And he was right.
South African newsrooms were complex work environments – English newspapers and the journalists and editors who ran them thought themselves very liberated – they were mostly unconscious of their racial bias. It bothered me a lot. I felt that I was part of the problem and did my best to do my job well. When I was a young woman on the news desk, black men in the newsroom did not always like taking directions from me – was this because I was white? Definitely. And because I was a woman? Maybe.
I was in my late 20s when I was promoted for the first time to news editor, and I am pretty certain that at that stage in my career I got moved sideways soon afterwards to make way for one of “the boys” – because the CEO at the time preferred “real men” in the important jobs. I put up with this shafting as my job remained interesting and I got more time to spend with my young children. Journalism is a pretty tough job when you are a young mother.
In my time on the paper, I knew of at least three fellow-reporters who were sexually assaulted, and I am sure there were more. The 1980s workplace culture in South Africa was not exactly enlightened and there was very little help offered to these women. It was left to friends and colleagues to do what we could to support them.
I now live in Australia and am fortunate to have a loving partner who has helped me raise two kids in a happy, hurly-burly home. I have a son who won’t stand for sexist bullshit and a daughter who definitely won’t stand for sexist bullshit.
I am proud of them.
I think we are all on the hook to stand with women and children who suffer domestic violence and sexual abuse. We must call out sexist behaviour and provide women who come forward our support.
But while there is absolutely no excuse for men abusing women, we do need to look at the things in our society that are fuelling this violence – like social deprivation and inequality, and stand against this, too.