2010 Human Rights Day Oration
Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights Medals and Awards Ceremony
The Honourable Catherine Branson QC
10 December 2010
Check against delivery
We meet today on the lands of the Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation. On behalf of the Australian Human Rights Commission I pay my respect to their elders past and present.
I also speak for the entire Commission in welcoming you all to the 2010 Australian Human Rights Awards. It is wonderful to see so many colleagues working in the s ame interests as us in business, in the public sector, in our non-government organisations and as private citizens from all walks of life all around Australia.
I am going to start by telling a story. It is not a pleasant story. Some of you will know it already. In 2008 approximately 100 men paid to have sex with one 12 year old Australian girl.[1] She was being pimped by her mother and a male ‘family friend’ from a Hobart motel and from a house in Glenorchy which is a city near Hobart. Both her mother and the ‘family friend’ are now serving jail terms although none of the other men has been charged. There are many deeply troubling aspects of this story - but the one that I would like to raise here is how this could have gone on for so long without coming to the attention of the authorities? Someone must have been managing the motel, others must have been staying or eating at the motel, and there must have been next door neighbours in Glenorchy. Surely someone had suspicions about what was going on. Did they just think: well it looks bad but I don’t suppose it’s any of my business?
Let me tell another story. This is the story of 19 year old Brodie Panlock.[2] In 2006 Brodie jumped from the top of a car park in Melbourne. She died three days later. She had endured relentless and cruel bullying by male workmates at a café in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. Her employer and the bullies were convicted of occupational health and safety offences. But, is it possible that no one else knew what was happening to Brodie? I don’t think so.
These are horrible stories of extreme harm done by violence, harassment and bullying. But the lives of far too many Australians - people like you and me and members of our families - are blighted by violence, harassment and bullying. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported that one in three Australian women has experienced physical violence since the age of fifteen and one in five has experienced sexual assault since that age.[3] Violence, including sexual violence, against women with disability is appreciably higher.[4] It is estimated that in 2009 violence against women and their children cost the Australian economy $13.6 billion.[5]
Social research in Australia, as well as the Commission’s own complaints data base and our own telephone survey, let us know that approximately one in five women experience sexual harassment in the workplace.[6]
A few years ago a study involving 38,000 Australian school-aged children showed that at least half of them had experienced bullying at school.[7] It has been found that bullied children are five times more likely to be depressed than their peers and bullied girls eight times more likely to be suicidal.[8] A recent study of same sex attracted young people showed that 61% had been verbally abused and 18% physically abused.[9] We also know that older Australians are experiencing abuse - sometimes, but not always, in institutional settings.[10]
I could recite more statistics about violence in our community but I won’t for two reasons. The first is that I don’t have long to speak. The second is that, as the High Commissioner for Human Rights has recently pointed out, the rehearsing of deeply concerning statistics risks numbing us to the individual suffering that lies behind them. In talking of violence against women she said: ‘the numbers are of pandemic proportions – so large that, perversely, they distract us from the plight of the woman next door.’[11]
I have chosen to talk about violence, harassment and bullying today to explain why it is that the Australian Human Rights Commission has decided that tackling them should be one of two key priorities for our work over at least the next two years.
Our other key priority is building understanding and respect for rights in our community. This choice virtually made itself. Education about human rights is the centrepiece of Australia’s Human Rights Framework announced by the Attorney-General in April of this year.
But the decision to concentrate on violence, harassment and bullying in all areas of our work reflects our understanding as a Commission that, if the human rights of ‘everyone, everywhere, everyday’ are to be truly respected, the levels of violence, harassment and bullying in Australia must fall and fall significantly.
Violence, harassment and bullying are not only inconsistent with the right of everyone to be treated with respect and to live free from fear and violence; they impact indirectly on the internationally recognised rights to equality of opportunity, to health, to employment, to education, to housing and to family life.
Many of you will know of the work that the Commission has been doing in this space. To mention just some of that work, our complaints handling staff continue to do excellent work conciliating complaints - many of which include elements of violence, harassment or bullying. I am sure that you know that it was the Commission that brokered the settlement of the sexual harassment claim made against David Jones and its former CEO but we daily handle complaints that don’t attract media attention. Our specialist Commissioners have led work to address family violence; to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace; to highlight the problem of elder-abuse; to expose the link between racism and violence and we have worked with others to make our cities safer places for international students. The Commission has also recently hosted a high–level summit to address racism on the internet, including on social networking sites.
With the adoption of our new priorities, we will continue and expand our work in areas such as these. We will also use our community education work to increase public understanding of violence, harassment and bullying and the harm that they do. And we will work to empower community members who may be bystanders to violence, harassment and bullying to act. Initially we envisage working in the cyber-world, in part because it is a relatively safe place for intervention. But we propose, with appropriate advice, to expand our work of empowering bystanders. It is early days and I hope to be able to tell you more about it, perhaps this time next year.
So let me close by referring again to the words of the High Commissioner who spoke of the risk of our being distracted from the plight of the woman next door. In speaking of human right abuses, I see ‘the woman next door’ as a potentially powerful metaphor. It is relatively easy to empathise with the woman next door – it doesn’t take much imagination to picture ourselves, or someone close to us, in her position. It seems to me that wider respect for human rights requires that we expand our imaginations so that our empathy reaches also to those whose lives are markedly different from ours; so that, in a metaphorical sense, all who face human rights abuses become for us ‘the woman next door’. If we can do this, to return to the two stories that I opened with, I doubt that we would remain passive bystanders were we to witness grave child sexual abuse or gross harassment of a colleague in our workplace. It is my hope that we will as a country move to a position in which none of us experiences violence, harassment or bullying without a ‘neighbour’ stepping to our defence.
[1] ‘Commissioner urges
inquiry into child prostitute “disaster”’, ABC News, 5
May 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/05/2891249.htm (viewed 9 December 2010).
[2] ‘Employers “on notice” after suicide death’ Herald
Sun, 8 February 2010. At http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/employers-on-notice-after-suicide-death/story-e6frf7jx-1225827975551 (viewed 1 December 2010).
[3] ABS, Personal Safety, Australia, 2005 (Reissue), Catalogue No. 4906.0 (2006),
p 7. At www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4906.0Main+Features12005%20(Reissue)?OpenDocument (viewed 5 March 2010).
[4] Women
with Disability Australia, Submission to the Australian
Government
Consultation Paper: Family Violence – Improving Legal
Frameworks (June 2010), p 6. At http://www.wwda.org.au/WWDASubFVL2010.pdf (viewed 3 December 2010).
[5] The
National Council to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children, The
cost of violence against women and their children (March 2009), p 4. At http://www.fahcsia.gov.au/sa/women/pubs/violence/np_time_for_action/economic_costs/Pages/default.aspx (viewed 9 December 2010).
[6] Australian Human Rights Commission, Sexual harassment: Serious business
Results of the 2008 Sexual Harassment National Telephone Survey (2008), p 1.
At www.humanrights.gov.au/sexualharassment/serious_business/index.html (viewed 3 December 2010).
[7] K
Rigby, ‘What harm does bullying do?’ paper presented at the Children
and Crime: Victims and Offenders Conference, Australian Institute of
Criminology, Brisbane (1999) p 4, quoted in Kids Helpline newsletter, Edition 2
2010, p 1. At www.kidshelp.com.au/upload/22860.pdf (viewed 9 December 2010).
[8] Plan
International, Bullying: The Global Campaign to end violence in schools, http://plan-international.org/learnwithoutfear/the-campaign/bullying (viewed 3 December 2010).
[9] L
Hillier et al, Writing themselves in 3, the 3rd national study
on the sexual health and wellbeing of same sex attracted and gender questioning
young people (2010) p 39. At http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ssay/assets/downloads/wti3_web_sml.pdf (viewed 9 December 2010).
[10] Benevolent Society, Recognising, preventing and responding to abuse of older
people living in the community: A resource for community care workers (2010). At http://www.bensoc.org.au/uploads/documents/research-to-practice-briefing3-abuse-of-older-people-mar2010.pdf (viewed 9 December 2010).
[11] N
Pillay, Are we accomplices to violence against women? (Statement issued
on the occasion of International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against
Women, 25 November 2010). At http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=10560&LangID=E (viewed 9 December 2010).
