Last week a young man was convicted of being the ring leader in a series of gang rapes in Sydney and sentenced to fifty-five years in jail with a forty year non-parole period. Also last week on Salon.com I read an article that questioned why young women who fight back against rapists are not lionized as women of strength and survivors. Then I considered back on the way in which the young women who had suffered the gang rape in Sydney were being treated, and I realised that in one way they are being held up as being heroic for having come forward and yet they are also being “protected from ignominy” by having their faces carefully smudged into illegibility and their names withheld.

Why is that?
Is it that we still, as a culture and a society, require that women are to be divided between “good women” who do not suffer the ignominy of forced sex and those who are “not good” who have been victimised that way? Is by veiling their identity they are thus prevented from being inflicted by the future possible implication that they are “bad girls” in some way for having been sexually assaulted? Or is it that having been forcefully violated that they have become “damaged goods” in some way by having found out about the sexual act and how it can be used as a tool of domination?
One of the oldest tricks in the annals of war is that the women of any group with whom your group was in conflict with would be fair game for terror by rape. It is very difficult for us here in Australia to understand that in Eastern Europe there are women who were in that situation and are subsequently bringing up children born from those rapes. What were those young men trying to do? What situation did they feel they were in, that they had to dominate and assault young women of a different social group of the country in which they now live? Why did they feel the need to perpetrate such violence?

I think the hardest part for me to understand is the heartless way in which the media and some politicians have made a rod to beat a certain ethnic group from this, because of the way in which the perpetrators used language to address their victims and the court when their leader was sentenced. I am very aware that I don’t know all the things that happened, and I’m glad for that. Having a young daughter who expects the streets to be relatively safe I don’t need to be given any more ideas as to how she might be harmed than I can already manage. But for me the question is becoming why was the racial bandwagon so easy to identify while the question of why these young men thought it was “fun” to behave this way is not?
From what I have read, the formal social association of people from the particular area is having more difficulty with coming to terms with how these boys have behaved than if it had been a bunch of Anglo-Australians from an equally deprived area. Mosly I feel sorry for their mothers.

But for those three young women, they are heroes, deserving of great acknowledgment for the stand they have taken to encourage other women to say ‘this is wrong and needs to be confronted’. I really hope that they find healing in the fact they brought their assailants to court and those men were found guilty and I hope that the inevitable appeal process, no matter its outcome, will not damage their sense of having done the right thing.