Violence Against Women

It was a Sunday morning, last month, when I was in a bus on my way from Sydney to the Northern Beaches that a young couple, at about 15 to 17 years old, got on the bus arguing. Normal, perhaps, until he pushed and punched her. Lucky her that he was definitely under some drugs effect and could barely stand on his feet, so it didn’t hit her that hard.

As she sat at the back, the bus driver made the guy sit at one of the front seats. But it didn’t prevent him to keep cursing her as a slut all the way. We passengers without much to do about it just watched the sad scene. An old lady even tried asking him to stop, not successfully though. The well-groomed girl on the back, with her head down, cried silently. Tears of shame, angry, pain... love?

I don’t know the end of that story as I don’t know the end of many others I’ve seen, read or heard about. But it made the think about a very serious matter that seems haunt people all over the world: the violence against women.

Searching about it I found out that Australia, as well as Brazil and many other countries, has scary domestic violence numbers. The last official government research is from 2005 but unfortunately I don’t think it has changed since there besides huge national wide campaigns such as the “Violence Against Women – Australia Says NO”.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics – ABS, 363.000 women (4.7 per cent of all women) experienced physical violence and 126.100 women (1.6 per cent) experienced sexual violence in the year of 2004.

From the 2005 survey the ABS also estimated that in the previous 12 months 2.56 million (33 per cent of all women) have experienced physical violence and 1.47 million (19 per cent) have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15.

From this it is possible to estimate that approximately one in three women (33 per cent) have experienced physical violence and one in five women (19 per cent) have experienced sexual violence at some stage in their lives since the age of 15.

These numbers, of course, are not completely right, especially because many of the women who experience this kind of violence don’t go public wether because they’re too afraid or ashamed. The Personal Safety Survey, another ABS research realised in 2005, estimated that only 36 per cent of female victims of physical assault and 19 per cent of female victims of sexual assault in Australia reported the incident to police.

The rest of them unfortunately keep the scream in their throat, the marks under their clothes, the shame inside their closet and the pain into their chest.