- The Guardian
- Issue #2207
Australia’s third annual report by Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin reveals sexual violence has reached its highest level in 33 years. This alone should be shocking enough, but underneath the numbers there was another disturbing shift.
For decades, it has been a consistent statistic that the majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by people known to the victim. However, this report indicated a sharp change to the nature of sexual violence in Australia, with nearly six in ten police-recorded sexual assaults occurring outside family and intimate partner relationships.
The sharply increasing rate and changing nature of sexual assault in Australia constitute what the Commissioner correctly described as a ‘distinct national problem.’ Yet despite identifying the crisis as systemic, the report fails to identify capitalism itself as the root cause.
Under capitalism, the female body is repeatedly reduced to a commodity. The consistent normalisation of women’s exploitation through the global sex trade, earlier access to violent and degrading internet pornography, and a growing movement to push women’s subservience have accelerated this.
The desensitisation that accompanies access to women’s bodies further reinforces expanding market relations into intimate life and the dehumanisation of women. The multi-billion-dollar porn industry routinely normalises violence against women, presenting domination and degradation as desirable.
Misogynistic content cultivated by a profit-driven culture industry targets young people, regardless of gender, and further reinforces the notion that this dehumanisation of women and girls is normal and desirable. The same ruling class that profits from women’s bodies controls media that manufactures consent for it.
The report calls the family law system a site of ongoing weaponisation and harm. Courts protect property relations, not people, maintaining men’s power over women and children. Recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission for the funding of effective support services for victims and independent lawyers for victims remain unimplemented some 18 months later, a deliberate refusal to challenge patriarchal violence.
Findings on First Nations women are also damning. Intimate partner homicide among Indigenous women has increased, and Indigenous children hospitalised after family violence has hit record highs. This is an ongoing manifestation of settler-colonialism and structural violence which has always prioritised the dehumanisation of First Nations people for profit and power.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek admits not enough has been done. The government’s second action plan under a decade-long national plan reflects the leisurely pace of bourgeois reformism. Women and children are dying while reports continue to be drafted and inquiries land on deaf ears. Calls for sustained investment are welcome but insufficient, as many required services are structurally inadequate and increasingly subject to funding cuts.
Marxist-Leninists understand systemic sexual violence is a product of class society, not human nature. It is directly tied to the monopolisation of power, the capitalist’s need for private property, and the patriarchal family, and will be abolished only with socialism.
A socialist Australia would abolish the imperialist commodification of women through the global sex trade and pornography; dismantle the patriarchal family; establish courts prioritising survivors; guarantee women’s economic independence; support First Nations self-determination and reparations, and invest in genuine prevention through socialist education.
The ruling class calls such measures unrealistic. But the cost of inaction is measured in women’s and children’s lives, a cost the working class can no longer afford. The struggle against sexual violence is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism.
If you or someone you know is impacted by family and domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
