Page 2339 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 2 August 2017
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We still have a lot of work to do when the young women of our future are starting life potentially traumatised as a result of a sexual assault or harassment. The question has to be asked: what are the long-term implications for these women? How is the government responding to this crisis in our city? How are we helping to equip these women for success in life if we do not deal with these alarming numbers of assaults and harassments? If that was a statistic in our own workplace, we would all be up in arms.
At the ANU at least 116 students were sexually assaulted last year, with 52 of these happening on the campus; 841 students reported that they had experienced sexual harassment in that same year, 517 of them on campus. The University of Canberra reported 33 sexual assaults in 2016; 248 students reported being sexually harassed, with 110 of them at the university.
Based on these numbers, there are 149 young women who were sexually assaulted last year who are trying to get on with their lives, perhaps trying to study, all while dealing with the trauma of having been sexually assaulted. What are the outcomes for these women and what are we doing here as lawmakers to help these young women and to prevent other young women having to experience the same trauma?
If we want to see women here in the ACT doing as well as they want, I strongly suggest that a real solution be found to the extraordinarily high number of assaults and harassment of young university women in our city. I look forward to anything the minister or Ms Cheyne would propose to do to assist to resolve this unsatisfactory situation.
We need to find better ways for women to be able to blend the hard work of having a family when they choose as well as having a career. Having a family should not mean a loss of career opportunities. There is still a great deal to do to finish the work started decades ago, which many young women believe is already completed, of working out how the realities of being women can be appropriately accommodated and celebrated in our community.
I, for one, will continue to work and lobby for the women of Canberra to be able to have the family life they want, when they choose, and a career too; for the choice to be theirs, and not a choice on which our society still has not managed to get the details right and on which they feel forced to make a decision.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.37): I am pleased, of course, to stand today in support of this motion because it is important that we prioritise women’s health and wellbeing outcomes by taking a progressive and supportive approach to them. Women make up over 50 per cent of the population and, as a proud member of the first female majority parliament in Australia’s history, we as a parliament must work together to ensure that the human rights of women and, of course, everybody, are upheld.
Women have a right to autonomy over their bodies. I remember only too well the photo, which I imagine most of us here saw, the picture of Donald Trump surrounded
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