Page 89 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 13 February 2018
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We talk a lot about gender in this place, and there is a need for a compassionate and fair approach in response to this. It is important to pass, if you like, the gender lens across many areas of government policy and legislation, because we know, for example, from the 2015-16 year, that in the ACT there were 240 victims of violence per 100,000 persons, which was an increase of 33 per cent. In the ACT women were three times more likely to suffer violence at the hands of an intimate partner than men, according to a report in the Canberra Times of June 2017.
Compared with their peers, women with disability experience significantly higher levels of all forms of violence and they are subjected to violence by a greater number of perpetrators. Women with disability are 40 per cent more likely to be a victim of domestic violence than women without disability. Twenty per cent of women with disability report a history of unwanted sex, compared to 8.2 per cent of women without disability. More than a quarter of rape cases reported by females in Australia are perpetrated against women with disability, and 90 per cent of Australian women with an intellectual disability have been subjected to sexual abuse, with more than two-thirds having been sexually abused before they turned 18 years of age. This is from a fact sheet prepared by Women with Disabilities Australia about violence against women with disabilities.
That is just one example, to start with, of where women bear a disproportionate brunt of instances of violence in our community. Violence is not appropriate in any situation, but for it to be perpetrated against women with disability seems even worse, for some reason.
Another area where it is important to pass a gender lens over policy and legislation is housing and homelessness. We know that 34 per cent of single women over the age of 60 live in permanent income poverty, and by the age of 65 women retire with about one-third of the superannuation that men accumulate. A problem that has been facing us for centuries is that women are generally lower paid, if they are paid at all, for their labour; they have fewer assets and they have less superannuation in more modern times. And the dire financial situation of older women is well documented and well established.
Financial and economic insecurity, combined with a lack of affordable housing, something we hear about a lot here in the ACT, increases the housing risks for older single women. As they are teetering on the brink of this financial insecurity and this structural vulnerability, another event in their life such as a relationship breakdown, job loss, change in their health circumstances or the death of a partner can be all it takes for an older single woman to become homeless. Once they become homeless there are very few exits for them from that predicament. According to the Brotherhood of St Laurence, one of the most disadvantaged demographic profiles for a person to have is to be old, single, poor, female and in private rental accommodation.
Of course, it is not only about older women. We have heard of studies at universities in relation to young women. For example, the 2017 national report on sexual assault and sexual harassment at Australian universities found that 21 per cent of students were sexually harassed in a university setting in 2016. Women are three times more
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