2010 Human Rights Day Oration

Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights Medals and Awards Ceremony

The Honourable Catherine Branson QC

10 December 2010

Check against delivery

We meet today on the lands of the Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation. On
behalf of the Australian Human Rights Commission I pay my respect to their
elders past and present.

I also speak for the entire Commission in welcoming you all to the 2010
Australian Human Rights Awards. It is wonderful to see so many colleagues
working in the s ame interests as us in business, in the public sector, in our
non-government organisations and as private citizens from all walks of life all
around Australia.

I am going to start by telling a story. It is not a pleasant story. Some of
you will know it already. In 2008 approximately 100 men paid to have sex with
one 12 year old Australian girl.^[1] She was being pimped by her mother and a male ‘family friend’ from a
Hobart motel and from a house in Glenorchy which is a city near Hobart. Both
her mother and the ‘family friend’ are now serving jail terms
although none of the other men has been charged. There are many deeply
troubling aspects of this story - but the one that I would like to raise here is
how this could have gone on for so long without coming to the attention of the
authorities? Someone must have been managing the motel, others must have been
staying or eating at the motel, and there must have been next door neighbours in
Glenorchy. Surely someone had suspicions about what was going on. Did they
just think: well it looks bad but I don’t suppose it’s any of my
business?

Let me tell another story. This is the story of 19 year old Brodie
Panlock.^[2] In 2006 Brodie jumped
from the top of a car park in Melbourne. She died three days later. She had
endured relentless and cruel bullying by male workmates at a café in the
Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. Her employer and the bullies were convicted of
occupational health and safety offences. But, is it possible that no one else
knew what was happening to Brodie? I don’t think so.

These are horrible stories of extreme harm done by violence, harassment and
bullying. But the lives of far too many Australians - people like you and me
and members of our families - are blighted by violence, harassment and bullying.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported that one in three Australian
women has experienced physical violence since the age of fifteen and one in five
has experienced sexual assault since that
age.^[3] Violence, including sexual
violence, against women with disability is appreciably
higher.^[4] It is estimated that in
2009 violence against women and their children cost the Australian economy $13.6
billion.^[5]

Social research in Australia, as well as the Commission’s own
complaints data base and our own telephone survey, let us know that
approximately one in five women experience sexual harassment in the
workplace.^[6]

A few years ago a study involving 38,000 Australian school-aged children
showed that at least half of them had experienced bullying at
school.^[7] It has been found that
bullied children are five times more likely to be depressed than their peers and
bullied girls eight times more likely to be
suicidal.^[8] A recent study of same
sex attracted young people showed that 61% had been verbally abused and 18%
physically abused.^[9] We also know
that older Australians are experiencing abuse - sometimes, but not always, in
institutional settings.^[10]

I could recite more statistics about violence in our community but I
won’t for two reasons. The first is that I don’t have long to
speak. The second is that, as the High Commissioner for Human Rights has
recently pointed out, the rehearsing of deeply concerning statistics risks
numbing us to the individual suffering that lies behind them. In talking of
violence against women she said: ‘the numbers are of pandemic
proportions – so large that, perversely, they distract us from the plight
of the woman next
door.’^[11]

I have chosen to talk about violence, harassment and bullying today to
explain why it is that the Australian Human Rights Commission has decided that
tackling them should be one of two key priorities for our work over at least the
next two years.

Our other key priority is building understanding and respect for rights in
our community. This choice virtually made itself. Education about human rights
is the centrepiece of Australia’s Human Rights Framework announced by the
Attorney-General in April of this year.

But the decision to concentrate on violence, harassment and bullying in all
areas of our work reflects our understanding as a Commission that, if the human
rights of ‘everyone, everywhere, everyday’ are to be truly
respected, the levels of violence, harassment and bullying in Australia must
fall and fall significantly.

Violence, harassment and bullying are not only inconsistent with the right of
everyone to be treated with respect and to live free from fear and violence;
they impact indirectly on the internationally recognised rights to equality of
opportunity, to health, to employment, to education, to housing and to family
life.

Many of you will know of the work that the Commission has been doing in this
space. To mention just some of that work, our complaints handling staff
continue to do excellent work conciliating complaints - many of which include
elements of violence, harassment or bullying. I am sure that you know that it
was the Commission that brokered the settlement of the sexual harassment claim
made against David Jones and its former CEO but we daily handle complaints that
don’t attract media attention. Our specialist Commissioners have led work
to address family violence; to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace; to
highlight the problem of elder-abuse; to expose the link between racism and
violence and we have worked with others to make our cities safer places for
international students. The Commission has also recently hosted a
high–level summit to address racism on the internet, including on social
networking sites.

With the adoption of our new priorities, we will continue and expand our work
in areas such as these. We will also use our community education work to
increase public understanding of violence, harassment and bullying and the harm
that they do. And we will work to empower community members who may be
bystanders to violence, harassment and bullying to act. Initially we envisage
working in the cyber-world, in part because it is a relatively safe place for
intervention. But we propose, with appropriate advice, to expand our work of
empowering bystanders. It is early days and I hope to be able to tell you more
about it, perhaps this time next year.

So let me close by referring again to the words of the High Commissioner who
spoke of the risk of our being distracted from the plight of the woman next
door. In speaking of human right abuses, I see ‘the woman next
door’ as a potentially powerful metaphor. It is relatively easy to
empathise with the woman next door – it doesn’t take much
imagination to picture ourselves, or someone close to us, in her position. It
seems to me that wider respect for human rights requires that we expand our
imaginations so that our empathy reaches also to those whose lives are markedly
different from ours; so that, in a metaphorical sense, all who face human rights
abuses become for us ‘the woman next door’. If we can do this, to
return to the two stories that I opened with, I doubt that we would remain
passive bystanders were we to witness grave child sexual abuse or gross
harassment of a colleague in our workplace. It is my hope that we will as a
country move to a position in which none of us experiences violence, harassment
or bullying without a ‘neighbour’ stepping to our defence.

^[1] ‘Commissioner urges
inquiry into child prostitute “disaster”’, ABC News, 5
May 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/05/2891249.htm (viewed 9 December 2010).

^[2] ‘Employers “on notice” after suicide death’ Herald
Sun, 8 February 2010. At http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/employers-on-notice-after-suicide-death/story-e6frf7jx-1225827975551 (viewed 1 December 2010).

^[3] ABS, Personal Safety, Australia, 2005 (Reissue), Catalogue No. 4906.0 (2006),
p 7. At www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4906.0Main+Features12005%20(Reissue)?OpenDocument (viewed 5 March 2010).

^[4] Women
with Disability Australia, Submission to the Australian
Government

Consultation Paper: Family Violence – Improving Legal
Frameworks (June 2010), p 6. At http://www.wwda.org.au/WWDASubFVL2010.pdf (viewed 3 December 2010).

^[5] The
National Council to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children, The
cost of violence against women and their children (March 2009), p 4. At http://www.fahcsia.gov.au/sa/women/pubs/violence/np_time_for_action/economic_costs/Pages/default.aspx (viewed 9 December 2010).

^[6] Australian Human Rights Commission, Sexual harassment: Serious business
Results of the 2008 Sexual Harassment National Telephone Survey (2008), p 1.
At www.humanrights.gov.au/sexualharassment/serious_business/index.html (viewed 3 December 2010).

^[7] K
Rigby, ‘What harm does bullying do?’ paper presented at the Children
and Crime: Victims and Offenders Conference, Australian Institute of
Criminology, Brisbane (1999) p 4, quoted in Kids Helpline newsletter, Edition 2
2010, p 1. At www.kidshelp.com.au/upload/22860.pdf (viewed 9 December 2010).

^[8] Plan
International, Bullying: The Global Campaign to end violence in schools, http://plan-international.org/learnwithoutfear/the-campaign/bullying (viewed 3 December 2010).

^[9] L
Hillier et al, Writing themselves in 3, the 3^rd national study
on the sexual health and wellbeing of same sex attracted and gender questioning
young people (2010) p 39. At http://www.latrobe.edu.au/ssay/assets/downloads/wti3_web_sml.pdf (viewed 9 December 2010).

^[10] Benevolent Society, Recognising, preventing and responding to abuse of older
people living in the community: A resource for community care workers (2010). At http://www.bensoc.org.au/uploads/documents/research-to-practice-briefing3-abuse-of-older-people-mar2010.pdf (viewed 9 December 2010).

^[11] N
Pillay, Are we accomplices to violence against women? (Statement issued
on the occasion of International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against
Women, 25 November 2010). At http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=10560&LangID=E (viewed 9 December 2010).