The 'Dear Sirs' Project

09/07/2024

What steps in your life are you taking to stop Australia from meeting number 50?

26/06/2024

Neurodiversity in the law with Victorian Women Lawyers

We pay thanks to First Nations’ leaders, past, present, and emerging.

16/06/2024

In the last few days, we’ve read that 4 Western nations who are UN members are countries battling violence against women: Australia, the United States, France and Britain. The Guardian’s article about Britain is sobering.

Australia, Britain and France have international and domestic human rights laws to protect women. Those protections are of the whole woman: physical, economic, social, cultural, familial.

It’s both good and horrendous to know the widespread nature of the challenge.

Good because we’re all no longer concerned about adverse consequences for engaging in public discourse about the lives harmed and lost: immediate, intersectional and intergenerational.

Sad because no one should endure harms from those with whom they live and share a life.

Like the Met Chief, Australia’s front line workers and the legal system are the first to note the overwhelm of incidents and misalignment between legal protections and necessary resourcing.

Society must lead the change.

Equality is law.

It’s time for you and your community to make equality an everyday part of life.

Do it at home, at work, when socialising, in clubs, and all activities, and most of all teach and lead your children into equal thought.

Done well, we will stop counting dead women and make anachronistic the scale of harm.

National strategy beyond policing and criminal justice system needed to tackle problem, Sir Mark Rowley says

14/06/2024

Grab Kate Manne for the weekend!
https://bit.ly/MisogynyFuture

To understand the gendered drivers of violence such as the Bondi Junction attack, we have to reckon with patriarchy and its many structural protections

07/06/2024

What a spectacular conference Australian Human Rights Commission! It was such a stellar line up we don’t know how you’ll top it next year (unless a bill births an Act!).

07/06/2024

As a nation founded on the free labour of prisoners and subsequently through various forms of slavery, including of the women who worked in the houses of the military, government and bankers, it seems to us to be no wonder that Australia persists in not having a unified national domestic human rights framework.

Our founder’s interest in human rights law was piqued by learning at age 15 of the story of a family who fled Cyprus to Australia for a better life. Cyprus still has the dividing Green Line installed by the UN to keep peace as between the Greek and Turkish cultures who had interminably fought over the lands in a constant power struggle based in ancient patriarchal divisions cultural and religious.

Seated at the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Free & Equal Conference, The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG reminds us we are all born free and equal in dignity and rights, and that any derogation from it has been occasioned by religion and law operating often in tandem through the exercise of power to control others. Those others are typically the less educated, empowered, and wealthy.

We have come a long way as a nation but have so far to go to stop the preventable harms caused by the myriad misogynistic processes and outcomes against which The DSP rails.

We each have the ability to facilitate greatness for each other and our communities. We can live free from harm. We can do this now as we form the blueprint for a formal domestic bill of rights.

Choose equality over power and control. Do it in your workplace, at home, and in all areas of your lives. You deserve the safety that equality will deliver.

06/06/2024

We’re here! Australian Human Rights Commission

06/06/2024

06/06/2024

Hello lovely!

Ensconced and awash in Vivid.

04/06/2024

In Australia, the coincidence of public holidays, higher alcohol consumption and rises in violence is broadly understood in the treating professions. As we head into the upcoming long weekend, it's a statistic we should work to reduce.

In legal practice, we see the consequences of addiction. We know anecdotally that alcohol overuse causes harms for those around the dependent user.

And for victims of violence, lawyers know the types of the events that lead to the victim leaving their partner, their home, their employer, their workplace.

Thanks to a study supported by La Trobe University, a local study backs anecdotal knowledge.

Addiction is an SSA journal publishing peer-reviewed research reports on pharmalogical and behavioural addictions spanning many different disciplines.