Trigger warning: this post contains details of rape and sexual harassment, so may be triggering for some readers.
The magistrate who recently told a sexual harassment victim it was a “vast overreaction” for her to report and publicly expose her abuse is the same magistrate who let Sydney Siege gunman Man Monis out on bail after he was arrested in relation to the stabbing murder of his ex-wife.
Magistrate William Pierce released Monis back into the community in 2013, despite him being charged for orchestrating the murder of his former partner and mother of two, Noleen Hayson Pal.
Ms Pal was stabbed 18 times and set alight, yet the judge released Man Monis on a $10,000 bail securement.
“If there was a threat it was to this one woman who was murdered – if, there was a threat,” Mr Pierce remarked in Penrith Local Court in December 2013, adding that Man Monis was “[not] a threat to other people”.
But within a year of being released on bail, Man Monis was charged with more than 40 sexual assault charges against at least six different women, including 22 counts of aggravated sexual assault.
Again, he was released on bail. It was in this time the Martin Place Lindt Café Siege occurred.
Now, the same magistrate who first released Monis has stated that Paloma Brierley Newton “overreacted” when she refused to back down after receiving what the judge described as “a few mildly explicit comments.”
These included:
“I’d rape you if you were better looking”.
Top Comments
There are lots and lots of idiots on social media, both male and female. Whenever one of them says a mean or rude comment to me, I just press the Block button, forget about them and go on with my life. It takes all of 1 second, and it's exactly what the Block button was created for.
But that's just me. You do you, I guess.
People who say that women are overreacting about comments like Zane's, or that he got a fair sentence, are forgetting what this kind of disrespect towards women leads to. Men who make comments like this come to believe them, men who read comments like this come to believe them; and we end up with a community of men who think it is not only appropriate to talk to women like this, but that it's also okay to actually carry out these actions, because they no longer respect women as human.
As Malcolm Turnbull rightly said, "...disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women."
Do you have a single piece of credible scientific research to show that rude comments on social media actually lead to violence against women?
Because I've been looking for the factual basis to this oft-repeated claim, but can find nothing. If I didn't know better, I'd guess it was just a fantasy invented to justify someone's political agenda.
'Men who make comments like this come to believe them, men who read comments like this come to believe them; and we end up with a community of men who think it is not only appropriate to talk to women like this, but that it's also okay to actually carry out these actions, because they no longer respect women as human' - Can you point me in the direction of a study for this?
I'm not sure it would be ethical to study this, as it would lead to acts of violence against women for the sake of research! Besides, aren't we seeing it already? The Stanford rape case, all the women murdered through domestic violence...it all started with men not respecting women. And the reverse is just as true: women who don't respect men start behaving inappropriately toward them. Would you tell a person you respected as a human being that their mouth is only good for having a "hot load shot down"? Would you physically abuse a person you respected as a human being? Would you rape a person you respected as a human being?
Is it so hard for people to accept that the comments this young man made towards women are abhorrent and deserve punishment?
There is no way you were looking very hard if you couldn't find and papers. There is an absolute WEALTH of papers repeatedly showing that sexually aggressive discourse amongst male peers (as in this case) leads to higher levels of sexual and physical abuse against women. This paper is a key paper in the field and summarises many factors relating to sexual violence against women but includes a section on violent discourse amungst peers and how that related to secual aggression - LORI L. HEISE
Violence Against Women: An Integrated, Ecological Framework
Violence Against Women June 1998 4: 262-290, doi:10.1177/1077801298004003002.
Here is an excerpt:
Peer group behaviors and attitudes seem to play an important role in encouraging sexual aggression, especially among adolescent males (Alder, 1985; DeKeseredy & Kelly, 1993; Frank, 1989 as
cited in Malamuth et al., 1991). In a study by Gwartney-Gibbs et al. (1987), almost twice as many males with sexually aggressive peers reported coercive or forced intercourse than did males with no sexually aggressive peers. Petty and Dawson (1989) likewise report that sexual aggression is significantly related to desires to be held in high esteem by acquaintances, 11 a characteristic that may play an important part in maintaining sexual aggression by men through peer pressure" (p. 360).