I wish that all the ladies
Were holes in the road
And if I were a dump truck
I’d fill them with my load
This little rhyme has been playing itself over and over again in my head these last few days. The video of the St Kevin’s boys has everyone talking, with discussion ranging from white male privilege and the culture of private schools, to the demise of Aussie larrikinism.
The only thing I can think about is how poorly timed the boys were. If they had waited a few more years until they were in college at uni, they would have gotten away scot free.
The song, while out of place on a tram, would have felt right at home in our university residencies, a place I’m certain many of those boys will find themselves in a few years. On the campuses where our country’s future leaders are finding their feet, they’ll find a space where finally, boys are allowed to be boys.
I can speak to this culture first hand. As a previous president of the Macquarie Women’s Collective, I received more disclosures of violence and assault than I could count. During the last weeks I spent at my college, I was unable to go to the dining room because there were perpetrators at every table. At one point during my time there, I spoke out about the culture of casual gendered violence and one male student’s response scared me so much that I locked myself in my room for a day. Until the day I left, I was always scared of something happening because he knew where I lived.
But don’t just take my word for it. Nina Funnell and Anna Hush of End Rape on Campus put together The Red Zone Report at the beginning of last year, detailing instances of sexual violence in colleges and residencies all around Australia.
The 211 page report is filled to the brim with stories of boys only a little older than the ones from St Kevin’s.
Boys who masturbate into containers of shampoo or body wash left by girls in bathrooms so that female students will later wash themselves with a mixture of the product and their semen, boys who create Facebook groups called “define statutory: pro-rape, anti-consent”, boys who discuss details of a student’s rape over the PA system for the college to hear.
If you think the St Kevin’s song and these incidents are unrelated, think again. Violence and discrimination exists in a pyramid, with things like “locker room talk” and casual sexism at the bottom, providing the foundations for more violent acts, like cat calling and revenge porn. This in turn supports violence further up the pyramid, like rape and murder. These incidents and the video of the St Kevin’s boys bloomed from the same culture, one that demeans women, protects rapists, and ensures that boys and men are always prioritised, no matter what.
Universities and colleges were built on the foundations of colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and ableism, and were created to benefit largely rich, white, able-bodied men. It’s these values that are instilled within our country and learnt through our education systems, presenting themselves in our justice systems, boards, offices, and parliaments. It’s why we have at least one woman a week dying at the hands of violence, usually by domestic violence.
Over two years ago, the Australian Human Rights Commission released the first report into sexual harassment and sexual assault on Australian university campuses, finding that 1 in 5 students had been sexually harassed at university or a university affiliated event in 2016 alone, while 1.6% of students had been sexually assaulted in the same year. Of those statistics, 87% of those who had been sexually assaulted and 71% of those who had been sexually harassed reported that the perpetrator was male.
If we’re truly going to change the violent, sexist culture of Australia, our universities and schools are where we should be looking.
They might be 20-something year old students now, but they’ll be the ones making our laws in the decades to come.
