Sit With That Number
In Australia, somewhere between six and ten percent of reported sexual assaults end in conviction. I want you to sit with that for a second. Really sit with it. Because that’s the reported number. And because so many women never report at all, some estimates put the actual conviction rate closer to one and a half percent.
One and a half percent.
I had a conversation recently with a man who genuinely couldn’t wrap his head around why women don’t report sexual assault. He wasn’t being malicious. He was genuinely confused. And I had to take a breath, because the gap between his confusion and our reality is exactly the problem. He’s lived his entire life in a world where reporting something wrong leads to consequences. For him, that’s just how it works. For us, reporting something wrong often is the consequence.
His Word vs. Hers (Guess Who Wins)
Unless there’s visible violence – bruising, blood, something a jury can point at – you’ve got almost nothing. You have your account. He has his. And he’s an upstanding member of the community, a good bloke, well liked, reliable at work, coaches his kid’s footy team. As if community standing is a reliable metric for whether someone is capable of sexual violence. As if the two things have ever been mutually exclusive.
This is the part that breaks women. Not just the assault itself, but the immediate calculation that follows. Who is going to believe me? What evidence do I have? Can I prove I didn’t want this? Because that’s where the weight lands – on us, to prove that we didn’t consent, rather than on him to prove that we did. We’ve built a system that treats a woman’s account as the thing that needs disproving. And then we wonder why she stays quiet.
The burden of proof in a criminal case is beyond reasonable doubt. Which sounds fair and just and very noble in theory. In practice, when it’s a he said / she said situation with no witnesses and no physical evidence, reasonable doubt is enormous. It’s a door you could drive a truck through. And the defence knows it.
What She’s Actually Signing Up For
Let’s say she reports anyway. Let’s say she does the brave, exhausting, terrifying thing and goes to the police. What happens next isn’t justice. It’s a process. A long, grinding, retraumatising process that starts with telling a stranger exactly what happened to her body, in detail, more than once. It involves a forensic examination if she’s reported quickly enough. It involves statements and interviews and waiting and uncertainty.
Then, if it gets to court – and most don’t – she gets cross-examined by a defence barrister whose entire job is to make her look unreliable. What was she wearing? How much had she had to drink? Did she smile at him earlier in the evening? Had they kissed before? As if a smile is consent. As if a short skirt is consent. As if being kind or warm or physically present in a space is a standing invitation that can never be revoked.
She is not the victim in that courtroom. She is a witness. And she will be treated accordingly. Scrutinised, questioned, doubted – in public, on the record, while he sits across the room with his legal team. And at the end of it, there is still a very real chance the verdict is not guilty. Not because he didn’t do it. But because the system wasn’t built to handle cases where the only evidence is her word, her memory, and her body.
When You’ve Been Told Not To Bother
Here’s what we also need to acknowledge. Women don’t arrive at the decision not to report in a vacuum. We arrive there after a lifetime of being told – explicitly and implicitly – that our experiences aren’t valid. That we’re too sensitive. That we misread the situation. That we should’ve been more careful, more sober, more covered up, more aware, more something. The message is everywhere. In the media, in verdicts, in the public response to high-profile cases where a woman speaks out and gets eviscerated for it.
We watch what happens to women who do report. We watch the coverage. We watch people dissect her history, her behaviour, her choices. We watch men we know – good men, thoughtful men – say things like “well, you are very flirty” and “I’m just saying, we don’t know the full story.” We file that away. We learn. The lesson is: if you speak, you become the story. And not in the way you want.
So when that man asked me why women don’t report, I wanted to hand him a list. I wanted to say: read the conviction rates. Read the acquittals. Read the victim impact statements. Read the headlines. Watch how a woman is treated the moment she names someone with power or popularity or a good reputation in the community. Then ask me again why she stays quiet.
The 1.5% Tells You Everything
We don’t have a reporting problem. We have a system problem. A culture problem. A deeply embedded belief problem that says a woman’s account of her own experience is inherently less credible than a man’s denial of it.
Until that changes, nothing else does. Not the statistics. Not the silence. Not the quiet calculation women do in the aftermath of something terrible, when they weigh up the cost of speaking against the near-certainty that speaking will cost them more than staying quiet ever will.
Women aren’t irrational for not reporting. They’re responding rationally to a system that has shown them, repeatedly and clearly, what reporting is likely to cost them and what it’s unlikely to give them back. The one and a half percent isn’t a mystery. It’s the system working exactly as it was built. And until we’re honest about that, we don’t get to be confused about why she didn’t say anything.
Just One of My Stories
I was twenty five, living alone near the city. I’d been out to a gig, surrounded by people I knew. That night I was trying to set up a newly single friend with a guy I’ll call Boozie – his actual name was irrelevant to me, I only knew his metal scene name. They’d built a rapport over the course of the night, but my friend had to leave suddenly – housemate emergency. She pulled me aside before she left and told me she was very keen. As she walked out, Boozie realised he hadn’t given her his number, so he asked me to pass it on and put it in my phone.
I went home not long after. Very drunk. I passed out in bed. At some point in the early hours, I got a text from “James” – and my two best friends at the time were both named James – saying he’d been stuck outside after lockout, could he crash at mine? I sent my address without hesitation, because this was not the first time my mates had ended up on my sofa and it wouldn’t be the last. I lived considerably closer to the city than either of them. About fifteen minutes later there was a knock at my door, and instead of one of my best friends, there was Boozie. Confused and half asleep, I told him the sofa was there and went back to bed. Something to sort out in the morning.
He followed me into my room and tried to force himself on me. I kicked him in the jaw and gave him a concussion. In the morning I got up early, waited for him to surface, and told him to leave. Then I checked my phone. The messages he’d sent were well before lockout – it had been premeditated from the start. He hadn’t been locked out of anywhere. He’d just been waiting for me to go home alone.
When I told my friend group, their first response was, “well, you are very flirty.” I’m sorry – this man didn’t even have a beard and I have a type. But that was it. That was the response. Not anger on my behalf. Not disbelief at him. Doubt, directed at me, framed as a personality assessment. And here’s the thing that has stayed with me ever since: if my own people – including the real Jameses in my life – responded like that, what would the authorities do? I was lucky that night. I was able to protect myself. Later in my life, I wasn’t. And by then I already knew exactly how much my word would be worth.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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