Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame and thousands of women across the country are demanding a better future, sometimes at great personal cost
At university we were given a task to explain how the readings we did that week on sexual coercion in the education system were applicable to the contexts we came from. A woman from a low income country went first, and described how “virginity testing” (where fingers are used to test if the hymen is still intact) was part of childhood schooling in her country. It was my turn directly after and I was slightly lost for words.
“Uhh … I grew up in a privileged area of Australia so nothing like that happened to me in my schooling … but when I was doing the readings on sexual coercion, I realised I and people I knew experienced the behaviour described pretty much every weekend.”
