The Sydney Feminists

Another vibrant, talented young woman died recently at the hands of young men.  Laa Chol was at a party with friends, like many young people over the weekend.  Her life ended as she attempted to diffuse a situation where uninvited, or unwanted, guests had overstayed their welcome.  But this is a situation that happens all the time – all of us can remember our teenage years and being at parties where ‘gate-crashers’ had to be asked to leave.  Some of us may have witnessed fights and police involvement but very few of us will have been at a female-only party where the gate-crashers were young men and it resulted in the stabbing death of a woman. From what I can glean from media reports, the group of people who were supposed to be at the party were women and the gate-crashers were men.  So I was confused as to why the media’s reporting of this focused more of the race of persons involved over another, at least to me, salient fact: why a group of teenage boys and...

I’m writing this for Eurydice Dixon, who was raped and murdered by a man as she walked home from a comedy gig, but I’m also writing this for all of us.  Eurydice Dixon struck a chord with us, especially women I think, because she could have been any of us. We can all relate to her. Even though she is, devastatingly, the thirtieth Australian woman murdered this year according to Destroy the Joint , Eurydice’s story is absolutely universal. We’ve all had to get home alone, maybe not from a gig, but from a bar or friend’s house or even just from work, at some point. And if not all of us, then the vast majority, have felt the powerlessness of being harassed or intimidated by a man. Most of us can recall feeling scared the harassment we’ve endured might’ve escalated. I have a six-minute walk from my closest train station to my door, and I have been harassed on the way home. In the space of six minutes. Multiple times. I think we relate to Eurydice so strongly, because most, if not al...