‘Sexual violence thrives in silence’, which is why a new SBS series, 'Asking For It', is fearless in tackling dark issues to deliver its consent message. Cherie Moselen speaks to series’ co-creator Jess Hill and sexual assault survivor and advocate Saxon Mullins.
*CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses rape and domestic violence
LAST MONTH’S much-publicised “Let Women Speak” rally, led by far-Right anti-trans campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (commonly known as Posie Parker), highlighted the need for better education in our ongoing conversation about violence against women.
With the word "woman" emblazoned on her chest multiple times, Parker looked the picture of power as she claimed to give a voice to women worried about their safety in same-sex bathrooms.
Sadly, this posturing (really, just a front for Parker’s bigotry towards the transgender community) draws attention away from the real emergency: that one in three women in Australia has experienced physical violence and one in five has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15. And that they are more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone they know: in 70% of cases, at a home.
Clearly, the monster marauding through our communities is the “regular” violence women are experiencing — and it’s not lurking in an all-gender toilet.
The difference between Parker’s hate-filled diatribe and the informed commentary about violence suffered by women in Australia, as voiced by presenter and consulting producer Jess Hill in new documentary series Asking For It, couldn’t be greater.
A question of consent
Premiering on SBS this Thursday, Asking For It follows gritty series See What You Made Me Do, which confronts the national emergency that is domestic abuse. (See What You Made Me Do was directed by Tosca Looby, who, with Northern Pictures, invited journalist Jess Hill to work on this new series.)
With the number of police-recorded victims of sexual assault increasing by 13% in 2021 (the tenth annual rise in a row), this new series focuses on why consent – and the confusion around it – is currently a hot national topic.
Jess Hill told Independent Australia:
Making this series was like opening a box of butterflies and letting them all just fall out.
Some [parts] are ugly and poisonous and others are beautiful and really enrapturing. I hope that the conversations which come from it are broad and go in all sorts of different directions: around consent and power, sex and pleasure, satisfaction, mutuality and gender.
Extremely diverse in its approach, Asking For It considers what can happen when consent is breached and sex becomes rape.
Hill explained the show really wanted to bring to light aspects that would help dispel rape myths, like helping people to understand things like "fawning" (a common trauma response which is not readily known, whereby a victim uses people-pleasing behaviour to placate an aggressor, for safety reasons).
Said Hill:
This response is often mistaken for consent – if the sexual abuse survivor 'fawns' – or suggests it wasn’t that bad or it didn’t happen at all. And we showed that with Grace Tame.
Consent, psychologically, for survivors of child sexual assault is really critical because some will feel like they either gave the impression of consent or wonder why they 'consented' in their minds.
Hill explained the series also wanted to communicate to people who’ve been through it and had that response that there was nothing "wrong" in feeling that way:
"When you’ve had consent 'manufactured' it takes a long time to figure out why it was that you responded the way that you did, if you don’t know that it’s actually a common response to [abusers'] tactics."
Porn in the picture
Asking For It introduces us to people who work closely around consent. We meet Muay Thai boxer and consent educator Richie Hardcore, who explains why “you can’t talk about consent and not talk about porn [because] porn normalises really poor understanding about consent”.
We hear concerning insights from digital threats assessor and co-founder of Reset Australia's Chris Cooper about what happens when young people continually watch extreme content — which shifts their baseline so that such aggressive behaviour becomes "normal".
With the average age of first exposure to online pornography believed to be between 8-11, it's not surprising teenagers might act out the aggression they have, for years, seen commonly displayed.
Hill browses through some mainstream porn sites (anyone can access them with a WiFi connection), where she finds a deluge of clips encouraging aggression towards women. A quick skirt of the “manosphere”– websites and blogs which promote overt masculinity, misogyny and opposition to feminism – reveals an alarming anti-consent celebration that any 13-year-old who signs up to TikTok can watch.
In a later clip, lawyer Michael Bradley warns of “a big wave coming” across the Aussie school community as more girls begin reporting their experiences of sexual assault to state education departments.
“You can’t expect, rationally, a girl who’s been raped by a student to go to school every day where he is.”
He believes schools are “failing their most vulnerable students” — using outdated tools designed to deal with bullying to tackle sexual abuse. The takeaway here is that education authorities need to get a move on and create proper guidelines to help schools deal with this serious problem.
As Bradley argues, "You can’t expect, rationally, a girl who’s been raped by a student to go to school every day where he is".
Consent education
When asked about institutional stumbling blocks that have contributed to much of the country's consent education being of poor quality, Hill told IA:
I think schools can often feel like they’re going to get huge complaints from parents if they educate kids explicitly and that’s why we have euphemisms and really poor ways of teaching consent as we saw with the milkshake video…
But a Curtin University study recently showed that parents want their kids to be educated on consent and sex.
Hill believes that whether they know if their own children are watching it, parents know that porn is out there and is being consumed almost universally by kids from a young age.
Said Hill:
The need for quite explicit sex education is greater because, on the other side, kids are being accidentally educated in what is often a pretty nasty and damaging way.
I’d say that a stumbling block for schools, from what this study says, is the misperception that parents will complain. The role of schools is really important because it is kids in their peer groups all talking [about sex] together, which is a really different situation to, 'Hey son, it’s time we had the talk...'
It’s tough to explore the raw impact of consent in our lives without tackling some dark and disturbing stuff, but one of the series' considerable strengths is an awareness of both light and shade as Hill does this.
A dazzling "Unicorns" party creates a change of pace.
Unicorns was designed by event producer and LGBTQ+ advocate Adele (delsi cat) Moleta as:
‘… an environment of love, encouragement, kindness, community and celebration. And a reminder of how lucky we are to be born unapologetically queer.’
Moleta’s parties scream “anything-goes”, but the organiser has one explicit rule — affirmed consent must go hand in hand with all hook-ups: It's "Fuck, yes!" or it’s "No."
Other colourful footage takes us inside a Sexually Health Cities workshop where men are grouped at tables making vulvas with play dough. (Didn’t see that coming!)
Obviously good fun, the arty part is a clever distraction to get men talking about such things as “sexpectations”. And it astutely challenges the idea that males – mostly – can’t talk about sex in a group setting without feeling embarrassed.
The series also benefits from Hill’s expert narration, which is calmly paced as she threads these clips together, putting into context the importance of consent in ending sexual violence. This is plain speaking on a complicated issue at its finest.
The production decision to “interview” many of the advocates face-to-camera – so it is them and only them telling their stories to the viewer – gives these sexual abuse survivors the ultimate power in sharing their testimonies.
This is how you let women speak.
Accordingly, Saxon Mullins shares the ordeal that led to Luke Lazarus being convicted of raping her.
Inside the court system
Four years after the guilty verdict, Saxon Mullins found herself back in court — where that conviction was overturned. Lazarus maintained he read her body language as consenting and the judge agreed that although Saxon Mullins was “not consenting in her own mind”, she didn’t clearly communicate that lack of consent to Lazarus.
Recipient of the Australian Young People’s Human Rights Medal in 2018, Mullins’ advocacy since sparked a ground-breaking review of sexual assault laws in NSW. In June last year, the NSW Law Reform Commission closed this "loophole" around consent.
What is patently clear from this is that our legal process further traumatised a young woman who’d already been through enough.
When Hill informs us that “almost 90% of sexual assault survivors never report their ordeal”, Saxon Mullins’ bravery in enduring two trials and multiple appeals – sometimes “bumping into” Lazarus and his defence team because there was only one court entrance and one common place to wait – seems extraordinary.
Later in the series, it’s almost a shock to learn that South Africa provides a network of courts that only deal with sexual violence, with specialised rooms to ensure victims and accused never cross paths.
Both countries have similar legal systems, but the people involved in dealing with the sexual abuse process in South Africa are trained to understand trauma so that the survivor’s dignity is kept uppermost.
Is such a court system possible in Australia?
Independent Australia spoke with Saxon Mullins, who insists we need a legal process to deal with sexual assault that is fit for purpose:
I think it's required. I think we hold this idea that sexual violence isn’t a specialised subject – any judge can do it, any prosecutor – but it really does require people who are informed about sexual violence, just like it does for domestic and family violence.
For example, jury directions, which try and dispel ideas that people might bring into a courtroom — judges are bringing their own ideas in as well. They get to decide when those jury directions are said or not said.
Saxon Mullins understands first-hand the need for people who work within the system to be trauma-informed and understand what it means for a survivor to go through the court system.
Explained Saxon Mullins:
"As long as we try and fit sexual violence into the same courtroom where we hear traffic offences and the like, we’re doing a disservice to survivors, to everybody involved, because it is not built for that."
She says her hope for Asking For It is that it will get more people involved in necessary conversations about respect.
A (National Community Attitudes Survey) NCAS report – the longest-running annual survey in the world which looks at views around sexual and family violence – was recently released.
Saxon Mullins tells IA that the report always has and still shows“the number one cause of violence against women is attitudes towards women”.
Here, she said, is where education must begin:
"You have to have open discussions about these attitudes and hopefully, this is what 'Asking For It' does — have that genuine open conversation."
The series brings together many ideas for consideration: robust consent education and alternative outlooks for a better court system.
Saxon Mullins believes Asking For It includes concepts that might offer genuine solutions:
Even though me, you, many people in these circles have been having these conversations for years, some people haven’t, still. The more we can tell it in a truthful way, people can think in their own minds, 'What could I do to make this better?'
Driving change
Today, Saxon Mullins is director of advocacy at Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy (RASARA), where work is ongoing to ensure states around Australia are not just doing the bare minimum.
About this crucial service, Saxon Mullins explained:
At RASARA we’re trying to make sure that education is at the forefront of everybody’s minds.
We’re also looking to the states to enhance – or make – some affirmative consent laws: to make sure when we are talking about domestic and family violence, or sexual violence, we’re talking with truth and we’re talking with survivors at the forefront of our minds.
Asking For It is at once grim, moving and surprising. It will leave you with questions. Like, how seriously do we take sexual violence in Australia?
Saxon Mullins’ answer to that question is a question of her own:
“Why do politicians have to be told, every step of the way, what to do by survivors?”
Women and girls are not safe from sexual abuse (at home, at school, at work, in Parliament House, at a party or a bar) nor protected by our legal process when they do try and get justice, but the sad truth is not enough Australians are upset by that.
Asking For It is fearless in delivering its consent message:
“Sexual violence thrives in silence. And that silence is over.”
Australia would do well to watch it — we should all want women everywhere to fear less.
'Asking For It' premieres on SBS at 8.30 pm on Thursday, 20 April.
If you would like to speak to someone about rape or domestic violence, please call 1800 Respect on 1800 737 732 or chat online.
Cherie Moselen is an Independent Australia assistant editor and freelance writer who grew up in NZ. Her Māori ancestral roots are Ngāti Kahu and Ngāti Te Ata. You can follow her on Twitter @CherieMoselen.
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