The #MeToo movement needs to gain force across the world

When Australia’s first female prime minister called out sexism in parliament eight years ago, her speech went viral. Addressing the male opposition leader sitting across from her in the chamber, Julia Gillard said: “If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.” Her address, still in circulation on TikTok, still resonate with women around the world who recognize their own experiences in Gillard’s fury.

Last week, they saw allegations of rape and unwanted sexual advances against a senior minister and a former staffer in Australia’s ruling conservative party roil the country’s politics. They can also see the tone-deaf response by current Prime Minister Scott Morrison to the complainants—based on an implicit “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that leaves young women vulnerable to inappropriate behaviour without consequences—and the toxic workplace he presides over. The senior minister categorically denies the allegations.

It’s certainly not just an Australia problem. In the US, two former aides have accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment—which he denies—while in New Jersey, a high-level working group in January released a 76-page report on harassment, sexual assault and misogyny in the state’s politics in the wake of allegations against some people involved in running the 2017 election campaign of Governor Phil Murphy. None involved Murphy.

And in India, a former minister in the Narendra Modi government brought a defamation suit against a woman who accused him of sexual harassment in an attempt to silence her and the charges. The former minister lost that case in court last month in a rare victory for the country’s nascent #MeToo movement.

Globally, these events have confirmed for women what they already knew. The system actively discourages those who have been raped from coming forward and going through the so-called “proper channels” of the police and the legal system.

In one of the Australian cases, three government ministers, staff in the prime minister’s office and the parliament house security team knew an incident had occurred in the defence minister’s office in 2019. And yet no action was taken.

Morrison is under pressure over his handling of the multiple sexual assault claims. A poll released this week from Essential Media indicates there’s been a double-digit drop in support for the prime minister among female voters (although his overall popularity remains strong.)

The nation has long had a problem with rape. One in five Australian women have experienced sexual violence, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and on average, one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner.

A 2018 study found one-in-eight respondents agreed that a man is justified in having non-consensual sex if the woman initiated intimacy. Statistics for the United States are no less shocking. One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted rape, or rape, in her lifetime, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization RAINN reports. In India, government data shows crimes against women occur 39 times every hour.

As Sarah Maddison, professor in political science at the University of Melbourne, notes, just adding more women to the roll call of a nation’s lawmakers does not on its own transform the boys’ club of politics, which is a microcosm of society at large. “These institutions, in Australia and around the world, are deeply gendered and provide cover for men to behave badly and perpetuate sexual violence against women, while protecting the status quo,” Maddison told me.

Power structures remain stacked against women, despite rape laws, workplace policies and the cases that make it to court. “Every woman knows that what is going to be on trial in these situations is them, perceptions of their morality, their behaviour, their sobriety,” Maddison says. “It is almost never the men who end up on trial.”

And while the recent sexual assault scandals are unlikely to have electoral consequences for Australia’s Morrison government, they are a powerful continuation of the global #MeToo movement.

“All of these cases in different countries collectively turn up the heat on male-dominated institutions, they are educative to the wider public and they prompt debate. We are seeing slow, but determined change in these spaces that is being led by women,” says Maddison.

It’s a call for fundamental reforms around the world. The question is, will men in power and the machinery behind them finally listen—and act.

Ruth Pollard is a multimedia journalist specializing in conflict reporting across the Middle East and North Africa.