Author: Personal Website, Google Scholar

Abstract: »This article analyses a recent exchange between feminist counsellors working in Centres Against Sexual Assault (CASAs) and our state-wide peak body in Victoria, Australia. In June 2024 a collective of sexual violence workers (CASA4Palestine) co-wrote a letter demanding that Sexual Assault Services Victoria (SASVic) release a public statement condemning the ongoing genocide in Gaza and supporting international calls for a ceasefire. The letter—which argued that SASVic has a responsibility to “speak-out” given Australia’s own colonial history and settler-colonial present—was met with dismissal and ultimately, rejection. As a social worker, sexual violence counsellor, and co-author of the letter, I analyse this encounter by querying the sector’s unwillingness to name colonial violence. Reading this encounter through a critical race and feminist abolitionist lens reveals a legacy of white Australian feminists’ denying the constitutive links between settler-colonialism, racism, and sexual violence in this colony. To understand SASVic’s response, this article brings multiple, conflicting her-stories of feminist anti-violence organising into dialogue: white feminist accounts documenting the emergence and politics of sexual violence services with/against Indigenous women’s critiques of feminist praxis in Australia. Ultimately, the interaction between CASA4Palestine and SASVic exposes an often-hidden tension within the anti-violence sector; despite SASVic’s espousal of a political framework in which sexual violence constitutes a structural harm, rape is exposed as an individualised, interpersonal violation—somehow separate to coloniality. SASVic’s refusal to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Gaza unveils uncomfortable contradictions between its ostensibly politicised understanding of harm and its continuing legacy as an accomplice to colonial violence.« (Source: Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work)

Contents:

	The Feminst Politicisation of Sexual Violence (p. 4)
	Era One—1970s (p. 6)
		[White] Women’s Liberation, Rape, and the State (p. 6)
		Aboriginal Women’s Writing and the Incommensurability of Experience (p. 7)
	Era 2—1980s and 1990s (p. 8)
		State-Funded, Feminist Sexual Violence Services (p. 8)
		The Coloniality of Sexual Violence (p. 10)
	Era 3—2010s and Now (p. 12)
		The Production of a White, Liberal Feminist Discourse of Sexual Assault (p. 12)
		Contemporary Critical Race and Abolition Landscapes (p. 14)
	Conclusion and Implications for Social Work (p. 15)
	Author Note (p. 17)
	References (p. 17)

Wikipedia: History of Oceania: History of Australia / History of Australia (1945–present) | Sex and the law: Sexual violence