One Year On Since The First March4Justice, How Much Has Really Changed?

On Sunday, February 27, thousands came together for March4Justice2, a series of rallies across the country protesting government inaction on sexual assault and gendered violence. 

It’s been almost a year since the first March4Justice rallies were held in Australia, when 110,000 people marched at hundreds of events on 15 March 2021, demanding justice for survivors. Almost a year since Brittany Higgins, a former Liberal Party staffer, stood outside Parliament House — a place where she had been allegedly raped by a colleague — and told protestors that “the system is broken”. Almost a year since Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it was a triumph that those same protestors weren’t “met with bullets”. 

To honour the anniversary of March4Justice, Refinery29 Australia spoke to survivors and advocates about what progress has been made in the last twelve months, and what still needs to be done in the fight to end family, domestic and sexual violence.

Among those who protested both last year and last Sunday was 17-year-old grassroots campaigner Dani Villafaña, who is also one of Plan International Australia’s Youth Activists for 2022. 

While last year’s rallies may have felt like an empowering moment in history for some, Villafaña, a survivor of sexual assault, tells Refinery29 Australia that it was “one of the hardest, most traumatic parts of my life”.

“What I remember during that time around that rally around March4Justice was just a massive sense of anxiety and grief… it felt as though our safety was once again being attacked,” says Villafaña, who uses she/they pronouns. “These politicians, and a lot of our leadership, had opportunities to act upon it, [but] they made the conscious decision to not protect women, to not believe survivors…” they say.

Villafaña helped organise a student snap rally ahead of last year’s March4Justice; a way for those who couldn’t vote to raise their voices on the issue. One of the students’ key demands was universal consent education in Australian schools.

Better consent education is one of the clear, tangible areas that Australia has seen progress on, thanks in part to the work of activist and sexual assault survivor, Chanel Contos. 

Contos founded the TeachUsConsent campaign a year ago. On February 17, just one week before this year’s March4Justice, Contos announced that education ministers from each state had unanimously agreed to implement a mandatory holistic and age-appropriate consent curriculum across the country. 

Contos’ campaign was not tied to the March4Justice rally. But the 23-year-old activist tells Refinery29 Australia that, in the twelve months since the march, we have seen a “real cultural shift in Australia” around how we understand and talk about sexual assault and gendered violence. 

“Silence is the most powerful thing that perpetrators have against us, and not just perpetrators of explicit sexual assault and rape, but harassment, degrading behaviour, misogynistic attitudes,” Contos says. “From holding friends accountable, to believing stories of sexual assault, to calling out rape jokes — that’s the biggest shift that has happened from this mass reaction from women across Australia in all these different spaces.”

Jaime Evans, the lead organiser of last year’s Sydney March4Justice, agrees that since last year’s protests, “there’s a lot more sort of public acknowledgement that these stories are real and that they deserve to be told”.

“I think that’s a big plus on our society, that’s something we should be very proud of; the way that we are talking about these stories,” Evans says. 

But this experience has been far from universal. 

For Dhanya Mani, the first March4Justice was a painful reminder of the different ways that society and the media treat women of colour survivors and their advocacy work. 

In 2019, Mani, a former staffer in the NSW Liberal Party, publicly alleged that she was indecently assaulted by a colleague. Mani founded a movement called ‘Changing our Headline’ (since renamed to Kate’s List, in honour of the woman who alleged that Christian Porter raped her) to support other survivors of sexual misconduct and abuse. 

But when Mani came forward, her story wasn’t met with the same national outcry; women didn’t come together in anger over the government’s perceived lack of response to her sexual assault. 

“Obviously racism occurs in my life. I'm aware of it, it's often our reality," Mani tells Refinery29 Australia. "But I've just never felt so completely conscious of why my race means that the most traumatic things in my life just matter less, to the point that it’s okay for my work to be erased, for my existence to be erased.”

“There was just a lot of trauma and grief that came with that and seeing how easy it was for people to completely forget that I had ever done anything.”

For Mani, the last year has shown little progress in the way that survivor-advocates of colour are treated. For example, she was not invited to attend the Prime Minister’s speech this month acknowledging the culture of “abuse, bullying, and harassment” that has been perpetuated in parliament. 

The progress on the four key demands protestors made at last year’s March4Justice rally has also been varied. 

The demands were: 

- Full independent investigations of gendered violence and timely referrals to authorities; 
- The implementation of the 55 recommendations from the Australian Human Rights Commission's Respect@Work report; 
- To lift public funding for gendered violence prevention to world’s best practice; and 
- To enact a federal Gender Equality Act.

The internal investigation into how much the Prime Minister’s Office knew about Higgins’ alleged rape was suspended in August last year, until the criminal trial against the accused rapist concludes. 

The Prime Minister also rejected calls for an independent investigation into the rape allegation against former Attorney-General Christian Porter (an allegation he has repeatedly denied), with Morrison declaring Porter an “innocent man under our law”. Not only was there no inquiry, but in August 2021, Porter was temporarily promoted to the role of acting leader of the House of Representatives. 

Better progress has been made around the Respect@Work Report: the government accepted 46 of the 55 recommendations in full, part, or principle; and has simply ‘noted’ the remaining nine recommendations. 

As part of this, the government also passed amendments to its Sex Discrimination Act in September, enacting six of the 12 legislative reforms recommended in the report. On the one hand, the government did pass changes to make sexual harassment a sackable offence. But on the other, it didn’t adopt Jenkins' recommendation to impose a “positive duty” on companies and organisations to prevent sexual harassment and discrimination.  

Meanwhile, although the government committed $1.1 billion for women’s safety in the May 2021 federal budget, frontline domestic violence services were still waiting months later to hear when the extra funds would be released. 

As Janine Hendry — whose tweet sparked the original march in 2021 — said in an official statement shared on February 21 this year, “last year’s march was a catalyst for women and their allies to pull together and get organised”. 

"This year, on the anniversary of that historic march, women are asking what’s improved? What’s changed for the better? They will be taking these questions with them to the ballot box."

Plan International Australia’s Youth Activist Series launched a campaign on Sunday, focused on making parliament, and political parties, safer, more diverse spaces to ensure that our parliament is as diverse as our country. It also renewed calls for the government to adopt all the recommendations in the Respect@Work Report, a demand also echoed at this year’s official march.

Contos would also like to see Jenkins' review implemented in full. She says she would like Australia to critically examine its criminal justice system and explore “alternative options for victims to be able to hold perpetrators accountable, and restorative justice options”. 

“But we also need to elevate the voices of people who have experienced violence intersectionally,” Contos tells Refinery29. “We need to talk about the intersection and impact of colonialism, and what white privilege means for women of colour.”

The last twelve months has seen a huge shift in the way we discuss gendered violence, and frustrating federal inaction. We have, in many ways, seen justice hard-fought and won for some victim-survivors. But the last twelve months have also served as a reminder of the ways in which justice can be experienced unevenly.