As International Women’s Day rolls around, there will be morning teas with frilly cupcakes, corporate lunches, and panels where women congratulate themselves for peering through the glass ceiling while their stilettos dig into the fleshy shoulders of other women propping them up.
There will be speeches about empowerment, slogans about breaking barriers, and panels where women who have ‘made it’ will tell other women how they, too, can rise—if only they work hard enough, lean in ‘just so’, and network at all the right functions.
Rightly, there will be discussions about the rising number of women killed every year at the hands of men. There will be calls for urgent action—action that goes beyond empty promises by politicians, because we know that the solutions do not only rest in the ivory halls of legislature. There will be calls for men to step up, for frontline services to be better funded.
Politicians will promise change, committees will be formed, reports will be written, and the cycle of ‘calls for action’ will continue, endlessly feeding upon itself while the bodies keep piling up.
What will be missing—what is always missing—is meaningful, sustained action itself. It’s tiring in its predictability and banality.
And noticeably absent, deafeningly silent—because there will be barely a whisper, let alone a roar—will be the calls to end violence against women in prison.
No one at those corporate lunches will talk meaningfully about the women being raped and assaulted by prison officers every day. No one will stand up and talk about the strip-searching of girls as young as ten in children’s prisons. No one will speak of the state-sanctioned brutality, the sexual violence, the coercive control masquerading as ‘corrections’ and ‘rehabilitation.’
We’re certain no one will talk about the current case before a Coroners Court investigating the killing of Martu woman Dannielle Lowe. Her eight children who are grieving their mother’s death, knowing that the Coroners Court will never bring them justice.
Killings in prison continue, the violence by the State continues, and where are the women in this country demanding that this violence against women ends? Where are all the feminists during any of the inquests into disappeared and murdered Aboriginal women, or any of the deaths in custody inquests? Their silence is deafening.
The reality is that women held in cells, brutalised, degraded, dehumanised and killed, will not be included in the narrative of International Women’s Day, because we are not the women they care about.
Because even within the so-called feminist movement, we are disposable.
While the national conversation on violence against women rightly focuses on violence in the home, violence against women in the cage is invisibilised and silenced by the very women who claim to fight for gender justice.
The hierarchy of violence against women exposes the racial and gendered violence perpetrated by women in the context of racial capitalism. It is easy for white feminists to call for an end to domestic violence while turning their backs on the very systems that uphold and legitimise violence against criminalised women. Prisons are sites of systemic gendered violence, yet the same women who speak of sisterhood refuse to acknowledge that sisterhood should include us, too.
We are not the women they want to stand in solidarity with.
We are the criminalised. The poor. The disabled. The Blak. The unwell. The trans. The gender diverse. We are the ones who make ‘respectable’ feminists uncomfortable.
We are not fighting to smash a glass ceiling—we are fighting to stay alive, while hanging onto the hands of our women so they don’t disappear through the cracks in the floors.
We don’t just experience period poverty, some of us are forced to beg for a single tampon, let alone a week’s worth; and our girls are given paper underpants as blood runs down their little legs.
Don’t talk to us about the gender pay gap when our labour inside prison is worth cents on the dollar—when we are paid crumbs to sew uniforms, to cook meals, to do laundry for the very system that cages us.
Don’t talk to us about homelessness when it is a certainty for so many of us upon release, when women are being sent to prison simply because there is nowhere else for them to go.
We are the poster girls for every kind of oppression that International Women’s Day claims to stand against, yet we are the ones most excluded from its glossy, palatable version of feminism.
So, as they gather in hotel ballrooms with pastel-coloured banners and carefully curated hashtags, we will not be at the breakfast tables, the luncheons, the networking events, because in their feminism, there is no room for us (beside we can’t afford the tickets to these events).
But, we will still be here—pushed to the margins, forgotten, erased.
We don’t need their cupcakes, their corporate sponsors, their empty slogans. What we need—what we demand—is abolition. The tearing down of the entire rotten system that criminalises, brutalises, and disposes of us.
Because we are not disposable. And whether they acknowledge us or not, we are still here, still fighting. And we will not be silent. We will continue to fight, even when they refuse to see us. Because real feminism does not abandon the most criminalised, the most oppressed, the most invisible. And until all women are free, none of us are.
Feature image: Debbie Kilroy and Tabitha Lean.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/the-deafening-iwd-silence-on-ending-violence-against-women-in-prison/
