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Book review: Girls Like You Rayann Bekdache reviews Paul Sheehan’s analysis of the notorious Sydney gang rapes and finds that the important message about sexual violence against women loses its traction when cloaked in ethnic and religious stereotypes.
Girls Like You is the story of the victims and court trials of the spate of gang rapes that made headlines in 2003. These cases caught Australia’s attention due to the apparent racially or culturally motivated character of the crimes. An elderly, Anglo woman once approached me so, the debate began: who is to blame? Our only conclusion was that males who usurped religion and culture to justify their mistreatment of women were at the crux of this increasingly complex discourse which Sheehan tries to address but falls dismally short. Stylistically Sheehan has most readers paying attention from part one to six of his extensive account following the two separate trials of Mustapha and Rashid K and Sami and Amir K and we are further hooked in by jarring quotes like: “‘Shut up, you bitch, you slut. Girls like you, I know how to fix them up.’-one of the K brothers, prior to an assault on his sister, 3 January 2004, after she had failed to make him dinner.” With horrifying detail, we see the events unfold in the numerous obstructions, often perpetuated by the K brothers, in their trials and the trauma faced by the victims and their families. Even at the conclusion of his book, Sheehan leaves us in dire straits. According to him, our legal system exploits vulnerable rape victims: yet another K brother has been granted citizenship in Australia from Pakistan and the crimes committed have a deeply cultural subtext where women are still treated as second-class citizens and deprived of basic rights. Yet, are all of Sheehan’s conclusions grounded in unbiased facts? This is not to suggest the cases of Tegan Wagner, Cassandra, Roxanne S, Kelly G have been manipulated in any way but rather, that Sheehan polarises the issues of the gang rapes as a culturally specific crime that links in with the position of women in Islam. In a letter to the Herald, Eva Cox, feminist and academic captures the essence of Sheehan’s fascination with ‘oppressed’ Muslim women and the apparent lack of support from Western feminists: “Sheehan's interest in feminism seems connected to his desire to fan anti-Muslim prejudices…No one approves of violence towards, control or rape of women, but publicly connecting these constantly with one religion makes it harder for moderates to be heard.” Although he makes an attempt to clarify that the K brothers and their family do not adhere to the principles of Islam. Sheehan obliterates this attempt at conveying the issue in a more balanced manner when he refers to a particularly volatile speech given in 2005 by Sheikh Mohammed Faiz at Bankstown Town Hall as “near the sites where…hundreds of young Muslim men gather to form violent attacking raids on eastern beach suburb…” In reference to the Cronulla “riots” of December 2005. Yes, this particular Sheikh was misogynistic in his claims that women who chose to wear ‘revealing clothing’ are subjecting themselves to harassment, however what Sheehan fails to reveal is that Sheikh Feiz is dismissed as radical and narrow-minded by the majority of the Australian Muslim community. In this one line, Sheehan de-constructs the events at Cronulla and we see his agenda emerge. Although he has written numerous articles that claim to speak for women (particularly Muslim women) who are silenced by oppression, the binaries of US vs. THEM in relation to “Men of Middle Eastern Appearance” and Anglo girls dismisses the complexities at hand in contemporary Australian society. Sheehan implies that the men involved in the retaliation attacks after Cronulla with their “self-styled intifadha” reveal not only their violent nature but through their abhorrence of “Western” women’s freedom, they lay stake to these women as objects of harassment and sexual assault. Nonetheless, Sheehan’s Girls Like You should be read for what it overtly reveals about the failure in our legal system for victims of rape: “Only about one per cent of those who have been sexually assaulted ever see their assailants sent to prison.” Rape and Sexual Assault is a fundamental issue in our society and yet, it seems that the stigma attached to victims of this crime has not changed. Many women, including some of the girls mentioned in Sheehan’s book, choose not to proceed with laying charges against their offenders as it is often a lengthy, costly and draining process for the victims. Sheehan’s account of the questions posed by defence lawyers in the K trials highlights the intimidating and confusing tactics employed in order to misrepresent the girls involved as being promiscuous. As if by accepting a drive and entering a friend’s home these girls were somehow encouraging this kind of cruel and vicious behaviour. Earlier last month it was revealed that the NSW Rape Crisis Centre received one to two calls every week from women who had been gang raped. From 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2005, the Crisis Centre received 2927 calls, 59 of these were related to gang rape cases. It seems that sexual assault particularly against women in the 16-25 age groups is increasing and yet, the legal system makes it more difficult for victims of rape to see their attackers brought to justice- and it’s obviously not only “Men of Middle Eastern Appearance” committing these crimes. Girls Like You is fundamentally significant as it reveals the flaws in the Australian legal system in prosecuting and sentencing those guilty of sexual violence towards women. However, what Sheehan chooses to convey and conceal about crime and young men of “Middle Eastern Appearance” indelibly contributes to the current anti-Arab and Islamic zeitgeist of our context. |
Intrigued and anxious as to what Paul Sheehan was spouting after reading so many of his articles, I started reading Girls Like You at the heartland of Sheehan’s ‘cultural time bomb’: Bankstown, an area infamous for gang-crime, gang-rapes and home to “the most lawless tribal sub-culture in Sydney’s ethnic mosaic, the Lebanese gangs.” Or so we are told.