At sentencing hearings of sexual assault offenders, as well as the accused and the victim, prosecutor Katrina Marson often senses “a third, unnamed presence”.
“When someone is about to be sentenced for a sexual offence, it feels like apart from the players in the courtroom … there’s this other thing happening in the room,” says Marson, who is second in charge in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions sexual offences unit in the ACT, and a long-term researcher in the power of consent education.
Katrina Marson, consent author and sexual assault public prosecutor.Credit:Martin Ollman
The invisible power that “wraps itself around [some young men] and drives them, though they may not even know it”, is the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies that they feel.
“It’s all the expectations that person [the perpetrator] had; their beliefs, what they were taught and understood about what they were entitled to in that moment when they ended up visiting sexual violence upon someone else.”
This sense of sexual entitlement is still visible in regular national surveys and even international data on Australian attitudes towards women, says Marson.
This is despite decades of sex education in schools, awareness programs, law reform and inquiries into sexual harms – and, according to what she hears from teachers, it even lingers after the massive impact of Chanel Contos’ student-driven consent education campaign.
The size of the task of changing attitudes was seen in the most recent findings of the National Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey by government-funded women’s safety research agency, ANROWS, that found nearly one-third of young men (32 per cent) believed “a lot of times women who say they were raped had led the men on and then had regrets”.
Of entitlement, Marson says: “We are failing young people by not providing them with the tools, the skills, the language to articulate that or even understand or identify it in themselves. We are sending them out into the world with next to nothing [by way of understanding entitlement and its consequences] and that it might result in tragedy.”
Marson has been a criminal lawyer since 2013 but did a Churchill Fellowship to research how sexuality and relationships education contributes to sexual wellbeing in Europe and North America.
The resulting book, Legitimate Sexpectations, was released in August, and Marson will appear on the panel “Australia’s Reckoning with Sexism and Misogyny” at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
Though Contos’ campaign, including thousands of testimonies from young women about sexual misconduct or assault committed on them at school or university by peers, resulted in promises of improved consent education in Australian government schools, Marson says the quality of what is being taught is still extremely inconsistent.
In some school communities – especially some outside the state system – though the content may be delivered, it is clear that it is not being absorbed into students’ values.
“It’s not just about learning what consent is, and how to talk about it – although that is really important – it’s also about caring about that as a value,” says Marson, who is also lead researcher at the Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy group.
Though teachers are reporting to her that misogynistic attitudes espoused by the man dubbed “the king of toxic masculinity”, Andrew Tate, are coming through from boys in sex and relationships classes, it is too easy to blame social media and pornography for their attitudes she says.
Tate – who was kicked off Facebook and Instagram on Saturday – has had 12.7 billion hits on his videos suggesting women are men’s property, men should choose women in their late teens as they can leave their “imprint” on them better, and showing how to subdue a woman violently who accuses you of cheating.
“All of us have a role to play in challenging some of those attitudes and drivers of sexual violence,” says Katrina Marson, who appears at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival on September 10. “It’s a value we need to embody across the community.”
If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).
The Age is a partner of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
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