According to the ABS, 2.2 million women aged 18 and over have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. 718,000 men in the same age group have also experienced sexual violence.
— Content Warning: This article contains references of sexual assault —
The stats are alarming, for sure, but sadly reflect a reality likely unsurprising to many of us. In too many daily interactions, consent isn’t asked for, given or sometimes even considered at all.
SBS’ latest series, Asking For It, explores this complex topic at length. Created partly in response to the 2021 allegations of sexual violence occurring in Parliament House and the consent laws that followed, the series is a loud and forthright exploration of the sexual violence occurring in our country, and the failures of the institutions we rely on to protect victim-survivors. Asking For It offers a pertinent reminder that sexual violence thrives in silence, and that talking and listening is essential in creating change.
Junkee’s Editor-in-Chief Alice Griffin and Senior Producer Claire Keenan sat down with Asking For It director Tosca Looby and investigative journalist and host Jess Hill — who both previously paired up for SBS’ See What You Made Me Do — to discuss their new landmark series, and what they hope audiences will take from it.
Jess Hill in Asking For It. Supplied by SBS
Alice Griffin: What drew you towards the topic of consent?
Tosca Looby: It did really feel like a natural bedfellow, I guess after doing domestic abuse. And in some ways, I think we thought, well I thought naively that it was going to be an easier topic for us to do, but that wasn’’t the case. It was definitely hard to get people to talk about [consent]. But I think the word ‘consent’ kind of sanitises what you’re really talking about. And in some ways that was a good in for us. Not the least because it was at a time when consent was such a big conversation in Australia and obviously still is… [These conversations are] now going through the Senate. So, the timing has felt right the whole way through.
Jess Hill: It’s hard to imagine pinpointing another year in recent memory that was so explosive, you know? And it felt like every day there were events unfolding that usually you’d get in maybe one every five years, but it was like one every week. And I think it was really overwhelming for a lot of people. It was strangely exhilarating and started this mass disclosure of trauma and sexual violence — often publicly — like, during the Women’s March on the streets where people were disclosing, often for the first time, to complete strangers in the street.
We really felt like we needed to nail what that year was about and what it did to Australia and what it is continuing to do and what this conversation about consent is offering us as a society. Because it really is revolutionary to go from a position of just sexual liberation where everyone should be up for everything to mutuality and consent. Where it’s like, do you want to be up for this? And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. But we have real trouble expressing that. So, I think this is why we talk about the next sexual revolution being about consent, but consent as more than just asking for permission as like a true kind of mutuality between people engaging in sexual acts.
Claire Keenan: Something you handled beautifully in this series was covering consent in so many different spaces, from schools and universities through to aged care, institutions, universities and then online spaces. Of all the areas you explored, which surprised you the most?
Tosca: That’s a good question. I guess what’s happening online [around consent] is what surprises people. And it certainly was a lot that I didn’t know. The deeper we went into it, the more you realise it’s a cesspit that is going to get increasingly complicated. So yeah, for me it was understanding that the eSafety Commission is there to start really addressing issues online, but there’s so much that they can’t do and that we are really chasing our tail on in terms of legislation and protecting people online. Kids are so exposed, and parents are so unaware of what’s going on.
Jess: When people ask me ‘Are you surprised by things?’, it’s hard to feel surprised by things after working in this area for so long. But I can still feel really confounded and appalled [about what happens online]. I think when we were doing the experiment on TikTok, doing the manosphere stuff [for the series] — obviously everyone’s heard ad nauseam about Andrew Tate and for good reason because he has such a huge following, he’s so atrocious and so effective — but seeing just the breadth of content that was so misogynistic, including content created by women that was just incredible internalised misogyny. And just playing into that whole discussion [was eye-opening].
I remember we were filming and I’m sort of flicking through and Tosca was like, ‘Okay, so tell us about what you’re seeing’. And honestly, I just felt totally speechless. I felt the blood just dropping out of my body and I felt anxious, and I couldn’t analyse anything. It’s like my brain just got flooded. And all I could say was ‘If I had to watch this all the time, I’d feel so stressed out’, because that’s what I was feeling, you know?
Alice: I want to ask about ‘lying woman’ consent myth. Your documentary outlines that one in five people in Australia think that people coming forward about sexual assault could be making it up. And that this rate is the highest of any Western country. That’s scary. Did that shock you?
Jess: Not really to be honest. I’ve really thought a lot about this because we’ve had the attitude survey come out recently on what are Australia’s attitudes towards sexual violence and intimate partner violence. In some areas we’ve gone forward a bit. In some areas we seem to have gone backwards. I wonder whether there’s some part of society that is just never going to change.
And we’ve talked about this ad nauseam. How do people still believe this? For all different reasons: for personal fear that they may be falsely accused and have their reputation ruined. Which is, of course, the whole basis of common law: it’s better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be jailed. So, I mean, that’s the whole basis of our common law system. That mindset is so deeply embedded in our culture that to change that is incredibly difficult.
I don’t want to be defeatist about it. But also, it’s really important that we get real about what we can achieve, [and] where we can achieve it. Where do we achieve behaviour change, attitude change? Do we focus it more particularly on the areas and sectors where victim- survivors actually need those attitudes to be right — with teachers, hospitals, police courts, and community leaders.
There are different ways that we can go about this where maybe trying to get all of society to come along with us is an impossible task. I don’t know. But I think it’s a really important question for us to be asking: What does success look like in terms of attitude change in Australia?
Saxon Mullins appears in Asking For It. Supplied by SBS
Alice: Let’s talk about those harrowing excerpts from convicted rapists talking about committing their crimes, which we heard in Episode 1…
Tosca: So that was archive that the ABC had of men who had been imprisoned for rape, and had been convicted. It’s pretty unusual to find a group of men to speak like that obviously…
What we had hoped in the beginning is you would get people just from the community who would talk as they did privately off camera to say, ‘Yeah, look, I probably definitely have had sex in my life that I shouldn’t have had and that I was coercing someone to do it who was obviously just agreeing because she was trying to get me off her back’.
The frustration of making something like this is you have all those conversations off camera, but no one wants to say it on camera, especially on a subject like this.
So that was our one avenue to actually hear the voices of those perpetrators … it was quite revealing in a pretty devastating way. I don’t think it’s revealing of everyone who could say that they’ve arguably raped someone else [though] — I think that is its own cohort of people. I think that there is a much wider diversity of people who would say they’ve had sex they shouldn’t have had. And it would be great to be able to reflect that.
Claire: I did want to touch on intersectionality. What’s the biggest thing that you learned about it in the making of this project. How important is it in this space?
Jess: One of the best decisions we made was to have First Nations educator, Lauren French, right up front [in the series]. She’s a consent educator who is leading the way in so many different schools. But also, [scenes show her teaching] in a migrant and refugee school talking about power, bringing not only her knowledge of consent and sex, but her cultural knowledge to that work; to show all the ways in which various people from various backgrounds experience this.
I think intersectionality, especially when you’re talking about consent and power, it’s so important for people to understand when they’re learning about consent, how different types of identities, how different types of experiences, everything from age to cultural background to ability, is going to influence the ways in which you are able to participate in sex and what you are able to consent to and not consent to.
Claire: The big question of this series was how we can end rape culture. Going into this project and now that it’s finished, do you feel like you got closer to the answer?
Tosca: I think with our work, we’re always trying to not just present problems. We’re trying to present solutions. And so, I think that that’s where this series definitely went: here are a whole lot of suggestions — where do we take these now?
You never feel like you’ve come to some kind of conclusion. It’s always too big and you are opening up a question rather than ever fully answering it. But we put that question out there now and the whole intention of the series is to make this part of a national conversation. This now needs to be looked at in terms of legislation, in terms of services [and] in terms of intersectionality.
Jess: I think that part of ending rape culture is modelling how to talk about it and how to talk about it so that it’s not just [how it’s been] since #MeToo — it’s felt a bit like girls and women talking at boys and men. But how do we talk to and talk with boys and men?
And if you want to end rape culture, it’s not going to end just by us being angry and telling boys to sit down and shut up. We need to figure out ways to bring boys along where they don’t just feel like they’re being talked to as potential predators.
Because what we’re trying to model is love, not monogamous love, but love and compassion and empathy and understanding. I think we’ve come out of a very angry time, and you can’t stop people being angry. And it’s been effective in a lot of ways, but I think the next iteration of this must be like, okay, now we’ve said a lot about this. We need to come together and talk with each other and find ways to do that.
Asking For It premieres 8:30pm Thursday 20 April on SBS and SBS On Demand. The three-part series continues weekly.
Introduction written by Claire Keenan.
Editor’s note: This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Junkee Media and Northern Pictures are both subsidiaries of RACAT Group.
If this article has brought something up for you, or a loved one, please call:
1800 FULL STOP (1800 385 578)
1800 Respect National Helpline: 1800 737 732
Sexual Assault Helpline: 1800 010 120
Women’s Crisis Line: 1800 811 811
Lifeline (24-hour Crisis line): 131 114
Mensline: 1300 789 978
13YARN: 13 92 76, to speak with an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Crisis Supporter