Queensland Women’s Week will be celebrated this year from 2 to 9 March with International Women’s Day bring held on Saturday 8 March.
The theme this year is March Forward.
One dictionary definition of a march is ‘a steady advance’ and that’s a fair way to describe it.
It’s a time to reflect on what has been achieved and ensure that the momentum to equality and mutual respect is maintained.
Regardless of our own gender, women are an essential and important part of our lives, future and well-being across many dimensions.
They take on roles as life partners, mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, great grandmothers, aunts and cousins.
As work colleagues, friends and associates, your doctor, dentist, lawyer or veterinary surgeon.
Those occupations are completely normal now but would have once been out of reach when the most a woman could aspire to, albeit important, was to be a nurse, school teacher, typist or librarian.
We have nothing to fear from women continuing to make ‘steady advances’ and there is still much to be achieved in that regard.
There is no better or worse example of that than in the area of domestic and family violence.
It’s rightly been described by the Prime Minister and others as a national crisis. In Queensland it’s the greatest call for service area for the Police Department and is increasing every year.
What is particularly concerning in that space is that the research reliably shows that the majority of domestic violence is not actually reported to police.
Whilst anyone can be either a victim of or a perpetrator of domestic violence, it’s an unavoidable reality that by far most victims are women and most perpetrators are men.
So for similar reasons related to fairness and equality that enabled women to become surgeons and judges, we need to advance to a world where we prevent domestic violence to the greatest extent possible and are confident that when it does occur we will put into place the best and most effective responses.
We will achieve that by continuing to change the attitudes, values and beliefs that underpin the behaviours that relate to domestic violence as we have done in the past when women were told what occupations they were limited to because of their gender.
So because of those linkages can we ask that in this year’s Queensland Women’s Week and on International Women’s Day you support an event or at the very least support the women in your world in their journey to equality, safety, fairness and respect.
