But what if he became the perpetrator?
 
My son is very much a stereotypical 15-year-old boy.
He loves sports, hanging out with a big group of his friends, and playing Xbox.
When I was his age, I spent a lot of time with ‘the footy boys.’ I saw how they behaved, how they talked about girls, and how they treated girls. It was just accepted and normal. ‘Boys will be boys’ was still very much alive and thriving.
So I was justifiably concerned when my son joined the local footy club. I was worried that he would fall into the pack and adopt their mentality. It wasn’t so long ago that I had been a part of that world, so I couldn’t imagine that it had changed much at all.
As his mother, I needed to assess the situation and do what I could to support those important peer relationships, but still make sure he remained respectful and kind. It was a hard thing for me to comprehend, because in my experience the two ideals were mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, I still don’t have a simple solution, but remaining educated on gendered issues and always including him in those conversations is what’s working for us for now.
We have talks about girls at school, the way other boys treat girls, and how important it is to be respectful. Sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes it’s embarrassing. Sometimes we even get it wrong. But we never stop communicating. The line is always open.
He has proudly told me stories about how he has defended girls at school, and once he even risked getting himself in trouble by sneaking* a girl into our house at 5am because she needed a safe place to stay. (*I use the word sneaking but he told me about it as soon as I woke up in the morning.)
When things like that happen, I am proud to know that my son might be different than the other boys, and that he is brave enough to know and do what is right. To be an effective bystander and ally.
I am still learning to be a mother, and am not even close to perfect, but by continuing to communicate with my son, intuitively dealing with issues as they arise, and making sure we have an open space for respect and understanding on both sides, I truly and deeply hope that my son will never play the starring role in a fellow woman’s story.

The guilt of relying on your partner, or ‘co-dependency’, is something that plays on the minds of many budding feminists like myself when trying to navigate healthy relationships. We want to want our partners, but we need to not need them. Dependency in relationships is a contentious topic, it bears many questions and rules. How far into a relationship is it okay to ‘depend’ on your partner? Is it ever okay?  What level of dependency is considered normal? Pandemic aside, these are complex questions. Now, factor in a declared State of Disaster which restricts us from seeing our friends and family, and our work -presuming we are lucky enough to still have it-  has most likely undergone a serious remodel. 
So many factors that inform our sense of ‘self’ have been compromised by this pandemic. It must be acknowledged that Covid has had a profound influence on our independence. It has denied our ability to self-explore through travel, our ability to choose the space and people we surround ourselves with, our ability to practice celebration or routine. When I consider these factors individually they are somewhat forgivable and I can combat them with my signature ‘sucks, but she’ll be right’ mentality. However, when I consider these factors cumulatively I’m forced to acknowledge that the loss I am grappling with extends far beyond my cancelled holiday or the beloved job I had at the local pub with my best mates.
Covid has affected every area of my life that collectively established my sense of self, the self that took years of work and introspection to build and have a healthy relationship with. Feeling forced to relinquish my control of self over to Covid is something I struggle to forgive. So surely in a situation as ‘unprecedented’ as this one, can we at least partly exempt ourselves from that feminist guilt? The voice that says, ‘the only person I need is me’ and ‘you need to love yourself first’. I think a lot of people are struggling to love themselves in an environment that impedes them from actively being their best versions of themselves. That does not mean that they are less deserving of love and affection, it means that they need it more, or at least I know I do. 
My own past relationships, both romantic and otherwise, have rendered me fiercely protective of my sense of self, especially as a woman and as one who bruises easily. I am very familiar with what it is like to feel small, to have my emotions minimized, to be made to feel problematic or apologize for taking up space. Therefore, I feel it is crucial to be selective about who we allow ourselves to have intimate relationships with, close enough to touch our ‘self’, because often we worked harder for it than we should have had to.
Bearing this in mind, getting into a new relationship this year scared the absolute hell out of me. The prospect of investing so much of myself into somebody with the capacity to bruise me is terrifying at the best of times, let alone when I already felt like I could not control anything in the world around me. The usual remedy for this is to take it slow and self-preserve to ensure that if things didn't work out, I was okay and could still be content independently. Of course, this did not happen. My partner and I met two weeks before the beginning of Covid, meaning that the majority of our relationship has occurred in lockdown, which really throws normal relationship dynamics and timelines out the window. The excitement of meeting someone new, combined with the fact that seeing each other was the only fun thing we could legally do, meant that we were basically joined at the hip. Within weeks we had met each other’s families and fallen into a comfortable routine, quickly realising that dating in covid was dating in dog years. 
It sort of felt like yet another whirlwind I couldn’t control, our emotions progressed so quickly and effortlessly that we couldn’t slow down, even if we wanted to. Despite how little time had elapsed, we both felt immediately comfortable being 100% transparent with one another about everything from our innermost mental struggles to passing bodily gasses. By virtue of just being there and being ourselves, we created a supportive, hilarious, open, affectionate little bubble, one that made everything else going on outside of it that much more bearable. 
Now this should be a good thing, right? This rare immediate compatibility should yield nothing but happiness? 
In reality, four years of developing critical thinking skills in a social science degree, mixed with my strong feminist values created quite the potent cocktail of guilt and fear. I was and still am, so self-critical of how much of my happiness is currently reliant on my partner, as well as being fearful of co-dependency and how I would feel if suddenly he was not there. A good feminist does not allow herself, or her life to be consumed by a man, she remains independent above all else because her life does not revolve around her partner. 
But what about when every part of your life, besides your partner has been restricted, your work, your ability to see friends, your study environment, even the amount of time you are allowed to spend outside, all the things that make up the ‘self’.  At that point, all I wanted to do was guiltlessly open my entire lifestyle and space up to my partner, as he brought so much positivity in an otherwise negative circumstance, and I so craved that positivity. But instead I constantly try to justify to myself a healthy balance between how little time we have been together and the amount I allow myself to indulge in the relationship in its entirety. 
For the first few months I would not allow my partner to stay the night with me, instead I would make him drive home at ungodly hours. Whilst I wanted to spend that time with him, I had convinced myself that by preserving a space that was mine,  I was not allowing my lifestyle to be consumed by a relationship, thus protecting my ‘self’ and preventing codependency. Some might consider this strange behaviour, but to me it made perfect sense to deny myself of intimacy for the sake of proving that I could; because even in a relationship, I still wanted to be an independent and completely autonomous woman. 
Over time I got over it and lifted the sleepover ban, but this concept is still something I still struggle with now, six months down the track. I continue to question if the amount of physical and mental space I give to my relationship is healthy. It continues to sit uncomfortably with me that the thing getting me through lockdown, one of the most challenging times of my life, is my relationship, not myself. It leaves me judging myself for fearing the prospect of withstanding this pandemic without him which to me - is the definition of dependency. 
I am aware that like so many others, I am my own worst critic, and as such I ponder what I would say to a friend experiencing the same mental conflict. And that would be to just chill out!
It would be so frustrating to watch a friend completely over analyse and compartmentalise themselves out of enjoying the happiness that they deserve and creating red flags where there is no need to. I need to remind myself that being a feminist does not mean never being vulnerable or needing support. Especially at a time where nothing else feels constant, it seems reasonable to give myself grace if someone makes me feel secure, and most importantly not feel guilty for that. Acknowledging that at present, a very large part of my happiness is sourced from someone outside of myself does not make me half a person or a lesser version of my former self. It makes me receptive, sensitive and emotionally open to others, traits typically associated with femininity that I should not be compelled to suppress or minimise. There is no one right way to have a relationship or date in a pandemic. As women, if we chose to largely focus on the happiness that our partners bring us over the uncertainty and stress of everything else happening around us, we needn’t apologise for it. ​

Assistant Police Commissioner Luke Cornelius said 'The key point is this is about men’s behaviour, not about women’s behaviour. Every time I hear about a woman being attacked - for me as a man - it gives me some pause for reflection about what it is in our community that makes men think it’s OK to attack women, or to take what they want from women.’ A vast improvement from the words of the former Police Commissioner, who after the 2015 murder of teenager Masa Vukotic said ‘I suggest to people, particularly females, [that] they shouldn’t be alone in parks. We encourage females to walk together [and take] reasonable precautions.'
A quick scroll through the comments section of any article on the murder sees an endless repetition of 'NOT ALL MEN!! MEN ARE MURDERED TOO!!'. I'm not saying these people are wrong. It definitely is not all men, and men are murdered too. In fact, these people are absolutely spot on in trying to draw a comparison between the outrage over Courtney's death and the violent deaths faced by men. Men's bodies are more likely than women's to turn up on the streets as the casualties of violent crime.
 
However, although these comments are designed to criticise and discredit the women's rights movement, the facts that inspire them only prove its validity. Disturbingly, women's bodies are rarely found on the streets because they are more likely to die in a supposedly safe space many men take for granted - the home.
While Courtney's was the third body to be found in Melbourne's public this year, she was the 20th woman to be killed since January. 
These women are not some faraway figure you are not connected to. 1 in3 women have experienced family violence. It is prevalent across our society, in every economic and social class. These women  are your friends, your cousins and the people you went to highschool with. They're people that have a favourite restaurant and songs that remind them of each other. They're your doctor, your accountant, the lady that ran the milk bar next to your old house. You know these women. You are these women.
You also know the men that perpetrate this violence. Most men are decent, morally righteous people that care deeply for the women in their life and respect their communities. However, we cannot ignore the fact that 95% of all violence is perpetrated by men. So yes, it's not all men - but it is a lot of them. There are not many men that would bash a woman they barely know to death in a park, but there are plenty that would do it to their girlfriends. Every three hours a woman is hospitalised by a partner.
 
Men do suffer from family violence. Tragically, it is harder for men to access support to family violence services, as the system is structured to reach out to women. Yet men that experience family violence are far more likely to suffer abuse at the hands of other men. Men experience family violence at lower rates; with women are 8x more likely to experience sexual violence, and 3x more likely to experience other kinds of family violence. Violence against men is an important issue, but if the only time it is discussed is in a bid to move the conversation away from women, it doesn't help anyone.
 
Most women aren't dying in parks at the hands of strangers, they're dying in their homes at the hands of someone they loved and trusted. These attacks rarely make the news - they happen too often and they are too common. But why do we find it so much more horrific when an attack is random? Isn't the fact that some men feel such entitlement over their partners or daughters that they literally end their lives much worse?
 
It's all good and well to cry tragedy and air our disgust on social media, but if every woman is forgotten about until the next, we are hypocrites. We must be constantly examining the societal norms that create these men that think it's okay to kill us. A recent ANROWS survey found that 43% of young men support the statement ‘I think it’s natural for a man to want to appear in control of his partner in front of his male friends’, and one in seven believe a man would be justified to force sex if the woman initiated it, but then changed her mind and pushed him away. This entitlement to women's bodies and lives forms a dangerous societal relationship between men and women. Without a general principle of mutual respect, how can we expect it not to manifest into violence?

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