Domestic Violence and crimes against women are often issues of great sadness and media attention within Australia. However, one young woman is looking beyond her own backyard and connecting with women overseas who not only fight for their physical safety, but have the added binds of traditional culture restricting their voices. We sat down with Zoe Brereton to discuss her recent placement as a New Colombo Plan Fellow in India, and her paper on Indian culture verses Indian law in rape cases.
Q: In December 2014 you were selected as Australia’s New Colombo Plan Fellow to India, what did this entail?
A: As a New Colombo Plan Fellow or scholar, the government asks you to act as an “unofficial ambassador” for Australia. In our pre-departure preparation sessions, DFAT lets us know that New Colombo Plan scholars represent the Australian government’s commitment to sending bright students and potential future leaders in all areas of industry to our neighbours in the Indo-Pacific region. In part, we are there to show the value that Australia places in furthering regional cooperation. The hope is that our experiences overseas, the industry contacts and friends that we make, and the lessons we learn, will help mold our future ambitions and careers, so that our generation not only better understands the value of the Indo-Pacific region to Australia’s economy and foreign relations, but is also better able to understand our cultural differences.
While I was in India I didn’t have any official responsibilities, really. I was required to study at the University I had selected (the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and undertake my internships, all the while pursuing the goals that I had set for myself in my application. For me, this meant learning Hindi in order to better understand, as well as demonstrate my interest in, the Indian culture and people. It also meant actively engaging in the discourse surrounding gender justice in India, which I tried to do through undertaking several in-depth research projects into the rape trial and violence against women, as well as completing an internship under a Judge of the Delhi High Court.
Q: What has been your academic journey up until this point?
A: I have had a really interesting “academic journey” so far. I attended 7 different schools from primary through to high school having moved from England, to New South Wales and then to Queensland. I think that the most important school experience for me was being enrolled in the French Immersion Program at Benowa State High School. I absolutely believe in the incredible value of learning a second language from a young age – Not only has the ability to speak French helped me to learn other languages, but it has also meant that from a young age I have been empowered to live, work and study overseas.
After High School, I was awarded an Academic Merit Scholarship which contributed towards studying a dual Bachelor of Arts/Law at the University of Queensland. I deferred the scholarship and my enrolment at Uni for one year so that I could travel and work in France and then Uganda.
In terms of academic achievement, University was honestly quite uneventful for me up until the end of my second year. After receiving the scholarship, everything snowballed. I began working as a research assistant for one of my Professors (who was writing on India and sexual offences), and this work actually inspired my own research project in India, on police investigations into complaints of violence against women. I was then fortunate enough to be invited to speak at my first international conference on women in law enforcement which was a scary, but absolutely incredible opportunity.
Q. In January the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice published your paper on rape cases in India, titled: Perpetuating myths of women as false complaints in rape cases in India: Culture V. The Law. Could you elaborate on what this paper was about, and how you came to write it?
A: The paper runs through India’s history of sexual offences law reform, and looks at the reasons for reform as well as the effectiveness of the measures implemented by the legislature. Having analysed the social and cultural attitude towards violence against women, I analysed over 100 cases from the Delhi District Court to look at how these cultural attitudes are exposed in the rape trial. Ultimately, I focused my paper on the myth, prevalent in India, that characterises women who complain of rape as “false complainants”.
Having conducted some basic research into India’s rape law framework while in Australia, I knew that I wanted to focus on the role of discriminatory rape myths on police investigations into violence against women. It wasn’t until I was actually in India, and listening to feminists, academics and members of the police force using the narrative of women as false complainants to justify India’s high rape statistics that I decided to look into the empirical basis for this claim (and found it to be entirely lacking!).
Q. Within this paper you argue that legislature in India has failed to address the injustices experienced by women alleging rape in India, through your work how did you find this to be the case?
A: My experiences from sitting in on complaints at an All Women’s Police Station made it clear to me that the veracity of a woman’s complaint of gender violence continues to be decided against the background of discriminatory rape narratives: i.e. is she physically injured? How recent was her complaint? Did she know the perpetrator? Is she “accustomed to sexual intercourse”? Talking to women who had been sexually abused revealed that they often hid it from others, often at the insistence of their family, for fear of social stigma, and then reading hundreds of court transcripts exposed to me that judges too are often biased against women who don’t behave as the virtuous woman should. While the legislature works to increase penalties instead of tackling entrenched discriminatory beliefs about women, held in society, and then perpetuated by rules of evidence and the legal process, the injustices faced by women will continue to be unaddressed.
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