This Black Body Is Not Yours for the Taking

#MeToo in regional, rural and remote Australia: An analysis of regional newspapers reports profiling the movement

“…Although this article has demonstrated that the #MeToo movement has to some degree been able to transcend the urban-regional/rural divide in Australia, the profiling of voices speaking out about GBV continues to be those who are mostly white, heterosexual women. This continual failure to account for and represent diverse experiences in mainstream discussions about sexual violence (and GBV more broadly) perpetuates the neo-colonial erasure of Aboriginal survivors' voices and the tireless efforts of support services run by Aboriginal women (Ryan, 2019). The lack of attention given to LGBTQ+ voices and experiences was also missing from our analysis of RRR newspaper articles.…”

“…The question of which RRR voices were excluded from RRR reporting on the #MeToo is perhaps answered implicitly through some notable silences. Aboriginal voices were not present outside of regions where they are already over-represented, namely the Northern Territory, and sought to challenge the dominance of white women's voices and activism who overlooked, ignored, or appropriated the voices of Aboriginal women in Australia (see Ryan, 2019). These critiques are reminders of the continued failure in mainstream feminism as well as in representations of voices profiled in news media to capture the experiences of and challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivors and advocates.…”

“…As we highlight below in our discussion section, capturing these perspectives are vital for drawing our attention to the work being done in RRR communities led by Aboriginal women. This small sample does demonstrate efforts to push back against the invisibility or problematic representations of Aboriginal women in news media reporting on sexual violence in Australia more broadly (see Ryan, 2019). Yet news media representations of survivors' voices and support services speaking out in RRR in Australia remain predominantly white, perpetuating the erasure of First Nations women's experiences and specific needs in addressing GBV.…”

“…However, there were only two articles that explicitly referenced the voices, experiences of or support services associated with Aboriginal women -and these were both from the Northern Territory where statistically more Aboriginal people reside. The articles representing Aboriginal women and support services drew attention to the lack of recognition of the work carried out by Aboriginal women to prevent violence against women, reflecting the critiques of feminist anti-violence work in Australia raised by Tess Ryan (2019) and sought to bolster their presence. For example, one article profiled the work of the Tangentyere Family Violence Prevention Program located in Alice Springs (a town of approximately 25, 000 people located in central Australia) that began in 2014, highlighting the importance of responding to GBV in more culturally specific ways ("Empowering our women", published in the Centralian Advocate, 3 August, 2018).…”

“…However, #MeToo has also been subject to sustained and extensive critique, the most prominent of which relates to the initial erasure of African American activist Tarana Burke, who had developed the phrase "Me Too" some decade earlier through her work with young African American women and survivors. Critiques have also been levelled at the campaign on account of its perceived failure to include the experiences of marginalised groups, including people of colour, LGBTIQ+ communities, survivors in the Global South, older women, and many more (Ison, 2019;Kagal et al, 2019;Phipps, 2019;Ryan, 2019). Media reporting on #MeToo has also faced significant criticism from feminist scholars for the problematic way perpetrators and alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, as well as survivors, were represented (Hindes & Fileborn, 2019Royal, 2019).…”