I don’t usually start my columns with a warning, but in this case I will. Not just a trigger caution for those, like me, who are traumatised by descriptions of sexual assault, but also a ‘how long do I have to keep protesting this shit?’ anger, frustration, disgust, and alarm as well.

It is one thing not to be believed. It is quite another to be believed but not get justice. That is another form of abuse. A brutal public shaming, where your pain is used as clickbait for media platforms. Headlines about torture. About trafficking. About stolen girlhood. About women who were treated as sexual commodities, and traded like cattle for the slaughter.

The Bruce Lehrmann and Brittany Higgins case was never about establishing whether or not Lehrmann raped Higgins. It was about Brittany. She was established as not ‘the perfect victim’ so we overlooked the blazingly obvious fact that Bruce Lehrmann was ‘the perfect perpetrator’. An entitled, compulsive wrecking ball of cocaine, $400 steaks, free rent and very very expensive massages.

Detectives from the Gold Coast have charged two men with sexual offences that were arranged through an online classified advertisement.

Around 30 women identifying as Israeli marched in Byron’s CBD and Main Beach on Sunday to highlight what they say is a ‘disturbing and harmful silence’ by the United Nations and others after the October 7 attacks on Israel.

In 2003, when I introduced myself as an MP with my maiden speech in parliament, I articulated my centralist, small ‘l’ liberal principles. I argued that values are not something to be on display in the morning and forgotten in the afternoon. 

We should all be concerned about an underreported development in the Bruce Lehrmann rape trial fallout. 

NSW police say a man will appear in court today charged over the alleged sexual assault of a young girl at Goonellabah earlier this week.

How can it be that the response of the Prime Minister’s office to an allegation of rape in parliament house was to background journalists negatively about her partner? And that this bullying and re-victimising of the victim did not excite, at the very least, a police or judicial inquiry?

Tweed Byron police have arrested a 35-year-old Kingscliff man over rape allegations.