The Bigger Picture: The Landscape

It is not uncommon for sexual assault victims and those who survive domestic violence to respond to the violence with feelings of shame/blame, minimisation and denial. it is also normative for some friends, family and others in the community to deny, minimise and blame the victim.^[442] The last is a correlate of cultural beliefs that women who are victims of sexual or domestic violence have precipitated the violence with their behaviour.

Although many women officers experience sexual harassment, they have not united or taken coordinated action to press for change. Instead, women tend to reproach other women, asserting that those who get sexually harassed “ask for it” through their demeanor or behaviour. Such victim blaming makes the woman rather than her harasser the target of criticism.^[445]

Minimising and/or trivialising abuse may be a psychological mechanism triggered by the dynamics of the violence.^[446] Such feelings are also correlates of community attitudes that minimise some violence against women behaviours. For instance, in instances of partner rape, victims who disclose may experience responses that discount their harm such as being told that they are feeling sorry for themselves or that they are overreacting to something that is not really a “big deal” and since they stayed or returned that it couldn’t have “hurt very badly”.^{[447] [448] In the context of sexual harassment, “Abuse, taunts, insults and other everyday micro­inequities of harassment that are sexed are trivialised and dismissed because they are deemed to be insufficiently sexual”?}

These attitudes are conducive to both individual^[449] and community denial.^[450] For the victims or targets of violence, the “bizarre” and abusive actions may become normalised and unnamed.

A rural landscape drenched in masculinity

Australian rural mythology continues to revere “male dominance” as a norm, which is ingrained in daily rural life.^[453] Masculinity is celebrated as being the essence of rural spirit and “is typically constituted in rural sites and spaces as visible marker of strength, courage and power, in familiar symbolic representations of the farmer, the frontier settler, the hunter, the stockman and the cowboy”.^[454] It is also known that through engagement in heavy manual labour (which is a feature of rural life and which “involves physical effort and often shared dangers”), a type of “group solidarity and a spirit of masculine camaraderie is created”.^[455]

They believe that Jack is as good as his master, or even better; that mates must never bludge on one another; that a man’s word is his bond; that women are inferior to men; and that the company of mates is preferable to the company of women. However, the opportunities for expressing such values and beliefs are severely limited.^[456]

In combination with the ethos of male power in the bush, some academics and commentators have considered that the general “dangers of bush life’ render the rural space as ‘no place for a woman”.^[457]

Our study

The view of “women as other”^[458] in the bush has necessitated the implementation of survival mechanisms for rural women.

In this chapter we explore the way that harassing behaviour is perceived and reacted to in rural workplaces including: beliefs about the reactions/ responses of other women in the workplace to harassing behaviours (“She just keeps asking for it”); feelings of responsibility (“Saying ‘no’ makes me feel guilty”); minimising (“If you make a fuss you are just a big idiot”); and denial. We investigate whether there are differences in “survival” and cultural behaviours and thinking depending upon the occupation, degree of rurality, gender ratios, age, seniority and/or education of the respondents.