How dare Parliament apologise to someone who might or might not be a victim when the accused has not yet been to trial and will be pleading 'not guilty'! What hope does he have of a fair trial in a jurisdiction where trial by judge alone is not permitted.

Throw in the childish, grandstanding and vicious attacks by two females cheered on by the press.

As usual, the leading villain, recently described by a political colleague as an "awful" person, was our Prime Minister.

Fat lot of good the PM's grovelling did him according the lack of even the barest civility shown to him by the two females at the Press Club. Like all 'victims', they will never be satisfied with what anyone does for them. Victimhood is a weapon these days.

Thanks for raising this very important issue Phillip Hickox. Kudos. CM

>she would accept without question, the findings of any research that aligned with her own personal and feminist political beliefs and she would fiercely challenge any research that contradicted her beliefs as being false or misleading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

This is everywhere, be it in climate change, transport policy, sexual abuse etc We're all guilty of it (myself included). The very first step though is at least try and be aware of it.

As a boy I was abused by the male head of the school I was attending at that time. I reported to my foster carer and received the mother and father of all floggings! But the abuse stopped when he heard I'd reported him! Although he then took me to his office and tried to get me to agree, nothing had happened. But given the abuse and subsequent flogging I simply refused to agree!

In another home the abuse manifested as a Brother used his adult fists to beat me all but unconcious. By the time I reached sixteen I was raped more times than I had birthdays. And routinely whipped black and blue from my neck to my tailbone and kick into a corner to enable the flogging to continue until the flogger was exhausted!

As I grew older and studied medicine, I learned that their are two for certain gay genes and three other probables. And that their are bull queers that not gay just sex addicted bastards. The last the least represented in any demographic. Even then there is a pill to correct that behaviour. It's made of lead and delivered at high velocity right between the eyes!

Disbelief enabled the aforementioned abuse to continue unabated. The very last time I knocked the abuser to the ground and had a friend not pulled me off him I'd have killed him. Nobody tried it on after that. Moreover, once I could work and earn a wage my reunited parents took me back.
Alan B.

‘The minute someone says "Research says" or "The research does not show" it is time to become extremely sceptical especially when it comes to gendered based research.’

Well that’s certainly true of anything Mr Hickox writes. His article accuses others of using misleading statistics, then does exactly the same.

For example, the statement that 43% of complainants about sexual harassment in Parliament House were male is clearly intended to suggest that men are almost as likely as women to be harassed. But the survey it draws on actually found the opposite – “ Women in CPWs experienced sexual harassment at a higher rate (40%) compared with men (26%).” The reason the percentage of male complainants is higher than 26% is because there were significantly more men (1053) than women (805) in the sample.

https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/ahrc_set_the_standard_2021.pdf

The author supports his case with a paraphrase of a comment he thinks he remembers hearing on the radio more than three decades ago. The Weitzman analysis he quotes is similarly dated.

The more recent data quoted from BOCSAR was indeed revised substantially, but the overall pattern remains the same – most reports of sexual assault do not lead to prosecution, and most prosecutions do not lead to convictions. Furthermore, most sexual assaults are not reported to police and so don’t even make it into these statistics.

https://evawintl.org/wp-content/uploads/Module-1_Dynamics.pdf

Sexual assault is a horrible crime. Its victims and its perpetrators include men and women, boys and girls. But statistically the perpetrators are much more likely to be male than female, and the victims are more likely to be female than male. And most perpetrators get away with it.