Australia is currently being rocked by allegations by Brittany Higgins, 24, working for the then defense industry minister, Linda Reynolds, that she was raped at Parliament House by a male colleague in March 2019, Kate Manne, associate professor of philosophy, writes in an op-ed in The Guardian. While full details of the alleged crime have yet to come to light, Manne questions the way Reynolds and her office handled the incident.
“It is long past overdue to conceive of female victims as people in their own right, with human rights, rather than as some man’s somebody – his wife, mother, sister, daughter, and so on – and as mattering because of that,” Manne writes in the piece. “She is her own person, and a person is – or ought to be – inviolable by others’ acts of sexual violence.”
