So, guys, it's a very important week.
This week it is Anti Street Harassment Week and the good people at Lorel Paris are committed to ending street harassment through their bystander Intervention training in partnership with Plan International. Now you can take the training Lorelparis dot com dot au forward slash stand up has all the details. Unfortunately, for our next guest, he knows firsthand how important talking about this sort of subject is. Terrang is joining us on the air, and back in twenty fifteen, you lost
your youngest sister, she was murdered by her husband. May thank you for being here. Firstly, no, thank you for having me on. It's such an important thing to talk about. And the fact that you guys here at Nova are willing to have these conversations difficult ones, right, challenging ones is just so profound and important and I think it's a really big deal.
So thanks for having me here.
I mean, it is so hard to talk about.
These conversations are hard to talk about because I think you don't want to know about it. People want to bury their head in the sand about these really hard topics because we'd prefer that they weren't happening. But the reality, and especially for your family, is that we have a serious issue out there in this country, don't we.
Yeah, we've got a serious issue, right, And this whole thing about whether it's street harassment on one hand or the more extreme like you know what happened to my sister, they're all connected, right, They're on like a continent, They're on a line basically right where we think some of the stuff that might just be harmless, like just making a joke, stuff that we pass off as banter, cat calling, maybe groping someone on a night out, we think that's
not related, right, And most people who do that stuff aren't going to go and do something awful, right. We know that, right, we know that, and no one's suggesting that. But at the same time, we can't turn a blind eye to the stuff that we have for a long time, especially Ossie Blokes, I think we sometimes just like to pass it off like, oh, I was just a joke,
just having a bit of banter, you know. But when our sisters, our moms, our cousins, our friends are going through life, you know, changing their plans, changing where they're going, changing their whole life around, in fear of being harassed you know, out in the street. One in two Australian women right report that they will change their plans for fear of being harassed. And I love to ask blokes that same question, do you change your life plans because of that the same fear?
And no one says yes, Because we men.
Go through the world very very differently, right, And I think that's the important part of the conversation that a lot of Ozzie men need to be willing to have. And that's not saying that men are bad or that we've all done something awful, but just the fact that we want to be better. We want a society where things are safe.
I mean, but what is considered street harassment? What is it? Because it's easy to like put an umbrella on something like that, but what is it?
Yes, So the stats tell us that seventy eight percent of Australian women have experienced threet harassment, right, So we take that in context, right, that's eight in ten women have teal us that they've experienced it. And it counts the whole spectrum of behavior, whether it's cat calling, you know, like when it's shouting out to them on the street, whether it's staring at them, groping, making unwonted comments about
their physical appearance or their body. Those sorts of things are all part of street harassment, right, So.
It's strangers, it's it's strangers making women feel uncomfortable through their behavior.
Yeah.
Yeah, And it can even be it can even be people that you know making you feel uncomfortable through forms of like harassment or unwanted comments at work, at.
Work in a social environment, absolutely include sort of people who are not trying to do it intentionally. And what I mean by that is, like, I know my wife the other night, she walked down the street to the shops to get something, and she came back before even getting to the shops, and she goes, look, I'm not saying this guy was going to do anything, but he was just walking incredibly close behind me and he probably didn't realize how awkward or scared it was making me.
But just in the current environment here in.
Melbourne, well, I think as a female though, there is part of us that doesn't want to judge that kind of behavior, but it's this other type of behavior that has made us uneasy in the first place often, if that makes sense. So he might have just been a man also walking to the shop, and you do think, oh god, this.
Guy's following me. He's actually just going to the shops too.
But in the back of our minds, we're so alert right now that that stuff frightens us too.
Yeah, that's the thing, right, That's exactly as you said, Lauren, you're so alert to it, right because you're worried about what could happen. And for a lot of guys, we don't go through the world like that, right, we'd want the same for all the women in our lives, right, That's what a lot of the good men will tell me that I don't want the women that I know, or any woman to have to go through life feeling scared, right, just trying to get to the shops. You know, these
are basic every day dare I say, their money? They're boring things that we have to do every day, right, And if you're self selecting out of that because you're worried about what could happen, it's just an awful reality to live in. And this is happening to seventy eight percent of Austrange women. So I'm really proud to support Laurel in this training so that people who witness street harassment actually know what they can do to safely intervene.
You're confident that if if there was an incident, say below us on the street, that it would be called out.
Yeah, I hope.
So, you know, I think, like, how far we still got to go. We've got I mean, we've got a long way to go in the sense because can I hand on heart, Yeah, I don't think it would be what don't you think? I just don't think blokes generally speaking would would I mean, I would like to think it would be called out, But I still think we've got such a long way to go that more blokes.
As a bystanding you would turn a blind eye.
Yeah, look, especially if they heard something. Yeah.
Look, it sort of depends on what the behavior is. There's sort of things where like if someone physically touches someone right.
Of course everyone would go running back.
You know, there's kind of but there's kind of instances where we know, we've seen, we've been in situations we're out on a night out or something, someone gets a bit rowdy, bit handsy, and people like, hey mate, yes, right, we've been in those situations. It's some of the more subtle stuff like that. Well, the stuff that might even just be passed off as a joke right there, the
kind of banter, the cat calling or whatever. And we've all we can all recognize as soon as I talk about it, that we've seen a situation where we've watched on as men, and we've seen how it makes that women feel. We know that look of discomfort or that kind of like fake laughing along to just try to make the situation not get any more intense or not kind of resist in order to make things more uncomfortable for them, Right, And so I think you might be right, Clint.
Right.
And so I think what's so important is, as you were saying before, Jase, that that training at Laurel Paris dot com forward such stand up. It's so so important because it's giving people practical ways to intervene.
Right.
I think that one of the things, one of the things about why we don't do it is that a lot of men don't know.
What to do. That's exactly it.
Right.
I'll go around the country and there's men that will come up to me and say I want to do something, but I don't know what to do, right, And this training gives them what's called the five d's right, five tactical evidence base proven things that work right. One of them, for example, is distracting in a situation. Right, if you see something happen, you can distract away from the actual street harassment and intervene. Another one, which is so powerful
to me is we've always got our phones. Like I can't go anywhere with a without my iPhone, right, most people can't. And so if you see something you can document that. You can just take a little sneaky video, right, And that way the person who is targeted can use it later if they choose to report, if they want to actually take further action. So you're doing a bit
to support a lot of us. Men think that our job is intervening, is only calling out, right, is being the knight and shining armor, coming in, swooping in to do the heavy lifting, rescue the woman in distress. But there's so many other ways that we can get involved. And I think that's what's so powerful about this particular training that Lorel Paris is running.
So what are the other d's.
Okay, So the five d's in total, distract, delegate, document, direct, and delay, right, And so we've spoken about a couple of them, or already. I think delegates one that's really really important. You know, like if you're particularly if you're a young person and you see this happen, say you're like, you see this happen like after school or something, right, you can you can delegate by getting a teacher.
Right.
You can delegate by getting someone in a position of authority. So you see a cop right nearby, right, you ask clean about the street downstairs?
You can get it, you know, get.
Someone in authority involvement, yeah, right, get someone with clout, Like if you're down the footy club someone says something that's a bit out of pocket, you can get like someone who's you know, a lifer at the club who everyone listens to to come in and go hey mate, that's that's like, we don't do that here.
So this is training anyone can do.
Anyone, anyone in Australia.
It's absolutely free, takes you like ten to fifteen minutes tops, and it will mean that anytime you see this, first you'll know what the kind of signs are. Secondly you'll know what to do, which I think is so so powerful touring.
Your sister would be incredibly proud of you doing this.
I know, a lot of people, if they're in your situation, would just crumble, and you know, and that'd be it.
Like what was she like? Was a sister annoying? No? No, she was lovely.
She was And you know, I've met a lot of families who've lost loved ones in similar circumstances.
I've also that met so many people.
You know, it's not hard to when eight and ten women have been subjected to street harassment. A lot of the people that have subjected to this are such nice, kind people.
You know.
It's almost like others want to take advantage of that niceness and kindness, and it's a hard you know, life's hard sometimes, right, and I think that some of the nicest people are the ones getting taken advantage of the much She was just such a kind, generous, sweet person, And you know, I remember really fondly and I wish she was still here, and I wish all the other women that have suffered the same fate were still here.
But it's sort of a reminder that it's not a bad thing to just be a kind of nice person that cares about other people in the community.
Well, she'd be.
Very very proud of you, putting your name and face to this campaign. Look, you can go online Lorelparis dot com, dot forward, slash stand up.
More than three point seven million people have already been trained through this program, which is awesome.
Yeah and like you said, what ten minutes, ten fifteen tops. Yeah, and it's bloody important. Hey, thank you so much for coming in this morning. Thank you so much for having me