Name: Sarah Recklies
Community/State: Kununurra, Western Australia
School: Kununurra District High School
Age/Grade: 18 Years, Year 12
Bio: Click here
Sarah’s Power Trip is kindly being sponsored by AgriFutures Australia!
“Life is a roadtrip with twists and turns. How can we support one another to navigate the road to gender equality?”
In a day and age where gender equality is seen to have exceeded expectations, we as a society are still so dreadfully far from being just that; equal. Like a road, the trip we are on now has not been without its potholes. Yet, does a truck stop just because of a few bumps?
We as a society should be this truck, and continue driving towards our destination of true equality. Did you know that one in three women in Australia have experienced physical abuse since the age of 15(1)? Furthermore, did you know that indigenous girls and women are 35x more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence (2)? All this violence towards women and yet we still have groups disregarding feminism as selfish and pointless.
We as feminists are demanded to be silent, compliant and ordered ‘back into the kitchen’. We as a collective must not submit to the demands of misogyny and stand tall for our mothers, sisters and one day daughters? By standing together we can turn one voice into a choir of thousands. By standing strong with one-another, we can educate others on the true meaning of feminism, ‘the belief that men and women should have equal rights’, we can erase the stigma surrounding the movement. The one that wrongly paints us as feminists as misandrists. We can bring together the genders to erase the hurtful barriers that restrict and refrain us from achieving our true potential.
Those with privilege, such as white privilege or wealth privilege, should use their positions of power to help advocate for those who can’t. We with privilege should extend part of what we were given by society simply for the way we look, to those who suffer systematic oppression for that exact same reason. By walking hand in hand, rather than battling against one another for the same goal, we can go much further.
Through perseverance and the strong will that we as powerful young women possess, we can break free of the intergenerational misogyny that binds us to a narrow minded definition of femininity. We as a collective have the power to stand up and navigate the drive to change, to rebirth our society as one that is equal, no matter skin colour, gender or social status. We can make our society equal.
1 – https://www.ourwatch.org.au/understanding-violence/facts-and-figures
2 – https://www.whiteribbon.org.au/understand-domestic-violence/facts-violence-women/domestic-violence-statistics/