By KAREN PICKERING
In three years of running the march in Melbourne, I’ve had a lot of conversations about SlutWalk; some in public, on radio, television, in print, on panels and debates. But many more conversations have taken place in private and they often begin with unsolicited correspondence from strangers.
You might think I mean messages of abuse from people who are either opposed to SlutWalk, feminism, women or me in particular. I do mean that as well. I have received hundreds of messages detailing horrific acts that I deserve to be the victim of, that they hope will happen to me, mostly involving sexual assault, rape, murder, disease, and the more imaginative ones gleefully imagine me the victim of accidents that render me paralysed, unconscious or dead.
These are not so much conversations as one-way communications, some of which are reported to the police, but most of which are deleted and ignored. This kind of mail is by turns troubling, hilarious, pathetic and truly terrifying but what they don’t realise is that by contrast it can be ultimately energising.
Because much, much more important to me is the unsolicited correspondence I have received from people with an constructive idea or a sincere sentiment to share, rather than a threat to issue or abuse to inflict. I’ve gotten letters from women and men, girls and boys, young and old folks, sex workers and sex educators, teachers, lawyers, rape crisis workers, members of the clergy, police officers, grandmothers, mothers and daughters.