The alleged rape and murder of a comedian has sparked anger about attitudes to women

When Eurydice Dixon finished her comedy gig at a Melbourne bar last Tuesday she was reportedly in high spirits, sharing a drink with her boyfriend before heading home.

She bought some food and walked through an area she knew well: Princes Park in an affluent northern suburb of the city. Just before midnight, she sent her boyfriend a message: “I’m almost home safe.”



A passerby found Dixon’s body in the middle of a football pitch just before 3am on Wednesday, a few hundred metres from her home. A 19-year-old man has been charged with her rape and murder. Police say the two did not know each other.



What happened to Dixon, a smart, aspiring comedian with a dark sense of humour, was horrific, in part because walking through a park is so ordinary.



But her death has become something else: a flashpoint for an intense, often angry conversation about violence against women in Australia, and how it is men – not women – who need to change.



A decade ago, stranger deaths were framed as nightmare tales of evil monsters. Now, everyone from the country’s conservative prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to the 10,000 people who stood silently at a candlelit vigil for Dixon on Monday night, talk of culture and the structural causes of violence.

In an address to parliament this week, Turnbull said : “What we must do as we grieve is ensure that we change the hearts of men to respect women.” He said Australia needed to start “with the youngest men, the little boys, our sons and grandsons”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mourners in Princes Park, Melbourne, pay their respects to Eurydice Dixon. Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, concurred: “It’s about deciding as a nation that violence against women is ultimately preventable.”

Australia’s homicide rate – which includes manslaughter and murder-suicide – is the lowest in quarter of a century, according to research released last year. The vast majority of killers are partners and acquaintances.

Two-thirds of victims are men, but women are particularly vulnerable to being killed by a partner.

More than 80% of perpetrators of murders and other violent crimes are men. Dixon’s death has intensified a cultural debate about how boys are raised and contemptuous attitudes towards girls and women.

It comes amid the rise of the #MeToo movement, which has drawn attention to the pervasiveness of harassment. It has come during a national agonising about domestic violence, a crime once ignored but now framed as a symptom of gender inequality.

The flashpoint was caused by comments by a senior police officer. Supt David Clayton said on the day Dixon’s body was found – and before an arrest was made – that people needed to “take responsibility for your safety”.

“So just make sure you have situational awareness, that you’re aware of your surroundings,” he said. “If you’ve got a mobile phone, carry it; if you’ve got any concerns, call the police.”

It was sensible advice. Yet it was advice many women were sick of hearing. They are acutely aware of “situational awareness”: carrying keys in their hands in car parks, calling friends when walking alone at night, taking off headphones in case they are being followed. They are furious about the tiny conviction rate in rape cases, and the assumptions that for women to remain safe they must watch what they wear, what they say and what they do.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daniel Andrews, the premier of Victoria, and his wife, Catherine, at the vigil in Melbourne. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

“It isn’t up to women to modify our behaviour in order to prevent violence from being enacted against us,” writes the prominent feminist Clementine Ford. “It’s up to society to work together to dismantle misogyny and the particular kind of male rage that informs these acts of aggression.”

Rape and murder might be the extreme end, Ford writes, “but the spectrum they sit on stretches right back to ‘harmless’ casual sexism, the rape ‘jokes’ and threats that proliferate online and the attitude expressed towards women on a daily basis by groups of men who’ve been socialised to view themselves as superior. These toxic behaviours don’t manifest one day out of nowhere. They are cultivated.”

Therefore, while only a small number of men would do something as heinous as killing a woman, all men have a duty to challenge attitudes towards women, to condemn sexist jokes, and to push for gender equality in the workplace.

Ford’s views were given credence when, on the morning of the vigil, police discovered what were called “lewd” remarks written in white paint near the circle of flowers people had laid as a memorial to Dixon.

Vigil organisers reported that their Facebook page had been trolled, with rape “jokes” posted and tirades against women’s clothing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Malcolm Turnbull told parliament: ‘What we must do as we grieve is ensure that we change the hearts of men to respect women.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Nobody would defend that, but some commentators have questioned the “predictable surge of outrage” against the police warnings.



“‘Men’ didn’t kill Eurydice Dixon,” writes the deputy editor of Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Claire Harvey. “One man did. The courts will decide who he was. It’s totally unfair to blame all men – who, by the way, are also victims of terrifying random crime, and who also feel fear when they walk through the dark – for this.”

Harvey argued that, like it or not, there were “monsters out there in the dark and no amount of righteous fury is going to make them go away”.

It is hard to know why one killing among hundreds becomes a cultural lightning rod, as well as a human tragedy. The murders of middle-aged and/or non-Caucasian women from rural areas rarely receive such national attention.

Dixon was young, white and female. Her background was far from advantaged: her mother, a heroin addict, reportedly died when Dixon was seven.

Dixon was a feminist who made dark jokes about gender struggles. In her final gig, posted on Facebook, she said she worried a lot, sometimes about waking up in a slave society.

“I’m trying to be more optimistic, so I’m like ‘a slave society … that means no one has any rights. We’ll finally have gender equality. Equally shit – still equal.”

It drew laughs from the audience just a few hours before her death.