Deveson pulls no punches. She starts from the premise that while sexual apartheid is breaking down, it continues to impose a set of rigid stereotypes based on gender. The evidence demonstrates only too well why so many Australian men feel compelled to dress in drag, having no other outlet for the ‘feminine’ part of their personalities.

The first section of Australians at Risk focusses on sexual inequality, the family, domestic violence and rape. A succession of witnesses testified to the discrimination against women in education, employment, superannuation entitlement, trade unions and in obtaining credit, finance and insurance. Margaret Power, an economist at Sydney University, wrote about occupational segregation, claiming that it was a major source of poverty among women and stemmed from the concept of ‘the male breadwinner/female housewife’. Dr. Charles Noller from Brisbane Lifeline said that male insensitivity to the ‘needs and ideas and feelings and aspirations’ of women was ‘bound up with the whole cultural stereotyping in Australia of the male that tends to focus on the instrumental roles of getting out and working and keeping the family.’

The effect of the imposition of these stereotypes is revealed in the chapter on the family. Deveson argues that urbanisation, new contraceptive discoveries, smaller families, greater female participation in the paid workforce have had an influence on family structure and the roles of individuals within it, but neither community attitudes nor government policies have caught up with these changes. This was the gist of the Commission’s argument when it recommended that the government adopt a national policy on the family. But given these attitudes, what kind of policy could we expect?

From the chapters entitled ‘The Battered Wife’ and ‘The Frightened Child’ it is plain that the family is often a little box of contradictions, with the lid so tight in order to contain them. It’s not surprising that the situation is frequently explosive. Poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, isolation and stress all contribute. Yet family violence is a widespread phenomenon, and is certainly not confined to people on low incomes. The sixty-six-year-old wife of a government employee told how she had been repeatedly attacked by her husband. When she wrote he was making $400 a week, and giving her $62. She stuck it out all those years because ‘the welfare always said ... not to leave because I’d done a wonderful job with the kiddies’.

Her testimony speaks volumes about the economic dependency of women and the psychological and social pressures they bear.

I found the chapter on children so harrowing it was almost impossible to read. The extent of child abuse in Australia is unknown, but on the basis of a 1975 South Australian survey, Deveson estimates that, nation-wide, some 14,000 children are injured each year. As with violence against women, our physical and emotional savagery towards children arises from the tensions between the needs and hopes of individuals and the reality of our social structures. Deveson produced the television program ‘Please Help Me I Don’t Want to Kill My Child’ to raise awareness of the causes of child abuse; her book contributes further to this understanding. Listen to an eight-year-old’s account of maternal love: ‘Tonight mum’s purse was missing and I got the blame for it ... I got belted on the chin and mum started shouting at me really loud and I got a headache and an earache and I yelled to mummy that I’m innocent. Boy, mum does a lot of terrible things to me.’

Christina Gibbeson, from Elsie Women’s Refuge, spoke about the effect of domestic violence on children who came with their mothers to the shelter. ‘Two-year-olds having nervous breakdowns is not uncommon, even being hospitalized, right up to thirteen or fourteen-year-olds who cannot sleep, cannot eat, they are vomiting, calling to their mothers – they have terrible screaming tantrums. The children have been caught in the middle of a violent relationship and they often admire the bravado of the father who beats them up as well.’

So far, we have been presented with a picture of what Anne Summers has called ‘the nexus of oppression’. The second part of Australians at Risk contains chapters on sexuality, contraception, and abortion, corresponding to those sections of the Commission’s report that were seized out of context by the Prime Minister and sensationalized by the media during the election campaign. These chapters are interesting and illuminating but, again, it is the context that counts, a society sadly out of kilter with the experiences of most of its members.

Membership, however, is just what is denied to Aborigines, Islanders, migrants, homosexuals and the handicapped. Their alienation is compounded by harsh discrimination and a staggering ethnocentricity. Deveson devotes her final chapters to some damning evidence. An Aboriginal’s story of his mother’s death during child-birth on the Cherbourg reserve. A political scientist’s description of ‘gay murder’ and ‘poofter bashing’. A former consultant to Leyland’s, which had sixty different nationalities as its Sydney plant, wrote that ‘the induction courses and the safety courses were given in English … As part of the original welcoming process they took migrants, put them in a booth and pumped English into the booth via a cassette loudspeaker. This induction speech was specially prepared by an advertising agency in Sydney, and Leylands payed them $10,000. It mainly concerned the history of Australian cricket.

Perhaps the most moving testimony was written by a Sydney man crippled by polio at the age of nine: ‘I have to embrace this awful reality, suffer and cry. To affect a false stoic bravery does no good … people gather round and tell you to keep your chin up, there’s lots worse, life’s a tough battle and you can’t show weakness. But who are we fighting? Is everyone the enemy?’

The institution, he reminds us, ‘doesn’t exist so that the staff can play God.’

Who does play God? At the very time that the Commission was collecting evidence such as this, funds were cut and work was shelved, in the ‘interests of the economy’.

Australians at Risk jolts us into remembering where our priorities must lie. One more crack in the wall of complacency, it deserves to be widely read.