Conclusion

Home: About SECASA: About SECASA: History of CASA

Sexual assault services in Victoria have developed in 23 years from being unfunded, run by Collectives of feminists with a commitment to Women's Health principles and presenting a challenge to the status quo to a government funded state wide network of 15 centres.

Social workers have been significantly involved in the development of CASA's from the beginning. Individual social workers such as Pat Farrant responded to the challenges thrown up by the women's movement to provide a better deal for rape victims. Social workers, because of their understanding of the social context of rape have been able to forge alliances with other stakeholders including police, medical practitioners, bureaucrats and community representatives to establish a statewide network of services for sexual assault victims/survivors. Looking in 2001 at the provision of a statewide network of 24 hour services for a range of victim/survivors it is easy to forget how community and professional understanding of rape and sexual assault has altered from the seventies.

Discussions around government funding and whether an organization will be coopted if such funding is accepted have been left behind. The debate now centers on how to make successive federal and state governments responsive to increased demands for services.

The policy issue women raised in the early days of the women's liberation movement in the case of sexual assault has moved onto the agenda of both major parties attracting funding through a variety of programs. Some of the original activists in this area have become senior bureaucrats and consultants. There is a considerable amount of goodwill towards the funding of sexual assault and family violence programs from all sides of the political spectrum due to a shared history and the difficulty of being against such programs without being seen to be in favour of violence.

The old debates still surface in heated discussions about issues such as the wisdom of accepting funding of services for male victims, the most appropriate way to treat sexually aggressive adolescent's who may also be sexual assault victims, what to call victim/survivors of sexual assault and how to understand the behaviour of female offenders. The complexity of these issues serves to underline just how far we have come in our understanding of the issue of sexual assault since the seventies. The social workers who have been involved in the policy debates, law reform campaigns and development of services have been able to do so because of their capacity to understand the individual in the environment.

CASA's have grown, multiplied and made their own accommodation with the State and government funding. Whether they have fulfilled the promise of their origins and been a practical expression of women's fight against patriarchy leading to substantial changes for women, or whether they have been co opted to create a well serviced class of victims will be left to the judgment of another generation. They will ponder whether what Sarah Dowse called the Women's Movement Fandango with the State (Dowse 1983) led CASA's to ameliorate the consequences of sexual assault without challenging the underlying causes.

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