Sexual violence reformer is Newtown Woman of the Year

Sexual assault campaigner Danielle Villafaña is Newtown Woman of the Year for 2023.

A sexual violence survivor, Villafaña was one of those at the forefront of recent significant reform for women experiencing sexual violence in Australia. She is a surviver who suffered significant trauma as a result of a sexual assault when she was 14.

When she was 17 and in Year 12 at Fort Street High School, she founded Youth Against Sexual Violence Australia after previously starting a smaller group, Youth Survivors 4 Justice.  “We founded the national group … when we saw the peak of sexual assault and harassment circling the news cycle and as survivor myself and still in high school and being disenfranchised by the system it was really frustrating to see that the people who could do something about it weren’t,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2021. The group aimed to provide a voice and a means for young people to be actively involved in campaigns for change.

Villafaña migrated from the Philippines as a young child. She is now a tenant in Newtown and like other students must work as well as study to cover expensive rent and other costs.

Villafaña has worked alongside other activists and survivor-advocates pushing for legislative consent reform, holistic standardised consent education and economic safety for women. She has led rallies and actions as well as advocating to ensure that young survivors of gendered violence are protected.In all her campaigning,  she focuses on raising the voices of migrants and women of colour.

It was a major victory for Villafaña and other advocates when affirmative consent laws were passed by the NSW Parliament in November 2021. Under the law, consensual sexual activity must involve “ongoing and mutual communication, decision-making and a free and voluntary agreement” between those participating. Under the previous law, a person committed a sexual assault if they knew the other person was not consenting, if they were “reckless as to whether” they consented, or there were no reasonable grounds for believing there was consent.

Newtown Greens MP Jenny Leong, who was a co-sponsor of the reform bill, said the NSW reforms were a significant step forward but Australia still had a long way to go. “We still need proper consent education across the board,” she said.

At the time NSW Parliament passed the reform, Leong acknowledged the work of  “incredibly strong survivor-advocates, feminists, experts and activists who have been through so much and who have never given up.”

So it is perhaps not surprising that Leong nominated one of these advocates as her Newtown local woman for 2023.

In 2021, Villafaña won an Edna Ryan Award for making a feminist difference through community activism.

She has also worked in the environment movement, as a community campaigner with Sweltering Cities that works for more equitable and sustainable cities. She began her advocacy as a national organiser with School Strike 4 Climate, where she led Australia’s school climate strikes and campaigned against the sourcing and usage of fossil fuels. She now works for Fair Agenda an organisation working for a fair and gender equal future.

Still only 19, Villafaña has achieved a lot!  The editors invited  her to write a piece on International Women’s Day  for City Hub:

A future free of gendered violence is possible

For the first time I felt like I had control over this horrible thing

I was only 17 years old when I first spoke to national media as a survivor of sexual assault. For the first time I felt like I had control over this horrible thing that had happened to me, and felt hope that the future could be different. The past few years have seen a seismic shift in how Australia understands the injustices women and girls face every day. There is an understanding that incidents of gendered violence don’t occur in isolation – they are all threads of a much broader fabric of misogyny and patriarchal power that make up our society. In Australia, 1 in 3 women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence perpetrated by a man they know – I am one of three daughters.

For many, each failure of our leadership to respond to the crisis has served as a reminder of all that is broken and how far we still have to go. But out of this trauma we’ve also seen a great reckoning. We’ve seen survivors organise, take the streets and say that we won’t accept this anymore. The government’s new National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children aims to end gendered violence within one generation. It is a very ambitious goal, but it is ambitious because it needs to be.

Amidst this chaos it is so important to remember that a future free from gendered violence is one that is possible, it is one that we can choose.

When I first began organising around both women’s rights and climate justice, I was too young to vote. The logical workaround I found for this was organising my peers to take to the streets – perhaps to the dismay of our parents.

Organising is so critical to shifting the standards that we have come to accept as normal.The standards which say it’s okay for one woman a week to be murdered by her current or former partner, or for the worst effects of climate change to be irreversible by the time I turn 26.

On International Women’s Day I thank the many women who taught me how to harness the power of organising, those who disrupt the systems which harm so many, and showed me how powerful we are when we fight in union. While free breakfast is cool, we know that the revolutionary changes we need to see in this country aren’t going to be brought about by tiny pastries and pink pantsuits. Rather, we need to continue to organise our communities, to turn up for one another, and fight for the future we so deeply believe in at any cost. Revolutions are built in the spaces and lines between what we see in the news. They are led by the girl with the megaphone, the nurse at the picket and the mum caring for her child.

Until now, our future has been determined by the interests of powerful white men. But a better future is one that we can choose, and it is one that we must fight for.