Andrew and I went to the theatre Friday night to see Chicago. We are fans of musical theatre so all the big Broadway shows and productions on in Melbourne are must sees for us. Over the years, we have seen too many to mention. We are lucky to live in a city that has such entertainment available.

The International Comedy Festival was also on at the same time which meant the city was pumping with people. We couldn’t find a place to eat dinner because all restaurants, pubs and bars were packed. We resorted to waiting a while to get a small table at a Betty’s Burger franchise opposite the theatre.

I enjoyed the show (although not as much as some other shows). It was set in Chicago (obviously) where a couple of the main women characters who were cabaret singers were hell bent on being famous. They committed murder of their boyfriends and some slick lawyer would tell them how to act in the courtroom to get off as innocents. In the process, all they wanted was fame and notoriety.

I was surprised to read in the program that the play was loosely based on real events in the 1920s in Chicago and oddly, it’s a play for this time too.

Not the murder of the men and the women wanting notoriety and fame. It’s how the women need to be coached or perform in front of a male jury to plead ignorance. Also how the public insatiable for a story and who they deem innocent. The stories they make up behind these women: the beautiful ones had good reasons or were slighted so they get off as innocents; the ugly ones hang.

Pretty much nothing has changed on that front in today’s society on that front.

The show was loosely based on truth. According to Wikipedia, “it was based on two unrelated 1924 court cases involving two women, Beulah Annan (the inspiration for Roxie Hart) and Belva Gaertner (the inspiration for Velma), who were both suspected and later acquitted of murder, whom Watkins had covered for the Chicago Tribune as a reporter.”

However now, it’s women being killed by men but it seems to have lost the importance because we hear of it on the news so much that it doesn’t affect us anymore.

We have some shocking statistics in Australia with violence against women.

According to statistics 1 in 3 women have experienced physical violence. In the last month, in Victoria (three women in the same town), three women have been killed by young males.

18 women have died in Victoria since the start of the year – and we are only in April.

You can read the story here 👇

https://thenightly.com.au/australia/victoria/three-women-killed-in-ballarat-australias-violence-issue-in-the-spotlight-after-brutal-vic-alleged-murders-c-14285417

I don’t know but I’m thinking there’s something seriously wrong with these numbers and we are obviously not focused on working on a solution. If this was 18 children dying, then people would have been up in arms.

But women? Nothing. Crickets.

In the past, people would have said things like, “oh look at how she was dressed! She had that coming” or “she got into the wrong crowd, she had that coming. All utterly ridiculous excuses that show people’s ignorance but now the women dying are young and old; single and married; mothers; local active community members.

It’s happening far too often.

No woman should have to live with the thought that one day their partner will kill them.

Yet their requests for help fall on deaf ears in our society because of generations of physical domestic violence that has been normalised in our society and made even worse now because the perpetrators of this violence are all young men. It’s telling me that this is generational and what we are doing (society and government initiatives) are not working.