Men Who Bully Women

There is a headline news story in Australia today about a young woman who worked in a Melbourne cafe, quite literally bullied to death by her male colleagues. It sounds too trashy to be true but the facts are as tragically unpleasant as they are real. Not only is the suicide of this young woman a loss of her precious life but for her parents, now comes the eternal pain of never being able to share all those wonderful moments that they should have been able to share with their daughter. As for the four male perpetrators, the comment has already been made from the bench that they have shown remorse for their actions. But  neither remorse nor a puny cash fine can bring back a life lost and even if criminal sanctions were available, what good would they do? What puzzles me is how a group of men could turn like rabid dogs on one, young woman and yet somehow fail to take stock of the impact of their grossly abusive behaviours. It was philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who once commented that we all find it hard to reconcile that perfectly ordinary human beings can do the most extraordinarily evil things. That is the case here. A young woman is dead for no other reason than four seemingly intelligent, rational, privileged men, could and did indeed abuse her…