Christopher Dawson was jailed last month in Sydney for murdering his wife, the mother of his two very young daughters, in 1982 and installing in her place — to raise his children, to sleep on Lynette Dawson’s side of the bed — a young woman named JC.
In 2023, he will stand trial for grooming and sleeping with the then 16-year-old he taught in the late 1970s at Cromer High School.
Sexism and pre-feminist ways of seeing the world permeate every corner of the Dawson tragedy, from her desperation to overcome infertility to her choice to blame a young schoolgirl for “taking liberties” with her husband, rather than blame the philandering husband.
But nowhere is the casual misogyny of the era more notable than in the way police and Lynette Dawson’s friends, family and co-workers responded to what modern eyes would clearly see as signs of family violence and abuse.
This ranges from the way police treated the sudden disappearance of a woman who had neither money nor clothes and left behind her contact lenses and her children, to the failure of all but one of her friends to raise the alarm, even when they knew she’d been covered with bruises in the weeks before she disappeared and telling stories about her husband holding her face down in the mud, leaving her unable to breathe.
Indeed, one way to understand the hullabaloo surrounding Hedley Thomas’s Teacher’s Pet podcast and every tiny detail revealed in the legal proceedings leading to Christopher Dawson’s conviction is middle-class Sydney’s collective guilt over not recognising the mortal danger Lynette Dawson and women like her were in in the 1970s and ’80s, and overcoming patriarchal barriers like the privacy of the home to help.
All well and good, except for the sting in the tail. Which is that even as amends are being made to the ghosts of women like Lynette Dawson, the plight of Christopher Dawson’s other female victim is being mischaracterised and ignored. That of JC.
Note to, well, pretty much everyone: the young girl from the unhappy home caught up in Lynette Dawson’s nightmare was not Christopher Dawson’s “lover”. Nor should his interest in her be described as “romantic”.
The relationship between a Year 10 student and the teacher twice her age should not be called an “affair”, a word that implies two consenting adults, and points to the extramarital nature of the connection as its key moral feature.
The descriptions “girlfriend” and “partner” are also unsuitable because they also imply consent, as well as an age-appropriate relationship.
It’s time to get our gender equity ducks in a row, and not create another woman to whom we’ll have to apologise decades from now because our guilt and unexamined prejudices make it impossible for her tragic tale to be heard.
