In the last issue of The Paper an article by Nik Beuret proclaimed 'gang rape ruled to be free from racism'. As a feminist reading this headline I found little cause for celebration. After all, two 16-year-old girls have been subjected to sexualised violent attacks upon their person. The judge presiding over the case in which three teenagers were convicted of this act of gender violence may have found the attacks were not racially motivated but this is little consolation.

The case had attracted attention due to predictably racist responses from the tabloid media in Sydney, where the attacks occurred. That these media focused on the 'race angle' is demonstrative of the way issues of race obscure violence against women; it seems gang rape is a humdrum affair, but racially-motivated gang rapes are a rallying opportunity for a bigoted community. This is unfortunate enough, but just as disturbing is the response from the alternative media, which then seeks to defend the rapists by positing them as innocent victims of racial slurs. It seems that the tabloids and the alternative press have in common a race bias that blinds them to the abuse of women.

Some responses to the reporting of the events in the tabloid press illuminate the issue further: women from the Lebanese community received threats of retaliatory rape against them; clearly these women were not involved in the rape of any women – 'Caucasian' or otherwise. These threats of retribution aimed at the women from a particular ethnic group whose male members are thought to have aggrieved the white majority, show how women's rights are subordinated to the integrity of the cultural group. So an attack on 'Caucasian' women is understood (as it was by The Daily Telegraph) as an attack on the white community, not an act of violence against women. These retaliatory threats are then motivated by both racism and sexism.

This problem is compounded by the high visibility of many Muslim women due to their dress – they are easy targets for this kind of prejudice. Women in most (including Western) cultures are required to embody the ethnicity of a culture and our bodies become the battlegrounds for conflicts between men of different cultural groups. Another example should bear this out: in the multi-ethnic Indian region of Kashmir, men of the rebel group Lashkar-e-Jabar are enforcing the wearing of black burqas (which allow just a small slit for the eyes) on local Muslim women. The Age (13/9) reported that two women had been sprayed with acid on the street for defying the code. The same group is demanding Hindu women identify themselves with bindis and Sikh women with saffron headscarves. The issue here is not the universal application of an oppressive dress code, rather that women display the ownership of their bodies by whatever culture to which they belong. This is another way in which 'culture' runs rough shod over women's human rights.

In his article Beuret drew attention to the relatively high incidence of gang rapes in 'rural, predominantly white' areas, and rightly so, but how should we respond to violence against women in minority ethnic groups in Australia?

Certainly the identification of criminal suspects by ethnic markers is problematic (and probably not that useful) but we must be able to discuss the issue of violence against women no matter where it occurs and by whom it is perpetrated. We are gradually learning of some devastating violence against indigenous women and girls. We must, for the sake of these women and girls, be free to inquire into this and to take appropriate action. To be cautious so as not to appear racist is to suggest that violence against women of colour is somehow of lesser importance. And ultimately this is to discriminate further against ethnic-minority and aboriginal women who are doubly oppressed by the duality of racism and sexism.