One in three women will be sexually assaulted.
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It's a stark statistic which Prima Facie puts forward but it's one that is a reality for Australian women. It's also why the play, which tells the story of a lawyer who goes to trial with her own rape case, is not unbelievable.
"It's not a remarkable incident and that's kind of the awful thing," actor Sheridan Harbridge says.
"It's a very known incident that has happened to a lot of people that we know, that we know personally, someone in our family or a friend, or ourselves that have gone through this.
"But, unusually, this very common occurrence is never picked apart in artwork."
While other storylines will use sexual assault as a turning point in a plot, Prima Facie - through Harbridge's character Tessa - dissects the topic after she is raped by a colleague.
Tessa goes from being a lawyer at the top of her game in a male-dominated field, to becoming the victim wanting to seek justice by the only means she knows how - the legal system.
"I think in this show the worst thing that happens to her is not the assault but the fallout of her seeking justice [that] is the most traumatic part of it and I think that is a very true indictment of the legal system," Harbridge says.
Written by Suzie Miller, who is also a lawyer, Prima Facie aims to hold a mirror up to the legal system in order to expose its shortcomings and start a conversation about how it deals with sexual assault cases.
As Harbridge's character Tessa states quite plainly in the play: "A woman's experience of sexual assault does not fit the male-defined system of truth. So it cannot be truth and therefore there cannot be justice".
"What Suzie ... is trying to say is that the law is made up. We have made it up. Our society has made it up," Harbridge says.
"We think of it as some sacrosanct thing that can't be changed, where she is going: no, we just made it up based on our experiences, but we have to face the fact that up until the past 20 years it was only men in the justice system making up those laws.
"The input of a woman's experience does not exist in the law that as we know it today but that can change and should be reevaluated."
By taking her own sexual assault case, Tessa is required to take the stand while the accused can choose not to.
The worst thing that happens to her is not the assault but the fallout of her seeking justice.
- Sheridan Harbridge
"It's a very retrograde system. The burden of proof being on her," Harbridge says.
"And there is a line in the show that says this is not a car accident or a home invasion, but we are looking at a rape the same way, we treat it the same way as if it were a car accident or a home invasion when it gets to trial, where the victim is interrogated in a way that we knowingly know that she has PTSD, that she is about the relive trauma."
Harbridge has been in the world of Prima Facie for the past three months, playing a character who has "had something taken away from them" and she admits that it's been hard.
For the first time, she started to understand that she lives in a "bubble of incredible safety and self-assurance that has never been pricked".
The actor became acutely aware that she had something to lose and would even get up at 2am just to check the locks on her doors.
However, while stepping into Tessa's shoes has amplified a feeling of vulnerability, Harbridge says questions over personal safety started to present themselves earlier this year.
"[It was] mainly from the incidents that have happened in Melbourne. The women who we have lost this year, they were all doing things exactly like I do," she says.
"They were all assaulted on their way from public transport to their home, at a reasonable time of night. One of them was on the phone talking to her sister and that really shook me to my core.
"I feel so safe walking from my bus stop to my home at 11pm and two women were brutalised in that moment in Melbourne, so that had started to seep into my life before the show had doubled down on it.
"Everyone feels safe walking to their house in these beautiful Australian cities and it takes one hideous, selfish human being to come and take that safety away."
But despite all of this, when Prima Facie hits the stage later this month, Harbridge wants people to walk away uplifted.
Yes, Harbridge says watching Tessa go through her court trial is heartbreaking, but the underlying message is an empowering call to arms.
"We don't have to sit back. We can talk about this, we can be making sure this is a conversation that is going to get louder and louder and louder," she says.
- Prima Facie will be at Canberra Theatre Centre from June 26-29.