Where Bisexual Visibility Meets Sexual Assault Awareness
When the survivors who speak out most loudly are often straight-presenting women or visibly queer icons, bisexual people can feel like they exist in a strange middle space, heard by neither side. This is the reality I have noticed again and again, whether scrolling through awareness campaigns in Melbourne's inner north or sitting in a Sydney community space during a survivor storytelling night.
Sexual assault awareness has grown enormously over the last decade in Australia. State governments fund counselling hotlines, universities run consent education, and marches such as Reclaim the Night draw thousands each year in capital cities. Bisexual visibility, however, still flickers inconsistently, sometimes celebrated at Mardi Gras, sometimes dismissed as a phase in everyday conversation, and frequently missing from mainstream survivor narratives altogether.
Holding both realities at once is uncomfortable. Recognising that bi people, particularly bi women, experience higher rates of sexual violence than many other groups is one part of that. Recognising that the bisexual community is often expected to organise itself, fund itself, and heal itself with very little institutional support is the other. This piece sits in that overlap and tries to make it a little less lonely. If you are new here, you can read about the kind of writing this platform centres and the stories that tend to gather in this space.
The Silence Within the Silence
There is a particular kind of silence that bisexual survivors describe. It is the quiet that follows an attempt to name what happened to you, only to be told that you are "really straight" if you have ever been in a relationship with a man, or "really gay" if your current partner is a woman. That kind of erasure does not stop when someone harms you. In fact, it often makes reporting harder, because the people around you, including the ones trained to help, may not know how to categorise you.
Australia's national counselling line, 1800RESPECT, has worked hard in recent years to acknowledge that bisexual callers exist and need affirming care. Yet many survivors still hesitate to call. The fear of being misunderstood, of having their identity questioned in the middle of a crisis, can feel just as heavy as the original wound. For readers who have been piecing together their own language for this, work on reframing trauma as a practice can be a useful starting point, because the act of naming is part of the healing.
This silence is not personal weakness. It is a structural outcome. When bi identities are treated as unstable or experimental, the systems designed to respond to violence often miss the people who fall through those cracks entirely, leaving them to recover in private with very little scaffold.
The Numbers Australia Doesn't Always Name
Australian Bureau of Statistics data from the Personal Safety Survey shows that nearly one in five women have experienced sexual violence since the age of fifteen. Men face lower but still significant rates, with bisexual men reporting notably higher rates of violence than their gay or heterosexual peers in several studies. Bisexual women, however, are consistently the group with the highest reported rates of lifetime sexual assault among women in many surveys, including work done by La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society.
These figures matter because they challenge the idea that bisexual invisibility is harmless. The more invisible a community is, the easier it is to under-resource the services meant for them. Walk into a community health centre in Fitzroy or Collingwood and you will find pamphlets about queer-friendly counselling, but bi-specific outreach is still rare. Head out to a regional town in the Northern Territory or Tasmania and the gaps widen further, with no LGBTIQ+ organisation for hundreds of kilometres.
When awareness campaigns quote statistics, they often round to broad categories. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, asexual, and other identities are sometimes treated as a single block. That grouping, while inclusive in intention, can flatten the lived experiences inside it, particularly for survivors whose bisexuality shapes how their assault was framed, denied, or weaponised by the perpetrator.
How Bi Erasure Shapes Healing
Erasure is not just an identity issue. It bleeds directly into recovery. A bisexual survivor trying to process a relationship-based assault may be told by well-meaning friends that they should "just date women" or that the problem was the gender of their partner, rather than the behaviour of the abuser. This kind of response treats orientation as cause rather than identity, and it shuts down the work of actually grieving what happened.
Healing also takes a financial toll that Australians do not always talk about openly. Mental health care plans through Medicare cover part of a psychologist session, but the gap fee still adds up, especially when someone needs long-term trauma-focused therapy. For bisexual people living outside major cities, finding a bi-affirming practitioner can mean long drives to a capital city, which is not feasible for everyone, particularly for young people still living at home in places where being out is not safe.
Peer support groups can help, but they too often cluster around either straight or gay and lesbian communities. Bi-specific groups exist in places like Sydney's Inner West and Brisbane's West End, but they tend to be small, volunteer-run, and easy to miss. Closing that gap requires resources, not just goodwill and a Facebook event.
Safer Queer Spaces Down Under
Australian pride events have become more open to bisexual people over the years, although the experience still varies wildly. Sydney Mardi Gras has dedicated bi visibility moments in its parade, and Melbourne's Midsumma Festival has grown to include bisexual-specific gatherings and panel discussions. Smaller events, such as pride celebrations in Adelaide's Hutt Street or Perth's Northbridge, are also creating room for bi communities to show up without having to justify their presence.
What would make these spaces safer is not just visibility, but accountability. That includes clear consent policies, trained welfare officers at events, and outreach workers who understand the difference between biphobia and the broader rainbow experience. It also includes ensuring that sexual assault support at pride events is not just a poster on a wall but actual accessible people on the ground, ready to walk a survivor to a quiet room if needed.
A useful starting point for readers wanting to navigate their first pride event as a bi woman is work on showing up authentically, because preparation is part of self-protection. Equally, community organisations such as QLife, Minus18, and Switchboard Victoria provide peer support and can connect survivors with appropriate counselling without requiring them to explain their identity from scratch.
Telling the Story Differently
Storytelling has always been a tool for marginalised communities. First Nations leaders in Australia have used it for truth-telling and treaty work, queer elders have used it to build intergenerational knowledge, and survivors have used it to push for legislative change. Bisexual survivors belong in that lineage, and their stories deserve platforms that do not demand they choose one half of themselves over the other.
Writing honestly about being a bisexual survivor is not always comfortable. It invites questions, pushback, and sometimes outright denial. But it also opens doors for the next person who has been waiting to hear that someone else survived something similar and is still here, still bi, still whole, still capable of joy.
The shift from silence to speech does not happen in a single essay or march. It happens slowly, across arvo coffees with friends, late-night messages in group chats, and small acts of refusal to pretend things are fine when they are not. Each of those moments matters, especially when they happen out loud and on the record.
| Experience |
Mainstream Survivor Narrative |
Bisexual Survivor Reality |
| Identity framing |
Usually presented as straight or gay |
Bisexuality often questioned or erased |
| Service response |
Tailored to straight or LGB frameworks |
Limited bi-specific training among staff |
| Community support |
Established networks and resources |
Smaller, scattered, often volunteer-run |
| Visibility at pride events |
High for lesbian and gay communities |
Growing but inconsistent, event-dependent |
| Statistical representation |
LGB often grouped together in data |
Bisexuals reported separately as highest-risk group |
| Healing conversations |
Often centre gender of attacker |
Frequently dismissed as "pick a side" |
| Media representation |
Sparse but increasing |
Rare and frequently stereotyped |
If you are a bisexual survivor reading this and feeling seen for the first time, the most concrete thing you can do today is save one phone number into your phone: 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732. It is free, confidential, and available around the clock across every state and territory. Saving it now means that on the day you need it, you will not have to search while you are shaking, and that small act of preparation can be the first step toward a different kind of healing.
