In light of the violent tragedy that unfolded in Bondi, it is imperative that we look seriously at crime, opportunity, safeguarding, and facts.

The attack at the Bondi Westfield shopping centre was horrific. Whether the attacker was acting in alignment with a particular ideology, or just suffered an immense mental health breakdown, the simple truth is that he was a man who ended the lives of five women and one man.

Of the additional people taken to hospital with severe wounds, we are yet to be advised of the split between men and women.

With the information available to the public, of those whose lives were cut short, it is generally accepted that women were targeted over men. Women pose less of a threat to men intent on causing harm.

It is also a statistical fact that the victimisation rate of violent crime for females in Australia is more than five times that of male victims. And upwards of 90 per cent of all violent crime is perpetrated by men. This is an unfortunate reality of our species spanning all cultures and dating back thousands of years of evolution.

Today, as news reporters and the public talk about the heroic policewoman who took the perpetrator down with a lethal firearm, we need to understand that people intent on causing harm will take every opportunity they can to achieve their goal, whether with a sane mind or not. And we must safeguard, as best we can, against this well established risk and potential harms on those in the community that are easy targets. This was the very purpose of legal protections for women that were undertaken in the mid-to-late 20th Century.

While most men are wonderful humans and strive their entire life to protect women and children, research shows that it is men that carry out most of violence in our society. It is also an obvious fact that most women are less physically capable of defending themselves against men.

Even though we know men carry out most of the violent crimes, and women are less likely able to defend themselves, right now women across the world are being forced to accept men (who say they are women), into their changerooms, rape shelters, sporting teams, and many other areas that used to be protected, female-only spaces.

There is no test and no defining set of rules that can categorically differentiate those males that are identifying into women’s spaces purely for predatory purposes, and those that are suffering a mental health incongruence. Legislation demanding that women step aside for all these men is simply the most egregious dismissal of the facts we know about male predation and violence.

As the law stands, it would have been possible for the Bondi killer to walk into any women’s bathroom (without being questioned) or parent’s room, claiming he was a woman. To think about what might have ensued had that have been the case, Australians today would be grieving vastly differently.

We must call on our government to act swiftly in amending the Sex Discrimination Act in order to reinstate protections for women as defined as biological sex, not as gender identity. In order to ensure they are never removed again, it is imperative that the Australian government enshrine in law that women are adult human females, and deserve special legal social protections.

Jenny Monroe is a mother and children’s rights advocate from the Geelong region, Victoria.