Another woman killed and we are no closer to a solution
Another woman killed and we are no closer to a solution
I've watched this cycle so many times. Another woman killed, all the usual players say all the usual things, and nothing changes. Here's 3 things we could do in a year that might make a difference.
Yet another woman killed, another man charged and we start again with the cycle of rage and fear and frustration. Activists and advocates flood social media with demands for action and fend off outraged men demanding to know why grief-stricken women are not acknowledging men’s feelings. Politicians making solemn, empty statements and talk about yet another inquiry, as if the dozens we’ve had already weren’t enough. Maybe a royal commission would help? We’ve had two, one fifty years ago and another one eight years ago, but men are still killing women, more and more each year.
The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children promised to end men’s violence against women in a generation but there is no evidence it’s even slowed down over the last few years. If anything, all the data seems to indicate it’s getting worse. Maybe this is an indication of better data collection - more women reporting violence to police and more reports correctly coded as domestic, family, and/or sexual violence instead of being dismissed or ignored. And more murders categorised as domestic violence homicides instead of missing women or unknown causes. Maybe.
Or maybe the truth is that the number of men still terrorising, abusing, raping, and killing women has not changed.
Jess Hill, author of the ground-breaking book, See What You Made Me Do, shared a piece she wrote with Michael Salter last week about rethinking primary prevention because what we’ve done so far simply hasn’t worked. The national policy on primary prevention is based on the Our Watch framework, Change the Story, which pins most of its hopes on changing attitudes that condone violence and improving gender equality. Our Watch, recipients of over $100M in federal government funding have positioned themselves as the gatekeeper of federal funding and policy advice for prevention work. The gate, however, appears to be permanently locked and barred from the inside.
As Jess pointed out, while improving gender equality is a worthy aspiration, evidence suggests it’s not a panacea to gender based violence.
Changing attitudes also doesn’t work. Jess used the public campaigns to reduce smoking rates and HIV infection rates as analogies to demonstrate this. I was a smoker for a long time, and the whole time I was smoking I knew smoking was addictive and dangerous. I had the right attitudes, but it had no impact on my choices and behaviour. It was the combination of rapidly rising cigarette prices, increased discomfort (standing outside on a freezing July night is not fun), easier access to cessation aids (thank you nicotine patches at cheap prescription prices) and the loudly expressed opinion from everyone around me that smoking is disgusting that finally made me give up the demon nicotine. Where the smoking and HIV analogies fail, however, is that it was the smokers, gay men, and IV drug users who were dying. They had to choose between change and death. Most of them chose to change their behaviour. They gave up smoking, used condoms, campaigned for education and free condoms and needle exchange programs, and were active in their own communities, supporting each other to choose to stay alive.
The people being raped, killed, terrorised, and abused are not the ones who need to change to prevent men’s violence against women and children. The men who choose to use violence (or don’t know how to make any other choice) are not the ones dying because of those choices. And they are definitely not campaigning for change.
One of the reasons there are no perfect analogies for men’s violence against women is that it’s difficult to think of something so deeply embedded in every aspect of our lives that that give the people with power to make choices such benefits while causing such harm to their victims. Perhaps colonisation and what it did (still does) to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is the only thing that truly reflects the breadth and depth of the problem. It’s structural and systemic, hidden and blatant at the same time, burrowed into every aspect of our social, economic, cultural, judicial, medical, educational, familial, and recreational lives. Genuine, effective change will take a heroic effort by thousands of people, all working together in separate places.
I couldn’t possibly hope to cover all the changes we need to make if we’re going to see a change in the rate of men’s violence against women and children, but I can try to outline a few.
One key changes is to stop ongoing colonisation violence against First Nations people and fund self-determined solutions. Those solutions have already been advocated by First Nations people and mostly ignored by everyone else, for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here, to list only a few. I’d also suggest that calling for another inquiry or paper on family violence in First Nations communities without giving long term funding to the programs already proposed is deliberately destructive.
On the areas I do know something about, I’ll take a moment to outline three that we could do within a year:
Legal system: There is an unresolvable tension between the principles of natural justice and necessity to treat victims of gender based violence as people who are telling the truth and deserve support to recover.
State and federal prosecutions have police to investigate crimes and huge budgets for lawyers and experts to try cases that no individual can match. The state also has the power to deprive a guilty person of their liberty. This massive power imbalance is (mostly) corrected by the presumption of innocence or the burden of proof (the prosecution must prove guilt rather than the accused proving innocence) and the standard of proof (beyond reasonable doubt in criminal cases). If we start unpicking these principles we might as well just save everyone some time and lock up everyone living in poverty, anyone with a mental illness and every Aboriginal person in the country. No one benefits from tampering with the principles that protect people accused of a crime.
However, those principles, combined with the adversarial system (lawyers pitted against each other in court) means there is no choice but to treat victims as piece of evidence not a person, and allow defence lawyers to argue they are untrustworthy witnesses to their own experiences. The aim is to reach an objective truth through arguments based on subjective myths. Nothing could be more hurtful to a woman who has been raped or a child who has been abused.
An approach based on healing and recovery, where subjective experience is all that matters and the aim is recovery rather than punishment - for everyone involved – is the underlying principle of restorative justice. It wouldn’t work for every person or every case and it absolutely has risks involved. But the legal system is simply not fit for purpose in gender based violence – it has pretty much decriminalised rape and endorsed domestic violence – so we need to try another approach. This is not a new or theoretical idea. There is a family violence restorative justice program running in Victoria and another one in the ACT that has shown very positive results. What would it cost, how long would it take, what training would be needed to roll this out across all jurisdictions? We could find answers to those questions in less than a year.
Targeted Support: Jess pointed out that one of the most dedicated prevention workforces in the country is the army of single mothers who had the immeasurable strength to leave violent and abusive men in search of a safer life for themselves and their children. There are over a million lone parent families in Australia, more than 80 percent of them are women and at least 60 percent of those women have escaped living with violent men (the 60 percent figure is based on Personal Safety Survey data which excludes anyone who is homeless or staying with friends/family, can’t speak English, or can’t talk about the experience of violence to a stranger – in other words, all the people most likely to have survived domestic abuse).
Many of these women know their children grew up with violent men and are scared that they will not be able to help them recover enough to be able to choose a different path to the one chosen by their fathers. Rather than give them all the support they need to care for their children and support the whole family to recover and rebuild, we consign them to poverty, homelessness, and disdain. Correcting this would cost a huge amount. Failing to correct it will cost us all so much more. What would it cost and how much would it save to provide single mothers escaping violent men with the support to rebuild their lives and give their children the tools they need to do the one thing most of them have promised themselves – not never grow up to be like their father? We could answer that question in a year and then make a plan to do it.
Prevention education: Victoria introduced respectful relationships education (RRE) in 2016. Consent education was wrapped into RRE and is now embedded in the RRE curriculum. The national curriculum was supposed to incorporate these lessons and roll out as mandatory in all government schools this year. It starts in early primary school and goes through to year 10, with options for year eleven and twelve. It is aimed at changing attitudes by providing debunking myths about gender based violence and inequality, but it also teaches protective behaviours by explaining red flags for harmful relationships, giving practical tools for bystander intervention, and teaching kids how to give, receive, and accept verbal and non-verbal consent.
Sounds like a solution, right? And maybe it would be if this was what was actually happening. It isn’t.
In Victoria, the curriculum is separated into units and schools choose which units to teach. Government schools, in theory, are supposed to teach all of them. In practice, many choose to ignore the units that, as one teacher explained it to me, “get parents complaining or end up in an Andrew Bolt column”. What she was talking about were the “complementary” RRE resources that get to the pointy end of prevention education – understanding sex, power, consent, violence, and learning tools for changing behaviour.
The Victorian Department of Education has no information about how often the complementary resource is used, by whom, or to what extent. The mandatory curriculum, taught by PE teachers, is inoffensive lessonsabout emotional literacy, personal strengths, positive coping, stress management, help seeking, gender and identity, and positive gender relationship. These are certainly important life skills, and no one could argue that children won’t benefit from learning this stuff, but none of it is going to make a dent in the fear, rage, shame, and entitlement that underlies male violence.
So, we need to stop pointing at Victoria and saying they’ve been teaching respectful relationships and consent for years and it hasn’t made a difference because this is just not true.
Schools are as much patriarchal structures as parliaments and sporting codes. There is considerable evidence that sexual harassment and assault persists in our schools - with students as the most likely offenders against female teachers and students. School leaders dismiss, ignore, minimise, cover up, and even laugh at teachers who try to report their experiences. I’ve heard from students and teachers about school principals responding to reports of sexual assault by boys in their school with an indulgent snort “oh, boys, what can you do?” or telling young female teachers that they need to learn to control their classes or “find another profession”. These stories are backed up by research and all the evidence says it’s getting worse not better (thank you Andrew Tate).
The federal government seems to have stalled on its promise to roll out an effective national curriculum, with proper support and training for the teachers who must deliver such complex lessons. It is well past time to stop naval gazing and start teaching. There will undoubtedly be backlash from all the usual suspects and their pom pom squad in the Murdoch press. It will take courage, certainty, determination, and fact-based advocacy to stand up to the backlash and governments don’t lead change, they follow it, so we all need to show support to anyone in government willing to take a stand on this.
None of these suggestions are an entire solution. All of them together might make a difference but still it won’t be enough. We need to look violent men in the face, see them for who they are as well as what they do, and find a way to motivate them to change. We will never fix the problem by making it the responsibility of women and survivors. (Just a note here: The National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children does not acknowledge that perpetrators of violence even exist in the title of the document supposedly dealing with the effects of those perpetrator’s choices. In the document, the word “victim” is used 244 time. “Perpetrator” is mentioned 85 times.)
Jess is right. We need to rethink how we prevent men’s violence against women. But the to do that we need to understand exactly what it is we are doing – and are not doing – now. Then we need to have the courage and determination to push past all the people who benefit, implicitly or explicitly, from men’s power and control over women and create real change. It will not be easy or quick or linear. But it is still possible.
Jane Gilmore is an author and recovering journalist from Melbourne. Her books include: Fixed It: Violence and the Media’s Representation of Women, Teaching Consent, Fairy Tale Princesses Will Kill Your Children, and Yes, No and Everything In Between (coming in 2025). https://janegilmore.com/books/
If you are in immediate danger and it is safe for you to call police, call 000.
You might also find some assistance from these organisations:
1800 RESPECT
Sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling and support.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Ph: 1800 737 732
www.1800respect.org.au
Suicide Call Back Service
24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Ph: 1300 659 467
www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au
Kids Helpline
24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Phone: 1800 55 1800
www.kidshelp.com.au
Men’s Referral Service
Support for men who use violence and abuse.
7 days a week
Ph: 1300 766 491
https://ntv.org.au/get-help/