For generations, politicians and journalists were more likely to practise domestic violence than talk about it. There was a great silence about the issue in the media and mainstream politics. That has been changing, particularly in the last two years. Tony Abbott significantly increased funding for the national domestic violence strategy last year. Malcolm Turnbull has carried on Abbott’s work with vigour and commitment. Bill Shorten and Labor have called for a national summit on the issue. This week, both parties have again addressed the issue.
Meanwhile, domestic violence and the resources we deploy to help address it are under more scrutiny than ever before by the media.
The shift of domestic violence to a point significantly closer to the centre of the policy agenda is positive. It means there is more public debate about it, it means policymakers, the media and frontline agencies such as the police have less excuse to not take it seriously. And the debate is much more nuanced than critics on both the left and the right like to pretend: we understand that domestic violence is not merely about gender, but about economics, about culture, about control.
While trying to address domestic violence at a strategic level — in particular, to identify effective means of ensuring that boys grow up to respect their partners — is critical, so too is ensuring that we are able to help victims of domestic violence right now. The additional funding announced by Malcolm Turnbull two months ago will provide much-needed resources in indigenous communities and hospitals. But accommodation for victims of domestic violence and their children is still wanting; desperate women are often being referred to motels and caravan parks across NSW and Queensland. Worse, we’re still not devoting enough resources to the problem of homelessness, which means crisis accommodation is under double pressure.
For the Commonwealth, state and territory governments, this needs to be a priority where the resources match the rhetoric.
A good look at the funding and services for mental health conditions and addiction is also required as they are a large causative factor in the violence cycle..not to mention poverty..
[ Tony Abbott significantly increased funding for the national domestic violence strategy last year.]
Forgive me if I’ve miss-remembered this Crikey, but didn’t Abbott slash $300M from services that assist women, and then (cynically) reinstall $100M as a sop to the outrage that the cuts had caused?
I’m pretty sure I remember that too, paddy. Thank goodness Crikey doesn’t cover sport or all their match reports would operate on a “last goal wins” basis!
Precisely what Paddy said. Thought I’d read this in Crikey but am having trouble finding it – surely we both didn’t imagine those figures?
The $100M was announced in September 2015 – not ‘last year’.
This post is correct in arguing that more is needed than rhetoric. And yet its argument itself is just a species of rhetoric. Where is the reasoning? Why is gender not solely relevant? Why are economics, power, and control also relevant? What is the difference between “power” and “control”. Is it possible that some acts of domestic violence are motivated by feelings of being *out of control*, of being powerless, of being economically marginalised, of being (as Jaybuoy very pertinently points out) mentally unstable or ill or or drug addicted? Mark Latham has been making similar points for some time, yet it’s now de rigueur to dismiss his observations ad hominem, rather than engage with them on their rational merits.
In regards to the gender complexion of the menace, there is no doubt that the vast majority of domestic violence against spouses is committed by men. But men are also among those who will seek instinctively to protect women from such violence, be they brothers, cousins, sons, nephews, fathers, friends, policemen, neighbours. The supposition – reiterated as holy writ in the “Daily Life” section of the Sydney Morning Herald, for instance – that all men are by nature violent and that all men therefore need to undergo some radical pacification of their putatively aggressive masculinity is a calumny, but one which few appear at all willing to correct.
Any comprehensive response to domestic violence ought also at least not ignore those minority of cases where the violence is committed by women, against their male spouses and/or children. My step-mother abused her four step-children viciously for six years, including my little sister who was only 4 at the time the abuse started. She would deliberately manufacture gross transgressions (for instance, drinking something other than water from the outside tap) and cause us to be beaten as a result. She would gain sexual satisfication by persuading our father to beat us. And she smashed objects, and threw dangerous objects at, and pushed and punched my father when she was in one of her moods. She was psychologically cruel and manipulative, and ensured that her step-children were humilitated at school, at sporting events, and on social occassions. She took great pride in being harsh and oppressive, in “teaching lessons” because “children must be seen but not heard”.
Any approach to domestic violence needs to be devote resources proportionately. But it would be an injustice if it were not to recognise that in some minority of cases it is women who are the perpetrators.