Every time there is a particularly horrific incident of violence against a woman, as there was this week with the brutal murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children by her separated husband, there are calls for something to be done.
That “something” includes suggestions to ramp up our legal responses to gender violence, with a lock ’em up, knee-jerk reaction born of frustration.
Will strengthening our domestic violence laws prevent the kind of violence we saw, and railed against, over the last week?
There have been hard-won changes to domestic violence laws over the past decades, including improvements to protection orders aimed at preventing future acts of violence.
These are regularly issued and commonly breached, including by Rowan Baxter when he attacked his family. As with other law reforms on gendered violence, from sexual assault to sexual harassment laws, they have failed to stop the problem.
Intimate partner violence still impacts one in four women, rates of sexual violence against women have increased, sexual harassment is so pervasive that there are very few women who haven’t experienced it and on average one woman a week is killed by an intimate partner.
Given this discouraging picture, is there any hope for future law reform?
There is, but not in the easy way that might be hoped for. Law is not a tool directly wielded to address a social problem. It’s never as simple as declaring violence unlawful.
Any piece of legislation is filtered through a complex tangle of social and legal interpretations, and many of those are still working against victims of violence.
Law doesn’t sit outside of the society in which women are hurt and killed; it is part of it and shaped by it. And that society routinely disbelieves women and minimises harm.
One in five Australians believe that a lot of what is called domestic violence is really just a normal reaction to day-to-day stress and frustration.
A huge 43% — including Pauline Hanson, appointed by the Morrison government to co-chair yet another family law inquiry — believe that women make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence to improve their case in family law disputes. This, despite data showing that domestic violence is under-reported.
We might be willing to condemn a man as a “monster” and “evil” after an extreme act of violence, but otherwise we are skewed towards taking the male perspective and excusing sexual or gender offences against women. Harm minimisation and victim blaming undermine legal efforts for change.
Queensland Detective Inspector Mark Thompson’s statement, since retracted, that police were keeping an “open mind” about whether Rowan Baxter was “driven” to his crime, was rightly condemned because it exemplified a broader view that good men are driven to violence by their victims.
Yet even after many years of working on law reform and seeing the problem of gender violence persist, I am still an optimist. We know so much more about what causes violence against women, and what could stop it.
Law can play an important role in that. We need evidence-based approaches that take what we know about domestic and family violence and turn that knowledge into law.
But there is no doubt that tackling gender violence requires a collective effort from every player at every level, within the legal system and from without. Otherwise attitudinal hurdles and entrenched biases in the system will derail it.
Next: legislative and legal options to tackle domestic violence…
Karen O’Connell is an associate professor in the law department of University Technology Sydney and previously worked at the Australian Human Rights Commission.
One improvement in this area would be to call out idiots such as Bettina Arndt for ridiculous, self serving comments that do nothing to address a widespread problem that is not adequately focused upon, or only becomes an issue after a horrific act of violence.
Absolutely agree, Redgum!
Not sure how the law can fix this, but it would appear that the most basic need is to remove the woman (and her children if present) to a SAFE place, where her husband/partner has NO access to her/them.
AVOs don’t seem to work, so maybe we need something like a ‘witness protection’ system, if only on a short term basis, when the victim/s first leave their home. Perhaps this could be followed by a more permanent relocation. This is not ideal, but better than being murdered.
Any Journo worth their salt would be trawling DHS and its Child Support Agency’s records (with a little help from friends) for the number of time’s dad’s have rang their frontline staff, off their chops, threatening suicide or harm to their ex-partner. Then cross-reference that with the total number of incidents that were thoroughly investigated verses the number of actual incidents reported by frontline staff.
It would also be worth noting how many frontline staff have rung a customer back after they’ve made suicide threats, as a “follow-up”, just to see how things have transpired, only to be informed by another family member that they’ve already topped themselves; no sign off police or community intervention.
Yep, murder’s murder (thanks Uncle Mr Scotmo) and suicide is suicide but murder/suicide; that’s a whole different matter.
There is no simple answer to this, we as a society have to look inside and find the answers. It will be hard, very very hard.
Rowan Baxter is not the only person currently in the news for whom you will die was not enough to dissuade them. The law is pretty powerless here.
The only answer I can see to effectively protecting women in time, without forcing them to turn their lives (and their kid’s lives) upside to evade the violence, is upgraded high tech electronic devices that are tamper-proof and set off automatic alarms. These alarms would have to be relayed instantly to the nearest squad car, if the violent party gets too close to the threatened party, and the police would have to prioritise action to intercept the would be offender with live knowledge of his whereabouts.
This technology would have to be backed by immediate incarceration if the safe distance orders are broken, and continued incarceration until the case comes to court.
Doubtless quite hard to do, but it would make for powerful deterrence, as well as hugely improved safety for women and kids.
But getting Hanson and Arndt right out of the planning would be a great start .
Breaches of domestic violence orders must be penalised or the system of protecting women and children from abuse falls down, advocates say.
Well, Christian(!) Porter, morrison’s Attorney-General and hero of the rabid Right, has successfully destroyed the Family Court, virtually without criticism or even comment. By merging it into the mainstream Commonwealth judicial system prior to the last election while cutting funding overall, Christian(!) Porter has guaranteed worse decisions and more delay plus less fairness. I doubt that any group will be better off for it.
Journalists, deluded as always by the press release, persist in referring to the destruction of the Family Court as a “reform”.
Be reassured that “rolling it into a new, larger court in a bid to resolve acrimonious custody and property cases more efficiently and clear a backlog of 21,000 cases” is pure Christian(!) BS. Costs will rise, quality will fall, delays will increase, and Christian(!) will be appointing only his Rightist mates to these positions, as George was doing.
Where is a budget-cut system going to find money to suddenly uphold lots of domestic violence orders?