Yesterday’s photo of Morrison sitting between two women, ready to co-chair the women’s safety cabinet committee was the absolute high point of a whole series of messages reminding one not to write about this issue.
It came shortly after right-wing anti-union journalist-activist Aaron Patrick’s brainspray about journalism-activism in the AFR, Paul Kelly’s weekend dismissal of the “women’s movement” as a potential election issue, and Peter Van Wrongselen doing everything he does.
Gawd help us. But with state and federal women’s ministers meeting today and the prospect of another inquiry, there are a couple of things one feels the need to say.
The first and most important is that, aside from calls to properly fund services, the suggestions and proposed solutions to violence and harassment that are coming from this new uprising are now almost wholly oriented towards increased surveillance, regulation, incarceration, and an ever-closer union with the police and the state.
A committee meets and proposes mandatory ID to start a social media account. Random alcohol and drug testing is proposed for MPs and their staffs. Coercive control legislation, which criminalises a whole new range of behaviours, is proposed on the basis of the latest popular theory on the roots of gendered violence. And on it goes.
This has been happening for some time. But in the recent round of protest and response, it has become dominant. The last vestiges of liberatory caution have been thrown away in the search for relatively rapid solutions to the problem.
As I’ve noted before, if there’s evidence that such measures will significantly lessen violence then they need to be considered. But if there is little or none then the demand for immediate action is simply fuelling a relentless attack on such liberties to no purpose — or at least to insufficiently scrutinised purpose.
That latter position is strengthened by the strong suspicion that, aside from some common-sense reforms in court practice, there has been little policy-based success in reducing violence against women. Anne Summers noted this possibility several days ago in The Age, pointing out that some of the best statistics indicate that there has been no change at all in such violence rates over 15 years.
Summers’ solution is more money, because certain federal funds haven’t been used. But they’ve spent a fair bit, and state governments have been spending large amounts on the issue. The total spend over two decades has been huge. If it was simply a lack of resources, you’d expect to see some sort of positive shift. If there truly has been no change, then the other question must be asked: is the whole basis of intervention policy simply wrong? A false steer?
Have we been applying ineffectual measures for two decades, largely because the state and NGO apparatuses in this area are pursuing intertwined but different aims — reducing violence and changing gender relations — with the firm conviction that the two are identical?
In that conception, many other explanations of gendered violence — that much of it is transactional but between unequal forces (woman slaps man, man puts woman in hospital), or that much of it is transferred (the systemic violence of the workplace, capitalism, racism, etc, applied to men being taken out on women) — have been all but excluded from consideration, as a “gender first” explanation began to take over in the late-1980s and became dominant in the ’90s.
This is the situation we face now. A lack of progress on gendered violence rates, meeting an increasingly insistent demand — headed by professional-class women — that change be rapid. This fuels the application of policy that may be absolutely wrong: the belief that change will occur through changing individual violent men.
To the liberal, individualist mind this seems the obvious, indeed only, course of action. To anyone from a sociology or criminology background it seems at the very least dubious and limited in its effects, if not partially counterproductive, due to the “backlash effect” (whereby people take on the identity they are being instructed against).
Round and round we have gone like this for close to two decades, caught in a pair of contradictory mindsets. The first is that all men are potentially violent, and that the “not all men” claim is a cop-out. The “all men” claim must push us towards a biologistic explanation for gendered violence. But underpinning policy is an opposite idea: a social constructionist belief that humans are a blank slate, constructed and capable of being readily reconstructed.
There is also very little critical-inquiry journalism on this at the moment. There isn’t much to choose between andropausal tantrumson the one side, and the mantra-like recitation of statistics rubbed like talismans over and over on the other. Most of them are useless to the argument. The statistic of 90,000 police callouts is waved around, for instance, but we don’t know what these consist of — the ratio of potentially lethal assaults to minor physical altercations to loud arguments.
At least a part of those would be the moral policing of the poor and the black (loud arguments in McMansions don’t get a callout, those in;thin-walled flats do). The factoring and sorting of police callouts should have been done a decade ago. Journalists simply repeat it, because it’s easier than digging into it.
The second talisman is the murder rate. This too tells us nothing about overall violence rates, because non-lethal violence is dynamic and subject to change, while murder is far more static.
Testing violence policy by this measure is the worst possible way to assess policy impact. The murder of women has come down over the last 30 years, but as a fixed ratio of murder overall, largely due to the ’90s gun buyback and improvements in emergency medicine. Three decades of policy may have had zero effect on it.
On RN Breakfast this morning, Hamish McDonald used the murder rate to question women’s minister Anne Ruston as to a failure of action. But even if there had been huge success in combating mid-level violence, intimidation, control etc, it most likely wouldn’t show up in the murder statistics. These are awful, abhorrent deaths. But endlessly reciting “one woman a week” has done nothing to lessen that ratio, and it won’t in the future.
But really we just don’t absolutely know what the relationship between different types of violence is. That has been the great gap in the last two decades of this issue. Van Wrongselen is wrong, as always. What we need is not quick policy measures, restored funding of crisis services aside. We’ve had a decade of politicians doing that to look busy and responsive and it’s done very little.
We need to instead acknowledge the righteous and just anger of the recent protests and to follow that with some real scrutiny of policies that haven’t worked — and the reasoning behind them. We need a focus on good stats and metrics so we can get some picture of the simultaneous trending up and down of different types of violence that adds to an aggregate. We need any new inquiry to be led by a sociologist or criminologist, not a lawyer — someone who can bullshit-detect the line being run by self-interested parties.
Ultimately we need to try and work out how much male domination is changeable, and how much of it is an irreducible feature of overarching patriarchy that won’t be demolished in a couple of generations, and beyond that, possibly, of biologically determined embodied sexed asymmetry.
The melancholy indication from comparative studies of gender-equality-pursuing nations like Sweden, and traditional patriarchal societies like Italy, is that the reduction on gendered violence slows as it gets lower, until it barely moves at all. Accepting the real possibility of that would dictate a whole series of different policies which might generate real, statistically visible success.
The essential demand of progressives — that things change simply because you want them to — is not easily dispensed with. In the short term, maybe someone at the meeting of women’s ministers can dispense with the platitudes and ask why so little of this vast policy apparatus appears to have worked, and why the only answer to this failure appears to be more surveillance, more coercion, more micro-control of everyday life?
These are the questions not being asked — neither by progressives, nor by the whining Muppet choir in the Oz and elsewhere.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au.
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636.
Thank you for this article Guy. I work as a lawyer in this field and can make a few observations.
Coercive control risks criminalising women fleeing violence. Many perpetrators are adept at manipulating police to frame themselves as the victim, we call this “misidentification”. It’s disturbingly common.
At the moment “misidentification” means that a victim is listed as the respondent on an intervention order. Criminalising coercive control could lead to the victim being charged with criminal offences, exposing them to prison time.
The other problem with coercive control is that it relies on the police to get the assessment of a given family violence situation right, which they often don’t.
Inviting police further into people’s lives does not equal safety. I’ve had many clients say to me they would not feel safe calling the police because they don’t trust that they’ll be believed, and with good reason given their experiences.
There is a very inconsistent response from police to family violence. Some police to their credit are very well trained, an asset to force and understand the dynamics of FV (i.e. that physical violence is often the tip of the iceberg), while others are poorly informed and cause substantial harm as a result.
The other issue is the piecemeal nature of service response to FV. Unless you’re in a refuge, there are lengthy waitlists to access family violence services such as the orange door.
I always harp on about this, but the lack of stable, well-resourced social services means that it’s practically difficult to set your life up if you leave a violent relationship.
Finding housing is extremely challenging if you don’t have a stable job, mental health and rental history.
Accessing and engaging with support services is a full time job, particularly if you have lawyers and courts involved. It’s not surprising that some people give up and stop returning professionals’ calls and/or return to their partner.
Overlaying all of this is the pitiful rate of newstart and parenting payment compared to the cost of living and housing.
Thanks for listening to my ted talk.
I find it hard to connect the extreme instances of family violence with early male behaviours – especially the klunky interactions between genders in late teens and early 20s. Is this white rage and cold-bloodedness that allows a man to kill children and women driven by mental disfunction or learnt behaviours? Or something else? Can it be fitted into a gender issues framework that easily? At some point on the spectrum of crime and reported incident they must merge or overlap – but does it help to cram them into a single understanding of male behaviour?
Hi RoRo I understand your confusion and it is this that makes you question – quite rightly current family violence research and policies. These are the very things that need to be questioned
Is Guy Rundle the champion Bulls#!t Detector?
He’s certainly well up in the rankings in my book.
Most of his Crikey colleagues fill out the field, with odd New Daily and Guardian writers.
Well done Mr Rundle!
Of course women experiencing domestic violence need more funding to make up for the money stripped away from their programs since LNP elected in 2013
And women need WOMENS REFUGES ie not to share facilities with men
Very “courageous” Rundle. You’ll piss off the pseudo-progressives, the progressives and the grumpy old male commenters on this page all in different ways.
But I can’t fault much of what you say.
Dig in!
As an old white male progressive, I am not pissed off by Rundle’s thinking – but wary that looking further afield for reasons often serves as a great excuse for doing nothing useful to solve the problem at hand.
Fixing faulty men is a massive problem that may or may not be doable, but providing help and shelter and protection for frightened women and kids can be done and needs to be an urgent priority.
We could find valuable jobs for many people to provide this protection, while taking some pressure off the police who are stretched too thin already without dealing with family violence.
Hello Fairmind, In general I agree with the general thrust of your message. However, I am forced to question your reference to ‘faulty’ men. Sure I accept that there is a small proportion of domestic/family violence (DV) that is due to ‘faulty’ men.
However, given the magnitude of the prevalence as opposed to incidence of DV we cannot I believe attribute it to ‘faulty’ men. Surely, there are not that many ‘faulty’ men at large in our society? And if in fact they are in some respect ‘faulty’ how is it that so many are able to maintain an air of respectability in public settings As Rundle implies we need to think outside the box when we try to find explanations for DV.
Unless we can understand ‘why’ is occurs we will be unable to make effective progress to reducing it. At the moment all that our well paid politicians are doing is band aiding the issue playing catch – up instead of pursuing meaningful preventative steps/research.
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Better education; less inequality; more social housing; more womens’ refuges; equal pay. These all save money by resulting in: smaller police force; better health; fewer prisons; less crime; less domestic violence. This is long proven by international studies. The more equal a society is, the better it is for all – rich as well as poor. It’s a sad fact that Australia is going the other way, and accelerating under the mob now in government. We need a long spell of a more socially minded government, with voters watching for actual results and not being fooled (as they now are) by fearmongers spreading lies.
Look to Japan and Finland, amongst others, to see the benefits of more equal societies. Also, believe the statistics. It’s what they’re for, and they don’t lie. If what we’re doing is not working the statistics will tell us so, as in black deaths in custody, and we should obviously try a new approach, but in a calm and reasonable way and having studied other methods overseas.
Finland, as well as Norway, Denmark and Sweden boast the smallest ‘gender gaps’ in the world, in terms of educational, economic and political power.
Yet these same countries endure some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the European Union. An EU-wide survey found rates of IPV in the Nordic countries to be between 46% and 52%. In contrast, the rates for partner violence in Croatia, Poland, Slovenia and Spain were 13%. It’s called the Nordic Paradox.
‘Believe the statistics. It’s what they’re for, and they don’t lie’.
Actual rates, or reported rates? Maybe there’s a greater willingness to report in the Nordic countries.
Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. We dont know what role differing perceptions of what violence is, play in the Nordic paradox. A push, a slap, aggressive shouting may be included in one place, not in another. But the at least significant rate in Scandi gives the lie to the gender inequality/violence correlation
Correcto…. look at what Assange’s rape charge was based on… morning glory without a condom…
You’re considering the Nordic Paradox, as you blokes casually term it, in typically narrow terms. The issue is, and always has been, power. Men wish to maintain their power over women, as their “God-given” right. When social change challenges that status quo, men have difficulty accepting that new reality, even over a span of decades. Add to the mix massive alcohol consumption, long dark winters in confined spaces (consider the mental issues created by both,) and you have a volatile recipe. When women are more socialised into accepting a subordinate role, the power balance remains in men’s favour. That does not mean gendered violence is non-existent, far from it, however it does mean men feel less challenged. When men feel less powerful than they believe they have a “
natural” right to be, they lash out, as they are biologically equipped to do.
These social power-dynamic changes will take generations to become the norm.
Men will need to accept that they no longer automatically control women and their choices. It’s a male problem. Men need to address it. Urgently.
Mostly agree Catherine, but men are not really born with a ‘natural right’ to be the more powerful. I’m male, was never the slightest bit infected with this virus.
Interesting that recent studies showed males higher likelihood of family violence as women equalled and exceeded them in pay.
Mostly men need to grow up, continuously, but society sees no need for that and doesn’t encourage it. God knows, if they grew up who would we send to fight our wars?
Any social worker will tell anyone that the behaviour, on either side, is typically repeated throughout their lives. It is not about guys running about with a butterfly net in search of vulnerable women.
It is a community problem which, it seems, is here to stay.
Hi drastic,
I note that you mention how greater equality is better for all in a society- both the rich and the poor.. Perhaps you too have had cause to read ‘The Spirit Level’ by Wilkinson and Pickett – quite controversial but they do cite a great deal of evidence to support the above
proposition.
However be aware that in the Nordic nations of which you name Finland progressive reform toward greater gender.equality has not reduced the relatively high levels of family violence in those nations.
This is so perplexing that some refer to it as the Nordic Paradox. This just goes to show that passing legislation will not in itself lead to less family violence. Rather a cultural change is required at a societal level.
This gives more substance to the saying that (social) justice must be in the individual before it can be in society.