Stopping the Australian Domestic Violence machine.

This week our ‘Minister for Women’ Cash launched a $30m advertising campaign that supposedly is going to combat domestic violence, because “all domestic violence begins with disrespecting women”. (Yes, she actually said that. And quoted our illustrious Prime Minister has also said that ages ago — I wrote to his office expressing my concern at the time.) The Stop it at the Start campaign targets young children — both girls and boys, encouraging the various adults who engage with them to have conversations about respect. Boys respecting girls… not everyone respecting everyone.

Despite being very politically active since my teenage years, including running the Australian Democrats for a time, and being consumed with outrage at many policy failures and political attacks in that time (hell, I get outraged about the way we treat refugees once a week)… never before have I felt the need to channel my inner Mario Savio, lay down on the machine and make it stop. But I think that day is probably upon me.

No longer can I tolerate the ‘domestic violence is gendered’ machinery rolling over the Australian public with more force and effect than a category 5 cyclone. Predominantly feminist organisations, all funded to the gills at the moment courtesy of the National Plan to Reduce Violence Women and Their Children 2010–2022 (PDF), twisting and redefining the very definition of domestic violence to fit their agendas without care for the damage they do in the process. This must stop.

And I put my body on the gears of this machine because I know only a woman can.

(I know I’m not the only person talking about this national discourse being damaging, but I’ve watched many feminists, and indeed packs of them, chew up and spit out any man who dare suggest that there might be a different view.)

So I tell them, no, SCREAM at them, that this overwhelming discourse that men are the violent ones, and women are the victims, and that is the nature of domestic violence, a gendered construct that will be fixed if only men and boys will respect women, is absolute crap.

Domestic violence is not gendered. What makes domestic violence domestic violence is the relationship between the parties, not the gender of the parties.

The dominant discourse of domestic violence as exclusively gendered violence against women is damaging.

The constant bleating of this gendered DV message, every day, in every media channel, in every corner of the land, is not doing good: it is isolating, devaluing and harming the majority of DV victims who are not ‘adult women victims of intimate partner violence by male perpetrators’; it is driving scarce funds and resources away from that majority of other victims to the group that already have the most support and resources including the desperately needed research so we can actually understand the whole problem, and — particularly this new advertising campaign that you’re all patting yourself on the backs about — is reinforcing and/or introducing new stereotypes and misnomers about who and what constitutes domestic violence rather than actually fixing any problems.

Even when they do research in to violence against women, they’re not listening. One of the studies pointed to by OurWatch CEO Mary Barry while gloating about the new ad campaign is a classic example of how researcher can find what they want to find: when presented with scenarios of domestic violence, respondents correctly identified that they needed to understand the relationship and preceding actions to understand the issue before answering — domestic violence being crime of a relationship not of gender — but they didn’t answer the question correctly to fit the dominant narrative, and researchers declared it all to be victim blaming. How dare the common people understand that relationships are not black and white, however black and white the wrongness of the violent act may be. (You’ll note in that linked story the research was the basis for this $30m advertising campaign to change attitudes in young people, which had already been budgeted and scheduled before the research was delivered. So that report was never going to find anything different, was it?)

If the various Violence Against Women advocates want a gendered crime to campaign about, they are welcome to mount a rape campaign, as that is a gendered issue. We certainly avoid that subject like the plague, seemingly distracted by a bumble bee anytime it comes up. Of course, they’d need to address the fact that nearly 60% of sexual assault victims are children. We should be outraged about that. But children are voiceless. Women aren’t.

Where are the childrens’ advocates, while we’re on the subject? Why are you not speaking out, and making it clear that ‘women and *their* children’ is problematic terminology? (Why aren’t feminists cringing at terminology that reverses decades of hard-fought work to tear down the notion of children being the possession and sole burden of the mother, chaining them to domestic duties?) Children are incredibly vulnerable, and are just as likely to a victim of mum as they are of dad (AIC domestic homicide stats indicate 52% of filicide victims are killed by their mother): they need their own services, their own advocates, youth refuges equipped for DV victims — and that means prepared to refuse parents or guardians entry if they try and take the child home — and kids need to know these services are there for them. They need a space and to be included in the discourse *on their own terms*. The need to know they matter, and not feel like they only count if mum is a victim and they choose to go with mum.

Further, the education programs that are in schools MUST be gender neutral. They currently aren’t. Children are mostly being force fed the same dominant narrative of ‘women are victims/men are perpetrators’ like the rest of the community… the extreme danger of that being that school is for most children their only significant ‘other’ place aside from home. It’s the only place they can reach out for help, short of wandering off by themselves to a hospital or police station. If they are being assaulted by their mother or another woman in their family, this dominant narrative ‘education’ being delivered to them as part of their curriculum is not only telling them they are not a real victim and their pain is not valid, it’s also saying the school or their teacher won’t believe you even if you do bravely ask for help. And given their teacher is also swallowing this ‘education’, it’s highly likely they won’t be believed.

Women do hit, and women do kill. No, not just in self-defence. Women are violent. Women are perpetrators of domestic violence. Far more often than you’d think. The sisterhood who will leap to defend murderers and abusers they’ve never met or spoken to with academic constructs of womens’ institutionalised victim status and how they are entitled to defend themselves is, in my opinion, as reprehensible as priests reactively excusing the acts of paedophiles. And it has to stop.

Something else that has to stop is the manner in which the Australian public writ large seem to just *accept* this campaign without any question. Since when did you all become a bunch of nodders? I know some thought I was odd when I opposed the White Ribbon Day from inception because I instinctively reacted to a message that said “only men can fix x” with the appropriate expletive that all such misogyny should be dealt with, but why is it that hardly anyone is rejecting or questioning a large, government funded, multi-organisational campaign to indoctrinate the idea that men are bad and violent and women are innocent victims? Further, how can any such campaign that seeks to divide the sexes ever be seen as good for equality, and why would anyone — male or female — support such messaging that drives us backwards as a society towards division and double standards? Not to mention completely ignoring the LGBTI members of our society?

You’ll note I’m not going in to men anything. I’ve dabbled on Twitter enough on this issue to know that if I even mention them I’ll get attacked, bullied, harassed, trolled, threatened and otherwise demeaned. Because heaven forbid we have a healthy and balanced debate about these issues, actually look at the hard numbers without spin, or acknowledge all domestic violence victims as equally valid in their pain and equally entitled to help, support and a safe life.

Is domestic violence a real and serious issue? Absolutely. So it would be really nice if the issue was actually dealt with, not an academic construct of a gender frame that excludes most of the reality that is domestic violence. Feminist theory and gender analysis is only useful as part of analysing any issue to illuminate factors that may otherwise be unseen: for example, women are more likely to use weapons so victims of women are less often injured, but when they are the injuries are far more serious; or men suffer much greater social shame and isolation as a victim thus are far less likely to report lower level domestic violence or seek help and comparative all male specified domestic violence refuges may not be appropriate support. However, that’s where it ends: at the research. There are no excuses for a country developing policy on this or any critical issue through a single ideological or theoretical frame.

Those millions of dollars need to be put to helping people, not indoctrinating false stereotypes or continuing to fuel this hurtful and damaging discourse. I don’t know exactly what needs to be done to stop this machine, but I’ll figure it out, because this must stop.