See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Male entitlement afflicts almost all men, in different ways and to varying degrees. But to many men, their feelings of entitlement are undetectable. In fact, many would deny feeling entitled at all. The belief some men have that their needs must take priority is so deeply entrenched it is almost invisible to them, and thus very hard to shift. Also, as Michael Kimmel noted earlier, men often feel individually powerless – they feel they live at the whim of their bosses, their partners or their children. The core of patriarchal masculinity is not power, as Kimmel points out, but the feeling of being entitled to power. But how do you show an abusive man who believes himself to be powerless – as many abusive men do – that he is actually acting from a position of entitlement?

  This is the fundamental problem facing us when we talk about ending men’s violence against women. As the stalwart Australian feminist Eva Cox said at a public event on the #MeToo movement, ‘The question is not “How do we stop that man from doing that to us?” but “How do we stop men feeling like they’re entitled to?” We have to start looking at what we are doing to little boys to make them feel entitled. We need to sit down and start addressing the social problem, because we are still the second sex.’25

  It’s not enough for men to reconnect with their feelings. A society of newly realised, emotionally sensitive men who still have raging senses of entitlement – and who expect women to prioritise and care about their newfound feelings – sounds like a dystopia worthy of a Margaret Atwood novel. Until men reckon with their overblown sense of entitlement, they cannot reach emotional maturity, and there can be no solution to domestic abuse. So what does it look like for an abusive man to do this?

  It took Rob Sanasi, the reformed abuser we met in Chapter 1, months of intensive therapy before he was able to make real and lasting change. At first, he tried to use his therapy to manipulate Deb. ‘He was saying things every woman in this situation has longed to hear,’ she says, ‘like, “I’m wrong, I’ve treated you badly, I’m so sorry for what I’ve done to you.” So I’d start getting hopeful. But then he’d slip in: “I want to make up for it, Deb. So if you would just quit that job and come home, I want to now make up for all the years we’ve lost.”’ Across from Deb at their kitchen table, Rob nods sheepishly. ‘Sneaky, sneaky stuff,’ he says.

  When Deb refused to quit, Rob became increasingly desperate. ‘He tried many different tactics to regain control of me,’ Deb recalls. ‘Like threatening to kill himself. He really escalated. It was very intense.’ But every time Rob tried a different tactic, Deb called him on it. Eventually, he realised it was all or nothing. His counsellor had been trying to get him to take responsibility for his abuse and to develop some empathy for Deb. To do this, Rob had to go back to the roots of his need for control.

  Rob grew up around domestic abuse, fighting, bullying and neglect. ‘Every night I went to sleep to massive, massive fights.’ When he was a little boy, his mum used to go out and not come back for hours, leaving four-year-old Rob at home alone with his young brother. ‘When the sun would go down, I used to think, “Oh shit, she may never be home again.”’ Feeling completely out of control at home, Rob tried to control everything outside it. ‘Even through my schooling life I had control over friends, over relationships. I always controlled my environment.’

  Deb interrupts: ‘I’ve heard you say Rob, too, that you had an attitude that everyone was there to serve you. Do you remember?’

  Rob laughs awkwardly. ‘Yeah, and I don’t even know where that came from.’

  At no stage did his counsellor let Rob use his childhood as an excuse: being accountable came first. Slowly, Rob started to get some perspective. Instead of blaming Deb for his abuse, he began to see that she had nothing to do with it at all. ‘To anyone looking in from outside, it would have looked like we were having marriage problems and fighting a lot. But we weren’t fighting – it was just me fighting Deb.’ Rob started to realise that he wasn’t the powerful man he thought he was – he was actually deeply insecure. ‘When you’re insecure, you want to control something so you don’t feel insecure anymore,’ he says. ‘But to try and control someone else – another human being – just doesn’t work, ’cos we’re not built for that.’

  As I listened to this, I thought of all the women I’d spoken to who’d stayed with their partner, believing he could change, but who ended up getting drawn further into their abuse. Deb was a counsellor, and she’d read a lot about domestic abuse – she must have known that Rob’s chances of reform were extremely slim. What was it that made her believe he would change?

  ‘I was very suspicious, because I was reading the statistics, and I also heard that a lot of men go to counselling so their wife will, you know, settle down. So I was really just observing, and going, “Is this change real, or is it just another manipulation?” Because everyone I was speaking to in the field was sort of rolling their eyes and saying, nah, it doesn’t happen, very rare, don’t get your hopes up. And I was like, “Well, I get that, but if only 5 per cent of men actually change, what does that change look like?”’

  Then one day, Deb felt Rob start to change. ‘I can actually pinpoint an actual day when I felt the control stop, when I felt those claws come out of me. Rob stopped focusing on me and started to take responsibility that this has nothing to do with Deb – I need to leave her be and stop harassing the poor woman. I just need to deal with my stuff and let her recover from me.’ It was a pivotal day for Rob too. ‘I went into the bedroom and I think I cried for, like, four hours,’ says Rob. ‘And literally from that day, all the work – all the counselling, all the memories, everything that had been done – kind of hit a peak, and it was like a volcano that just erupted.’

  But relinquishing control was only the first phase; next Rob had to relinquish his sense of entitlement.

  When Deb finally felt safe in the relationship, she sank into a posttraumatic state. ‘All of a sudden I would start crying and I couldn’t stop,’ she says, ‘and then a door would slam and I would be hypervigilant.’ Some days Deb would be ‘extremely angry’ with Rob and need him to get away from her, and on others she would feel vulnerable and need him to hold her. Rob had to learn that no matter what Deb did, or how unfair things seemed, her needs had to come first. ‘I think the biggest thing I learned is “It’s not all about me”. As Deb said, you know, she needed a lot of support, and that support might have been just for me to get lost. For a two-year period I just denied myself … Even if I thought she did something that was a bit irrational, and wasn’t really the way it should’ve gone, I would not speak up. I just knew that it was not my time to even have an opinion, you know. That sounds a bit weird, but I almost decided to deny myself any rights. And I think that was really good, for me, because it totally went against [what I’d done] my whole life – my upbringing, my behaviours. Not only did I have to stop [controlling], but I had to do the opposite of what I was doing – I had to think of other people, I had to think of Deb, I had to think of the kids, I had to think of other friends who I’d always, I suppose, used to get what I wanted.’

  ‘Rob went from a person that was quite narcissistic, that didn’t have empathy, to a person that did,’ says Deb. ‘It was kind of like suddenly he had eyes to see, oh my gosh, I’ve actually hurt quite a few people. Empathy is not just comprehending that, but actually feeling that. He really had empathy for me, whereas before he didn’t care about anything else other than himself.’ Deb describes Rob’s process as being ‘like a twelve-step program’. Rob says: ‘I started to get memories about different people that I hadn’t done really bad things to, but in my heart I knew I didn’t treat them right. And so I rang some of them up, and they were like, “Holy cow, I can’t believe that’s you saying this.” I spent two years apologising to people.’

  Today, Rob is someone men come to for informal advice when their relationships are falling apart. ‘Usually the only time I’ve seen guys start to realise anything at all is when they’ve just about lost it all,’ says Rob. ‘
I’ve never had any guy come to me and say, you know what, I’m really doing the wrong thing, and I want my relationship to be better. It’s always like a country song, you know – my wife’s gone, the car’s gone, the kid’s gone, the dog’s gone – you could write a song about it. And they’re all the same. And I was the same; I’m no better. I’m exactly like that, or was.

  ‘I think they think like I did, you know – What if I do all this work and then my wife still leaves me? Yeah, that still may happen,’ says Rob, ‘but you know what? The best thing about coming through this journey … I think there are three good things. Number one, it stops any more pain going to your wife. Number two, if you have children, it will hopefully stop them from passing that on and going through counselling themselves. Number three is you get to wake up in the morning yourself and be free.’

  *

  That is just one story about one couple. For other men, the journey is a lot rougher.

  ‘Brendan’ says the only thing that could ever stop his abuse was jail. ‘I needed to be locked away. She needed protection, and I needed protection from myself,’ he told the Gold Coast Bulletin.26 Brendan was sentenced to more than twelve years for attempting to murder his wife. If he hadn’t been jailed, he says he would have killed her. Nothing had stopped him before. Multiple intervention orders, short stints in prison: he wasn’t bothered by any of it, and he just returned to torturing his wife as soon as he was released. ‘Men who commit domestic violence, something is broken inside,’ he says.

  Brendan can’t even remember why he started abusing his wife: he had never hit a woman before. ‘But once I had, that was it. The switch was flicked.’ His abuse didn’t come in a rage – ‘It was just cold-blooded revenge.’ It became like an addiction he couldn’t shake, and ruined not only the lives of his wife and children, but his own life; by the time he was planning to murder his wife, he was also planning to kill himself.

  In jail Brendan found himself surrounded by extreme violence, and he was desperate to get out. He signed up for a behaviour change program, hoping that would get him early parole. But for some reason, Brendan didn’t end up being one of those guys who just do it for the piece of paper. He actually listened, and started to understand why he’d become an abusive man. ‘That course taught me all [the] things I should have already known,’ he says. Out of jail now, Brendan says he’s lucky his children stuck by him. ‘I have a good life now – even though I don’t deserve it. But how much better would it have been, how much better would we all have been, if I had never taken that first punch? Or, at the very least, been locked away for a long time, the first time.’

  *

  For many women, the idea of their abusive partner attempting anything like this is unimaginable. Worse still, often women will be persuaded against leaving by a man who is ‘willing to change’, only to find he has no intention of changing. By the time that becomes obvious, it may be much harder for her to leave.

  ‘The proportion of men that get really non-violent – they’re small,’ says Rodney Vlais, from No to Violence. ‘But they’re so inspiring. This very small percentage of violent men are actually working towards understanding their privilege and their gender power – way beyond what most men are willing to do in our society. That is the beginning of a social movement. If those men can do it, then surely all of us men can do it.’

  Domestic abuse is, first and foremost, a tragedy for the victim. But it is also a tragedy for the perpetrator. Most abusive men were once tender little boys, vulnerable and shy, who just wanted to love and be loved. That boy didn’t dream about abusing women when he grew up. He didn’t dream of becoming a violent father. And yet so many boys grow up to do both. As abusive men, they use power to inflict misery and violence on their lovers and children, but they do not necessarily feel powerful themselves. These are not the raging patriarchs of old, granted their every wish by the women and children who fear them, and vaunted by society. Modern perpetrators of domestic abuse are often miserable creatures, unable to love or be loved, and so wracked with secret shame that their only defence is to construct a grandiose narcissism behind which they can hide.

  Something needs to interrupt the process that transforms tender boys into violent men. Prevention campaigns that use slogans like ‘real men don’t hit women’, ‘man up’ and ‘be the hero’ don’t actually model an alternative to patriarchal masculinity; they simply reinforce the existing one. ‘Prevention campaigns present us with men defined by the stereotypically masculine attributes of success (strength, money, power) who say they don’t hit women,’ writes Michael Salter, the expert on gendered violence we heard from in Chapter 3. ‘The message is clear – keep our tough competitive masculinity, but abandon gendered violence.’

  Symbolic gestures, like ‘taking an oath’ against violence, are similarly pointless – as men’s educator Danny Blay once told me, the vast majority of perpetrators he’s worked with say they are staunchly opposed to men’s violence against women. These messages don’t work. Salter writes in Meanjin, ‘Violent men often don’t understand where their violence comes from and don’t know how to stop. Men who have engaged in violence and abuse towards women are often deeply ashamed of their conduct. It’s unclear how further shaming will produce a change in their behaviour and it may inhibit them from seeking treatment and support.’27

  When abusive men feel powerless and afraid, they use violence to dispel their fear and return to a feeling of power. No amount of condemning their violence is going to persuade them to act otherwise. Instead, as Salter writes, they need to be shown the way back to non-violence. They need to be shown, as Rob discovered on his long recovery from abusiveness, that taking the path of non-violence leads to a better and more successful life. ‘Non-violence is not simply the absence of violence,’ writes Salter. ‘Non-violence is the presence of characteristics that oppose violence – like care, patience or compassion … Rather than idolising “real men” who don’t hit women, prevention campaigns could be valuing the other kinds of choices boys and men make, such as caring for others, supporting those in need and working for the collective good.’ Casting perpetrators out as ‘irrevocably tainted’ only compounds their shame, and potentially makes them all the more dangerous.

  Ultimately, to stop domestic abuse, we need to do more than teach men to respect women. We need to teach men to respect other men, to give each other space and permission to live fully embodied, emotional lives – and we need women to allow that to happen, too. But achieving this will require men to take a hard look at their own sense of entitlement – a subject that can make even the staunchest feminist ally bristle. Patriarchy sells men the lie that in order to be ‘real men’ they must kill off their emotional intelligence, their intuition and their empathy when they are young, so they may vie for power in the real world, where success is measured by what you can control. This is the lie that is killing women and men alike.

  Women are at risk from the homicidal force of men’s humiliated fury: on the street, especially when they dare to walk outside at night, but especially in their homes, from the people they love the most. But men are dying from this too. Picture the destructive force of male shame as having two extreme poles: at one end, men react by attacking others, and at the other, they attack themselves. There are men who would rather die than say a word about their emotional pain. They are victims of the same patriarchal system. A deep fear of revealing emotional weakness, and stunted emotional development, are, among other factors, driving record numbers of Australian men to commit suicide. In 2017 alone, 2348 men killed themselves28 – the highest rate in more than a decade.

  The need to address the destructive force of male shame is stark and urgent – for women and men.

  And for the children they are raising.

  *This is explored in more detail in Chapter 11.

  #Studies on the frequency of physical aggression in pornography vary widely – one Australian study (A. McKee, ‘The objectification of women in mainstream por
nographic videos in Australia’, Journal of Sex Research, 2005, 42, pp. 277–90) found the rate of physical aggression to be as low as 1.9 per cent, because the researcher defined ‘aggression’ as something that was clearly intended to harm and was resisted by the female performer. But that’s just the point: women in pornography don’t resist their degradation. As the narrative goes, they know they’ve been bad, and deserve to be punished.

  6

  CHILDREN

  There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

  MAYA ANGELOU, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

  In the cool blue light of a cold October morning, fifteen-year-old ‘Carly’ stands shivering with her school friends on the train platform. She’s nervous. She’s been planning this moment for days. As the train approaches, she drops a hint that she’s about to run away, gives one of them her phone – just in case he’s using it to track me, she thinks – and quietly takes one of their tap-and-go travel cards, so police won’t be able to trace her when she taps off. Minutes later, she’s on a train heading towards Newcastle. After the morning rush of students, Carly shrinks into a corner, tucking her chin to her chest to avoid security cameras. At every stop, her heart races. Do the police already know where I am? How long before he finds me?

  By the time Carly is on that train to Newcastle, it has been more than a year since the police last caught her running away from her father. She was fourteen then, in a car with her mother and eleven-year-old brother, ‘Zac’. They had been on the run for nine months, fleeing a Family Court order that not only granted Carly’s father, ‘John’, sole custody, but also prohibited her and Zac from making any contact whatsoever with their mother.